Stripped

My life has been stripped of a few things in recent days. See all the red berries on the cotoneaster in my header photo up there? The migrating flocks of cedar waxwings, who made their first appearance here on December 16, have stripped them for sustenance on their winter voyage to Mexico. I rejoice in the fact that my little piece of paradise helped fuel their epic flight from the northern climes to their hiatus in the south.

Then I received a splendid tool last week from my physical therapist, who has made it his mission to strip my neck of the agony that plagues me. He gave me a TENS unit, designed to combat pain with electrical stimulation of the nerve pathways that conduct messages of misery to my brain. I attach electrodes to my neck and direct the palm-sized unit to zap the neural fibers in the musculature with a level of intensity that I control. It works! I crank that baby up to the echelon of warfare and rejoice as it slams shut the gateways to pain.

It is empowering to live in the solution rather than mucking about in the problem. I’m so jazzed that I’ve dived into the brown lifeless stuff in the garden. Hacking away at the evidence of death is a joy too, because visions of crispy brown crap drags at my sense of hope. Tearing it away fuels little jolts of delight as I uncover tiny shoots of the hardy harbingers of spring. Hyacinths and tulips push through the hard, droughty soil in their enduring drive to bloom.

Next comes the Zen of pruning frost-ravaged roses. I have 13 of those, looking like shit in the front yard, yelling “Life has ceased!” every single day since the hard frost hit. I hollered back at five of them yesterday with a litany of “Prepare for spring!” I was a rose-pruning ninja, not a Zen master, because I only had an hour and was impatient to dive into solutions again. Having made the crucial beginning, I will go more slowly today and savor the art.

It’s lovely to be stripped of things that then fuel flight.

Hope, personified in the eye of growth on a winter rosebush.

August Night

Twilight falls on an August evening. A sprinkler waters a neighbor's lawn with a cha cha cha shewwww cha cha cha shewwww. A thousand crickets begin their orchestra in the darkened park.

I have to go put on long pants and slippers, the air is so unusually cool. A quick tour of the garden earlier, after we came home from a friend's dinner party, shows some of the dahlia buds have begun breaking into flower on plants that haven't yet bloomed. It's been a strange summer in this usually hot neck of the woods. The garden looks like a midsummer garden, vigorous and full of life.

Four years ago, in the dog days of summer, I sat on a bench in the park next to my house and wrote a poem about the sad state of the garden. It was a different kind of August then, the unrelenting heat speeding the cycle of life and death.

The Poetry Jam prompt for Monday is "evening," and I thought of that poem. It surprises me how great the sense of loss is, when life cycle winds down and plants turn to the production of seed. Seed is a promise of resurrection, but it doesn't arouse hope in me in August. In early spring, yes. In August, seed is an ending, a reason to lament.

The Garden of Dry Bones

The long warm light of an August evening
strikes the black petals of a blown red rose.
Leaves of the dahlias droop; flowers rot
where they have fallen.
Dust drifts in the still yellow air.
Even the ground is tired.

All the bright blooms have faded.
In wild abandon, the sunflowers
throw back their heads, dripping seed.
The herbs, pungent and robust a month ago,
spend their straggling selves on seed.
Seed is the coin of late summer.

Seeds, and more seeds, fall from the
carcasses of flowers, like dry bones.
The golden light of August slants
through the graveyard of the garden.
Bereft, the gardener picks dry leaves
from the hollyhock.

In the waning light of August
the earth falls silent slowly,
the fading note of a violin.
Onward plows the cycle.
Downward bows the rose.
This is how love leaves you
one dead flower at a time.

I Can't Stop Myself!

My days revolve around my flowers, which is a helluva lot better than revolving around economic tumult. The dahlias are coming into their own, in all shapes: balls, anenomes, cactus, decorative, lacinated, collarette, waterlily. In the photo above, in a wonderful vase I bought in New Mexico, are an anenome dahlia, "Lucky Ducky," a waterlily named "Giraffe," a couple of ball dahlias, "Ruskin Gypsy," and a pair of anenomes named "Riverboat."

Life isn't all about flowers. It's about having courage and faith in the winter seasons, when life hands you killing frosts and death and other creepy things. It's about having faith in the future and being willing do the work required today. Here's the same vase a few days earlier, with the ball dahlia and a lacinated dahlia, "Pinelands Pam."

I must like the red palette, or else they happen to be strong varieties that thrive for me, because here are some more of a different type:

With some of my prize money from the regional fair's floral competition, I hunt down vases in thrift stores. Here, in a vase I found at Goodwill, are a red waterlily dahlia and a pink semi-cactus, "Heather Marie."

Most of my dahlias are three to four inches, a size I like for flower arranging. But a few larger varieties are blooming now. Here, in a tall pilsner-shaped vase from a local thrift shop, are "Spartacus," an informal decorative dahlia, "Grand Finale," a semi-cactus, and "Curly Que," an incurved cactus.

As I tend the garden and mess around with the flowers, I think about how courageous are some of the people I know. I see a lot of hope and resilience. I think about grace and mercy, how they keep marriages intact and help us all forgive each other. I think about the nature of faith; I've been told it's an active verb. I think about shit: did I use too much? not enough? Funny how shit is a word we use for fertilizer, which is a good thing, and for lousy things that assail us. Then I hum a few bars of some unidentifiable tune, and there's my day: part shit, part grace, and full of flowers.

Busy Hands Are Happy Hands

If it’s true that busy hands are happy hands, my hands are rolling in ecstasy.

The skeleton of a Conyne-style box kite is drying on the floor of my office. Drying on trays in the guest room are five kinds of herbs. The dining-room table is covered with flower vases and ikebana practice arrangements in the moribana and nageire styles. In the garage are three large silk-flower arrangements ready to be delivered. Out on the patio is my version of a Picasso face made of rusted iron hinges and bits of machinery.

The regional state fair begins next week, and I signed up for competitions in kite making, flower growing, dried and fresh herbs, vegetables, garden signs, and floral designs. All I do all day long is make things and do the prep work to make more things during the 10-day run of the fair.

The weather is glorious and I make mad forays out into the garden to keep things groomed and growing out there. The triple-digit heat vanished, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. The tomatoes aren’t ripening, and the sunflowers haven’t even set buds yet. The dahlias are dallying, which means I have almost no flowers to work with right now. There’s only a week before the flower competition begins. I got the bug infestation under control, but only God can make flowers bloom, so I’m starting to sweat a little.

In getting my work space prepared, I went through some boxes of my mother’s things, shoved into the garage willy-nilly last August when she died. It was an occasion for gratitude. I read her little scribbled notes, marveling at her valiant attempts to cope with her dying brain. I found the last little bits of quilting she was able to do before the skill of sewing left her. I read the random newspaper articles that she cut out of the paper, wondering why those particular subjects caught her attention. It all made me realize how much healing has taken place in the past year. Handling her things gave me pleasure and I felt joy again. Her idiosyncratic habits made me smile. I’m thankful for my mother and for what I learned during that painful last year of her life. I love you, Mom.

I dug out some photos of my floral work from two years ago to inspire me as I do prep work this week. This piece won “Best of the Day.”

This piece won “Best of Show” among both amateur (my class) and professional work.

This bride’s bouquet took a first.

This is a cake made of flowers.

The "Purple Tiger" rose at the top of this post is faithfully blooming and has taken blue ribbons in the floribunda rose class. And here is my entry in the garden sign category. It resembles how I look after all the work this week.

Invasion of Disgusting Bugs!

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

~ Victor Hugo

So there I was, getting ready to go to sleep in peace after my first, full day of being “up and at ‘em” since getting sick. I thought, “Just a quick glance at the basil pots, see if I’ve missed any snails.” So out to the patio I shuffled in my slippers, flashlight in hand.

A strange sheen on the leaves of the potted plants underneath the crepe myrtle tree greeted me. Hm. I reached out and rubbed a finger on a leaf, an act that met with sticky resistance. Oh, dear. I got a bad feeling about this. I aimed the flashlight up into the crepe myrtle, and OMG! An infestation of something insectoid, adults and eggs all over the underside of leaves, dripping with bug juice.

There went my desire for sleep. I wish to don my black leather killing gear and launch an all-out assault on the crepe myrtle. If those bugs travel to my dahlias, it’s over. But reality chimed in: It’s late and you’re tired, Chrissie-poo. You don’t know what they are or what treatment will destroy them. And no, you may not grab the axe and chop down the tree.

So there I am, hitting Google, sleuthing with anxiety. So there God is, awake as promised by Victor Hugo. God is a gardener, did you know? The original gardener. My sorrow ranks among the small ones, so I ask him please keep an eye on things. I’m going to have to let this go until tomorrow. I will wade into the insect army single-handed at dawn, Backyard Ramba with both barrels firing!


About the photo: Not copyrighted, not taken by me, not even the insect that infests my tree, but something similar is afoot.

Tempestuous Sky

I’ve been a bad blogger but a good gardener thus far this month. My surgically altered and mending hands have created a veggie garden for my daughter Milo and I to share. They’ve rejuvenated drip lines and sprinklers. They’ve tended all the dahlias and roses painstakingly, and they’ve repotted, transplanted, pruned, and fertilized everything. They've made one gopher R.I.P. They’ve pulled millions of weeds.

I apologize to all my blog friends for neglect. I’ve poured all my energy into the soil and the plants. Six weeks ago the doctor diagnosed a severe vitamin D deficiency and I’ve sought the sun for help. A new anti-depressant, cheap and non-toxic, has solved my insomnia problem, thank God, but it has a grogginess side effect. It’s a time of transition, and I’m happy about an evolution.



One of the transitions involves the world-famous Poetry Bus. It has trundled off to the Bus Yard in the Sky. Its poet riders have formed the worldwide Poetry Jam in retaliation, jamming on Mondays, with our new blog site linking us all. You’re welcome to join in.


This week’s theme is Thunder and Lightning. In a nice synchronicity, my bit of California is enjoying a tad of that this week. However, the muse has gone mum with all the gardening, I guess. So I’ve pulled a stormy piece from the archives to offer as my riff. But first, here’s a little relevant artifact from my family history, invented, perhaps, by my father:

Thunder roared and lightning flashed!
A tree fell down, and a frog got smashed!

And now for some real tempestuous weather. Today is my 19th wedding anniversary, and let it be known that the narrator of this piece is NOT moi.

Invasion

The wind stirs in the leaves of the trees—
sounds like a stream chuckling down a stony shoal
sounds like surf supping at the shore
sounds like kindness if I can conjure that stream, that shore

In truth, menace rises beyond the window
violence edging over the horizon
and stalking this way. I have silenced the radio
and shuttered the television, and now I lie

my eyes closed on the sofa under the window
I have drawn the shade so I am not tempted
to see, may rather remain in my reverie
of the wind susurrant in the sycamores, murmuring

its love for me, and not your red rage roiling
down the road to burst into this house with all the glee
of an invasion, and not your shoddy rape
of what little mercy lives in me, your beloved wife.

Tonight's anniversary supper ended in chocolate decadence cake with lime sauce (for Joe) and creme broule (for me). I now lumber happily off to don elasticized pajamas and ponder wedded bliss...

Photo credits: unattributed work found via Google

Dirty Power

When I’m feeling blue, it’s nearly always because I’m powerless to change something. This time of year, though, there’s a great antidote out in the yard called gardening. It might more truthfully be called weeding or soiling, but whatever it is, it boils down to power. I have power in the yard that I don’t have in the rest of my life.

I’m as ineffectual as a wet noodle in a lot of ways, but out there, I’m a goddess. With my hands alone, I can transform things. Today it was a piece of crap plot of ground. An hour later, it was a rich little garden bed ready for seeds. My whole attitude was transformed with it. I hauled those blue feelings off to the green-waste bin along with three huge bucket loads of weeds.

Lest I get a fat head singing my own praises, I remember that the sun, the rain, the spinning of the spheres aren’t mine to command. The essential force in power-gardening is the Creator who transforms the seasons in the first place. I’m thankful that He lets me work in concert with Him to turn weeds and dirt into flowers.

One of the major things I’m powerless over is another person’s ill will. Along with the weeds I yanked out of the ground today, I fiddled around with the toxic byproducts of an unhealthy relationship. I had fun whacking it with my metaphorical machete until it was no more than a Flash 55 for Mr. Knowitall’s Friday bash. See what others can do in 55 words over at the G-Man’s place.

Bad Blood

When you said I hate you
I saw a dam fracturing,
all that fierce water
surging down the gorge,
your accumulated
tragedies churning
like broken houses
in the flood.
I imagined a drop
of your venom
landing on my skin,
shivering there
before my pores
opened like a rose
and sucked it in.

I Hope Nobody Saw Me

My favorite January job is pruning the 13 rose bushes in the front landscape of my house. Most of them are wicked little shits, excuse my French, so it’s challenging to work among them without getting torn up. This year I used long-handled loppers. Ha! Nary a thorn ripped my flesh.

What I love about pruning roses is the process of considering where to make the cuts. I have to work with the architecture of each rose and the network of branches it created in its growing season. However the shrub grew, I discipline it back into a vase shape, open in the center like a cupped hand. I get rid of stems I don’t like and cut the rest at a particular place to force growth outward, away from the center. It’s an art form for me, working with the rose to create something pleasing.

I did the roses in batches this past week, a few at a time, because I was paranoid about making my ridiculously unhappy spine even unhappier. Maybe the event I’m going to describe for you (in a minute) happened because of that, because I felt at the mercy of a thing not of my choosing,

NanU, the Science Girl, drives the Eejit’s Poetry Bus around the world this week, and her prompt threw me for a loop: She said, write about something you like that other people don’t like. Or you’re afraid they don’t like it. Or you think they think you’re strange for liking it.

Ultimately, I wrote about something I did one afternoon, after the roses. I chortled as I did it, like a little maniac, and I did hope that no one saw what I was doing. It will be interesting to see what other Bus riders do with that prompt. We’re all linked here.

Free the leaves and they will bless you

in the dead of winter’s landscape
the brown thatch
of the lilac bush
sleeps beneath its brother the sycamore
the pair of them
stripped to the bone
frozen in the act of grabbing the sky

trapped in the cage of the lilac bush
sycamore leaves
curl fisted hands
thwarted in their pilgrimage from tree
to ground, from
steeple to grave
denied the sanctuary of soil

one moment on one ordinary day
you pass by them
going somewhere
as blindly as you have passed before
intent on some
forgettable chore
when you hear it and then you hear it

in the silence you recognize the sound
~the resignation
of anguish~
and it calls to you as a comrade would
you stop to look
you see the leaves
furled and wretched in the lilac’s web

instinctively you free one brown leaf
and watch it
settle into place
among its clan, then possessed by some
strange jubilance
you shake the shrub
hard, free all the leaves, laughing like God

Dreams Go Up in Smoke

For this reformed pot-smoking, pill-popping, booze-swilling child of the Sixties, it's a little disappointing that voters in the progressive state of California just said no to legalizing marijuana in yesterday's election. All I say for myself is: It would have been interesting.

Californians also nixed the notion of being governed by the very rich Lady eBay mogul, even if she does come with one of the biggest piggy banks in the world. Over a hundred million bucks later, it looks like her dreams went up in smoke.

My home state apparently prefers the aging former governor famous for once being the boyfriend of a pop star. Any connection to stardom plucks at the heart-strings of the average joe.

But enough politics already. It's going to be 90 degrees today, with clear blue skies. I've got a date with the outdoors to bring some order to the weary ones you'll meet in this poem:

At Least the Red Geraniums Behaved

Shame on the dahlias.
Their stalks, at the autumn equinox,
should be tall and green,
thick with offshoots
blooming like crazy.

Instead they stand in a motley row,
stalks of desiccated leaves
brown as bacon. Just because
they weren’t tended and fed
is no excuse for their poor behavior.
The gardener was busy
tending dying mothers,
fending off bitter brothers,
defending the defenseless
from injustice inflicted
on an entire nation
by the federal effing government.
Couldn’t the dahlias fend for themselves
for one stupid summer?

It looks like an army
with a scorched-earth vengeance
blew through the garden.
Maybe the dahlias are empathetic
mirrors of the gardener’s
scorched-earth soul,
but the tumbling geraniums
never surrendered;
they cheerfully endured
and their bright red laughter
keeps the gardener alive.

Abundance!

We harvested our little cherry trees yesterday. In February, I showed you this photo:

Here's what the buds look like now:

These Queen Anne cherries are delicious. We harvested a bucketful that filled up half the sink. The Van cherries that live cheek by jowl with the Queen Anne were even more abundant, filling the sink three-quarters full. The vibrant red Vans are more tart than Queen Annes and are smaller than the Bings you find in grocery stores.

We are wondering what to do with this abundance. Besides eat them, naturally (I'm surprised that thus far we've had no untoward side effects from eating all those cherries as we picked them). So far we've shared with neighbors and family and still have more than we can eat. Can we freeze fresh cherries, does anyone know?

Are you jealous of our abundance? I would be if it were you bragging about all your cherries. I love cherries. I'm also very proud of our harvest, because I've lovingly pruned these trees, which are full-sized genetically, into bonsai-size to fit into my minuscule backyard garden plot (maybe 10 feet by 20). The trees have to share space with perennial herbs, dahlias, hollyhocks, chrysanthemums, butterfly bush, and lamb's ears, as well as lilies, narcissus, and sunflowers in their seasons.

Not to mention I'm grateful as hell to God for sending the good rains last winter.

Tomorrow I'll tell you about going on the warpath. My time these days has been consumed, unlike the cherries, with gut-twisting developments. Please forgive me if I haven't your blog lately. I'm working full time on my mother's situation and then researching at night past the midnight hour... I've become a werewolf, with a bloodthirsty attitude. Tune in tomorrow.

Fake Accents & Other Garden Tips

My Cecil Brunner rose runs rampant, scenting the air.

Gardening tip for growing this rose:

Give it lots of neglect.

I caught myself in the garden doing something really silly: Talking to myself in my idea of a British accent.

There I was, productively doing maintenance work: Trying to fix a sprinkler head, pulling the oxalis that was taking over the dahlia bed, failing to fix the sprinkler head, digging a damn hole around it to get it unscrewed, getting a new sprinkler head, installing it and checking the stupid thing, yanking up more of that bloomin' oxalis ... and all the while talking nonsense in a fake accent.

WTF?

Maybe that fake accent is part of me. Maybe that's why Mom's eye surgeon (Dr. Rashid, not native born), asked if I were from Australia.

I've never lived outside the lower half of California, for Pete's sake. Blimey!

I told my daughter about this discovery of mine, and her response was ho-hum. "You always do that, Mom," she said. "I always found you bent over and whispering yourself." Doesn't that paint a pretty picture?

Well, the fact is, babbling to myself out loud in an accented voice, talking about this and that, may keep me from cursing and from quitting out of exhaustion. I would like to curse the damn gopher that ate my dahlia this past winter, I would like to curse the dad-gum sprinkler head, I would like to stop stooping over to pull endless oxalis out of the soil.

But I keep at it, with this imaginary Englishwoman blithering on in my head.


So my gardening tip for today is: Talk to yourself while doing chores in the garden, and do it in a fake accent. Trust me. It works.

~~~~~~~

Do you talk to yourself? Tell me I'm not the only one who does it. What about the accent? Anybody out there pretending to be somebody else when you talk to yourself? What if you walked up to someone busily talking to herself: Would you think she was nuts?

Garden of Earthly Delights

I want to take a breather from the human side of life. My garden is a place of serenity and a source of joy to me. Many of the flowers I don't even have to care much for; the Master Gardener sees to them. The rains He sent have been good for us. I can feel the life throbbing in the garden.

The Cecil Brunner rose wants no attention from me, and in return it blooms profusely and fragrantly.

I enjoy this color in my collection of bearded iris.

Like the bearded iris, the willowy Dutch iris thrives on winter rain and my neglect.

This is a less-stately form of foxglove, and it gladly reblooms in spring. All it wants is a fair share of rain.

The lilac gets a trim once in a while, but that's all it asks for.

The California poppies are volunteers. I don't have to do anything for them except let them spread their seeds each year.

The first roses

The stately foxglove gets ready to bloom.

My Scars

"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

Kahlil Gibran

I was out in the garden yesterday, attacking the weeds. It was a pretty spring day, a great day to be outdoors.
Armed with a tool or two and special weed-gripping gloves, I worked hard. I lost track of how nice the day was in my focus on the weeds.
I came in and wrote this poem:

Weeding

Why do the roots
descend so deep?
They grip the soil fanatically
hell-bent on survival
while the precious flowers
press their roots
to the earth like polite guests.
Weeds will release
their crowns but not their guts
the sacrifice a lizard makes
in giving up its tail
So resolute a thing inspires
not respect or awe
but fiercer dedication
to their eradication
foul fiends

Here’s what I noticed about the weeds, a variety of dandelion in particular: The more often in the past I had tried to rip it from the ground, the thicker and stronger was its root system today. I’m not kidding; there were dandelions out there that I have been fighting for years, and they are stronger than ever, because they have suffered at my hands.
This time I went after them with my long pointy dandelion digger. We’ll see how that works.
Gibran with this quote makes me fear that they’ll just grow more massive characters.

I like to think there’s an up-side to adversity. I like to think that all people in recovery are stronger souls because of the suffering, that survivors of all kinds of trouble have greater character than the ones who’ve never faced pain.

For decades I thought the scars I bore marked me as messed up for life. Only in the past few years have I realized, thanks to great help, that I can wear my scars with courage and dignity. I didn’t get them because I was bad but because innocent people get hurt like anyone else.

I think the roots of survivors grow deep. What do you think?

Gophers 2, Me 0

This is what I spent two hours doing on Sunday: digging fruitless holes in the garden, searching for the gopher tunnels that I knew were there.

Things I’ve tried in the past:

Drowning with a hose (unsuccessful)
Pesticide bombs (unsuccessful)
Ex-Lax (dropped down gopher holes, unsuccessful)
Metal spring traps (currently unsuccessful)

This gopher is smarter than I am. He somehow springs the traps I have placed into the tunnel (when I can even find a tunnel), then fills the hole with dirt, making his unfindable exit. Nevertheless, hope springs eternal.

Other things I did on Sunday: Attacked and cleared another section of garden. I’m now halfway finished with the back yard. Two days ago, I thought the job was beyond me.
Look what a little bit of diligence will do.

Things I saw as I worked:
Miniature daffodils.


Unusual daffodils.

A new bud forming on the roses.

My faith is renewed.

The Haitian prayer tacked on my refrigerator for the past 8 years:

Lord,
Your servant doesn’t know left from right.
Even now I don’t know which one of your hands I am in.
Whether I am in the left or the right, it doesn’t matter.
I am in your hands.
That’s enough.

~~~~

My Head Is Not My Friend

The garden was horrible. The whole area wrapping around the back of the house was a big ugly mess. Just the sight of it was overwhelming.

The head said, “Run back in the house!”
The program of recovery said, “Just because your head is attached to your body doesn’t make it your friend.”

This is what I saw when I stood out there wanting to flee this problem.
Dead stuff as tall as my head.

Weeds up to my knees.

To top it off, a gopher had found my garden and had begun to kill my prize hollyhocks.

I feared the problem was larger than I am. FEAR= F Everything And Run. Or Face Everything And Recover.
The Alcoholic Anonymous Big Book says the main problem for the alcoholic centers in the mind (page 23). A vital spiritual experience changes things, and “Ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them” (page 27).
I know I’ve had spiritual awakening as the result of taking the 12 Steps.

So I had a spiritual experience in the big ugly garden. I stood there with gardening gloves and pruning shears, wanting to run but didn’t.
In Appendix II of the Big Book, William James is quoted as saying there’s an “educational variety” of spiritual experience that develops slowly over time. But still it results in a “profound alteration in [my] reaction to life” that wasn’t brought about by myself alone.

My life has been like a garden run amok, and I wound up in a big ugly mess that landed in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. Slowly, one small section at a time, the Master Gardener worked on me.
I had a profound alteration in my reaction to life in that garden. It became important to just make a beginning, take the first step, worry about the next one later. Once I was committed, I started seeing things differently.

I saw this.

And I saw this.

And the work gradually got done. Not all of it. Not even most of it. But a beginning was made, and I’m free of the bondage of despair. Maybe I’ll even get that gopher.

Update, Sunday afternoon: Gopher, 1 --- Chris, 0

Busy Hands

This morning I have made up my mind to buy gloves, the kind without fingertips on them.

My fingers are like slivers of ice, and typing on my keyboard is akin to typing with a pencil, deliberate and slow. It's 45 degrees in here.

My office is a glass-enclosed room, which faces east into a park of old oak trees. To keep the cost down, we got a building permit that didn't allow us to run the duct work of heating and air conditioning into the room. I could keep the sliding glass door open and let in the house's warmth or coolness, but I smoke as I write, and the house is a smoke-free zone.

So in the chill of the morning my fingers freeze, and today I think of the solution rather than sit in the problem. Hail, gloves!

Yesterday I also got into the solution instead of dwelling on the problem, the problem being me and the solution being a newcomer. The death of summer's garden has depressed me, so yesterday I asked K to come home with me and help me prune the dying plants. When I asked her, she hugged me and cried.

We found two praying mantids as we worked. It's the end of their season too; the females have grown large with eggs waiting to be laid. There was a praying mantis in the dying rudbeckia, eating a butterfly, and I left her alone and worked around her with my newcomer.

As K and I worked, we talked about drugs and death and God and husbands: most of the things that matter in our small worlds. She's beautiful to look at and beautiful within, and she struggles to stay clean and sober but she keeps coming back. So we talked, and I loved her up, and the program of Alcoholics Anonymous worked in our lives.

In an AA meeting Sunday, someone said: "As alcoholics, we treat our loneliness with isolation."

It might be good to ask why we do that. It might be helpful to know the reason. But for me it's better if I just hear that truth, then take the action that will set me free from the bondage of myself.

K and I smiled a lot as we chopped down the dying plants. Had she not come home with me, I would have curled up in a ball on my bed, alone in my head. Instead, my soul was fed as the work was done.

There is an old saying that busy hands are happy hands.

My hands are warming up as the sun warms my room, and in my chest a warmth glows like the embers of a fire.

Trying Not to Grouse at the Autumnal Equinox

In spite of the harvest, in spite of the colorful trees, the brisk days, the frost-edges leaves, autumn is not my favorite time.

Autumn continues to be the precursor to winter, no matter how I try to think of the present, stay in the now, la-di-da. We hit the equinox, and my dahlias are dying. Everything in my garden that has given me joy all spring and summer is fading to death. The optimism I have worked so hard to build in AA now has to work hard against the flower gardener's sorrow.

I'm out there in the garden every morning, gathering in the last survivors, placing vases of flowers everywhere in my home. You'd think I was preparing for a catastrophe.

We're going through a heat wave here, a week of the 100+ temperatures; you'd think I'd be happy. But I'm not. I'm sad. I'm picking the stragglers, the vulnerable, the less-than-award-winners I grew this summer. Negative thinking is running amok.

It's a beautiful world I live in, BUT depression is starting to set in as the light says goodnight earlier each day. Maybe I suffer from SADD. Maybe I'm just MAD. I pour my heart and hands into that garden and it is the season for seeds, little birds that feed on the seeds, the last hurrah before the season I hate.

Boy, am I feeling melancholy today. The heat is cooking the tender young buds. Another week of this is forecast. Blah, blah, blah.

Thank God for small things, big things: I'm headed tomorrow for the redwoods, the tallest trees in the world. Thank God Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't close the California campgrounds. Thank God that today is my 18-month sobriety date. (Enter negative thinking: I had 15 years and went out!) (Out, damn thought; I've had a wonderful life of sobriety mostly, and I work the program hard, and I sponsor three beautiful beacons of women who are getting It, and the past 18 months has been among the best of my whole life! Thank you, Higher Power, that I haven't once thought of killing myself in a long, long time. There)

Okay, now I'm more serene. We can learn from the cycles of life. I have learned: to have faith that the dead will rise again; to have faith that each season is necessary; to trudge when necessary; to write poems when sad; to enjoy the moment even though this too shall pass; to use the same approach when unhappy; and to be glad for those who are glad about autumn.

According to the weather report, fall won't hit here for quite a few weeks, and then we'll have the pumpkins and squash, the riotous joy in the trees. The good news is: I can still wear shorts!

Here's a silly poem about my take on the autumnal equinox.

Equinox

One wakens to find an autumnal gloom

has lowered the boom on summer.

The bright yellow days segue to grays,

and the loins that ran rampant grow still

Yes, autumn is crisp with colors in the mist,

with apples and pumpkins galore, but still –

And not the least of all are the colors of fall

and the riotous joy in the trees. But please

let the haze drift away and the sun warm this day,

and don’t let the winter come soon. For one’s bones

are brittle and they ache a little, and one’s brain

doesn’t bloom in the gloom.

Chris Alba (c) 2008