Mother's Day

Today is the day I plant seeds. First, I set out all of my planting containers and fill them with potting soil, and then, I gather the seeds. 

The seeds are stored in envelopes and paper bags and plastic baggies, collected back in the fall or given to me, the dried-up marigold heads and zinnia, the basil and cleomes (which are big blobby brightly colored Dr. Suess-like flowers), the lettuce that bolted in summer, the red beans and black. All of the seeds have a story and the stories are all about gifts. 

The beans, for example, came from a farmer in New York near where my son and daughter-in-law live. Last year we helped the farmer dig holes in his field and he served us dinner, and as we were leaving, he handed me five black beans and five red. The cleome seeds were given to me by a neighbor after I told her how much I loved her “Dr. Seuss plants.” The marigolds are a gift from myself, several falls ago when I realized I didn’t need to buy these seeds, they were there all along, hundreds of them, in each cluster of blooms. 

Drop the seeds in the containers, add a bit more dirt. Water. Label, so I will remember. (I am big on remembering.) The process takes me all morning, and I am so grateful for this kind of meditative, lose-yourself-in-the-moment kind of activity. The second Sunday in May is always the day I plant my seeds. In central Ohio, it’s officially the start of the growing season—no more freezes or frosts (we hope!) 

It also happens to coincide with Mother’s Day. To put it mildly, I have mixed feelings about this day. I am a mother and I love being a mother. I am a daughter and this is where it gets tricky. For most of my life the daughter part of me took up an absurdly outsized portion of my brain. I don’t know how to explain it. 

Some of us grow where we are planted. Some of us are like the seeds dropped by birds and watered by kindly strangers. 

It’s warm outside while I work and lovely. When I’m finished planting, I have many more seeds left than I have containers to put them in. This happens every year and I am grateful for this too, a gift for those who have gifted me. 

A story. 

The Binge

Yesterday it was raining and unseasonably cold and dreary, and my husband and I sat down to watch one episode of a show we’d started the night before, a medical drama called The Pitt, which takes place in an ER and is weirdly mesmerizing. The one episode turned into three, turned into five, turned into nine, 

and the afternoon slipped away, the two of us parked on the couch, only breaking for meals and shuffling the dog in and out in the rain. When was the last time we did something like this, my husband asked me. Never, I said, but then I remembered the pandemic, 

our daughter and her boyfriend, now her husband, the four of us binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy, another medical drama (what is it about medical dramas?). Something about the intensity, the life-or-death moments, the glimpses of humans in crisis and all the ways we save each other. 

The Pitt covers a single day in a trauma center, each episode one hour in the twelve-hour shift. Slowly you get to know these people, the doctors, the medical students, nurses and orderlies, the head doctor doing his best to lead the place, but grappling with PTSD. Turns out, four years ago, during the pandemic, he was unable to save his mentor and now he’s flashing back, struggling to forget because who wants to remember that chaotic, terrifying time? Not me, but,

once, early on in the pandemic, in between Grey’s Anatomy episodes, I sneaked out of the house and drove across town to meet up with a friend I hadn't seen in weeks. The drive was eerie, the highways crisscrossing the city empty except for my car, a sign flashing over a bridge, reminding me to Flatten the Curve! Stay Home! 

and one man on the side of the road, peeing into a clump of bushes. This is the end of the world, I was thinking, and it was. Except it wasn’t. My friend and I wore masks and spent an hour together doing a socially-distant walk, and then I drove away on the vacant streets, 

home, where my family had moved on to binge-watching The Great British Bake-off, a marathon session of multiple episodes, punctuated only by stopping to bake a cake or whip up an elaborate French pastry. My son-in-law who had dreams of becoming a chef, made me a grilled cheese. The grilled cheese took hours and many episodes of The Great British Bake-Off because first he had to make the bread. 

When he delivered the sandwich, it came on one of my fancy plates, the thick homemade bread toasted, the cheese gooey and topped with thinly sliced pear and slivers of red onion. Nearly five years later, it’s still the best sandwich I have ever eaten in my life. Maybe I shouldn’t have broken the rules to visit my friend. 

I don’t know what spurred me on. The way everything had shifted out from under us, the library where I worked, closed for who knows how long, the claustrophobia of the house in lockdown, the binge-watching and binge-eating, the intensity of the love I had for my family, the terror that any of us might get sick, and suddenly, I thought I might lose my mind if I couldn’t do one ordinary thing. 

My friend and stayed on opposite sides of the street as we walked. When it was time to say goodbye, we held out our hands, pretending we could touch.  

Fun Times in the Financial Advisor's Office

A few days ago, my husband and I had a meeting with our financial advisor and it was fun. Maybe fun is the wrong word. My husband was fixated on all of the money we’d saved for retirement and how a scary chunk of it basically went up in flames over the past few weeks. I was fixated on how the financial advisor kept saying “the Markets.”

“The Markets don’t like chaos,” for example. 

Or

“The Markets like stability.” 

I was sitting in a comfy chair and doodling on a notepad with the snazzy pink pen the financial advisor had given me, and I was thinking, Good luck with that, Markets! Also, who are these Markets because I can totally relate to them. 

Then I went back to ruminating over the squirrel that’s been messing with my spinach. What happened was I planted spinach seeds in the small bed near the herb garden, and this squirrel (I think it’s the same one?) has been continually digging it all up. My suspicion is that he sees the disturbed dirt, and it makes him wonder if there’s something good buried under it, a long-forgotten nut or whatever. 

Every time I catch him at it, I chase him out and salvage what I can, but this was starting to seem pointless, more and more spinach seedlings flung and trampled. So, I got out the big guns. I’m talking, of course, about mesh fencing. 

I unwrapped the mesh roll and cut it to size, quickly realizing that this was not the easy process I’d envisioned. The mesh stuck to itself. It snagged on my hair, my necklace, my fingernails. The one place it would not stick was to the posts I’d fitted around the spinach bed. Did I mention that I’d chosen an eighty-two-degree day to do this? But finally, after spending a good sweaty couple of hours, I managed to construct a fortress around what was left of the spinach. 

Take that, squirrel. 

Meanwhile, in the financial advisor meeting, the financial advisor was saying, “The Markets will come back,” and I was admiring her faith and longing to believe her as the pink pen she had given me doodled its way across my notebook page, trying to tie all of my random thoughts together,

the Markets and the nutty afternoon I spent keeping one squirrel out of a two-foot by four-feet long garden bed, and maybe in this analogy the chaos is the squirrel? or the people in charge are the squirrel? greedily scrabbling for treasure, not giving a crap about the destruction of the garden. 

And maybe I am the Markets? craving stability and fully grown spinach, the mesh fluttering around me like the tattered fragments of the institutions I used to believe in.  

Or maybe the answer lies in the doodling itself? This really is a nice pen! Smooth and lovely and perfect for scribbling my new favorite word.

Mourning

The nest on the back porch has two eggs and no bird sitting on them, and I don’t know why. I don’t know why about a lot of things. 

What happened is the mother mourning dove had one brood—after sitting patiently for weeks, the two eggs hatching, the baby birds teetering out, flying down to the herb garden, everyone seemingly safe and well and off to live their lives. And then, 

maybe two days later, the mother was back on the nest and going through the whole process again. I wasn’t sure my heart could take it, the cold nights, the unplanned storms, the uncertainty of it all. I mean, come on, lady bird, give yourself--give ME a break! 

It was a bad week for a variety of reasons. My anger had seeped into a mild depression. I was having a hard time focusing, making plans and breaking them, and too much reading of the news, worries about my library losing state funding and my big fear: what if they make us take children's books off the shelves, everything spinning out, and not helped by the book I was reading

At Work in the Ruins, which is about how to live our lives after the world as we know it collapses (oddly, I found this book strangely comforting. I am so tired of people lying to my face) but also, it’s hard to think about the world as we know it collapsing. Take the cocoa powder I use in the banana, almond-butter smoothie I drink each morning. Did you know there is a cocoa powder shortage? 

It’s pretty much impossible to find now and has been for months. And just wait until we lose the almonds and bananas. A few days ago, a mother I used to know lost her son to a rare, aggressive and fast moving form of cancer. He was thirty-one years old and left behind a young wife and baby daughter and who gives a crap about cocoa powder. The world has ended, is always ending, will always be ending.

This morning, I found one of the mourning dove eggs broken on the steps, the yolk spilling out on the concrete, a sliver of shell tipped into the garden, a snail glistening in the sun, head bent over the bowl, drinking the remains, while a dove perched on a wire looked down at us, glass-eyed.  

I understand nothing. And we who are left go on. 

Through

Yesterday I was mad. 

I had a plan for the day, and I was all set to get the ball rolling. The plan was: first, unload my groceries. But before I even unloaded half of them, something happened and it all went to hell. 

I walked back into the house in a daze, and my husband said, Are you okay? I said, No. I made lunch and choked it down. My head wouldn't stop spinning with the thing that had just happened. I was angry, but I didn't know what to do with the anger. Anger is a difficult emotion for me in general. Most of my life I held it in, smoothed it over, walled it off. I was pretty good at pretending I didn't care. Sometimes I was pretty bad at pretending. 

Fifty million sessions of therapy later, and I've learned that the healthy way to deal with difficult feelings is: You feel them. 

The first time my therapist told me this, I said. Ah, it's like the line from Robert Frost, "The best way out is always through." Okay, sure, she said. 

But what if you don't want to feel the feelings? I forgot to ask her this. Or, if I did ask her, I forgot the answer. I cleaned up my lunch dishes and realized I was enraged. I said to my husband. I’m mad. He said, I can see that. What can I do to help? Can I hug you? 

Before I met him, I didn't know this was a question a person could ask another person. I didn't know you could say no. 

I said, Yes, and when he hugged me, I burst into tears. It was amazing how hard I cried. When I stopped, I said, I think I want to go for a walk. I took the dog and tried to lose myself in a funny podcast, but it didn't work. I was still jittery. I reached out to two friends, but they were both busy. I felt like I might crawl out of my skin. 

I ate an over-sized chocolate bar. That was glorious for like, two minutes, but then I felt sick. Now I was angrier, and all of the anger was directed at myself. My day, which had started out so promising, was going down the tubes. I went for another walk and tried to do a trick my therapist told me about where you look at five things and touch four things and listen to three things and smell two things and taste one thing. 

All I could look at was the sky. All I could listen to was the same song over and over. Under Pressure by David Bowie and Queen. 

The song is about love and it made me feel terrible because what if there are limits to love? And also, what if deep down, you hate yourself? I kept walking. Why can't we give love one more chance, says Freddy Mercury. And then David Bowie says, in so many words, Yeah, why not? 

It hit me that the love they're talking about includes yourself. It only took one hundred repeats of the song and 18,341 steps to come to this conclusion. My feet were burning by that time, but the anger was gone. 

I had found my way through, apparently. 

It only took a day. It only took a lifetime. 

Be Honest. Use Humor.

Last week I attended a zoom meet-up with a group of writers who are struggling to write these days. The writer who organized the meet-up invited us to go around the zoom room and share something we felt excited about. Someone said, French soup. Someone said, the art she’s making out of found objects. I said, lettuce.

Someone said she’s retiring, and we all said, Yay! Good for you! But then she went on to talk about how she works at a university, and it’s been wearing her down, trying to respond to all of the directives from the federal government to dismantle diversity and equity and inclusion in her department. We all said, oh. 

The writer running the group said, This is it. We’re all sad. But we’re also capable of finding joy. How do we acknowledge reality and still remember joy? Be honest, she said, and I dutifully wrote that down. Use humor. I wrote that down too. I was looking at the faces of these strangers arrayed in their zoom boxes, so many of us despondent about the state of the world, 

and feeling grateful that I am not alone, 

A few days later, it was “liberation day” as the news was calling it and the stock market tanked and the state of Ohio decided it’s a good idea to cut library funding. I was sitting on the couch with my husband, and I was déjà vu-ing back to March 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic, when I suddenly realized we only had a couple of rolls of toilet paper in the house. 

My husband tried to order some on Amazon, but everything was out. The next day I braved the supermarket, where it was pandemonium, and managed to make my way to the toilet paper aisle where there were two packages left, and I really really really wanted to grab both, but I only took one. That ranks right up there on the list of hard things I’ve done in my life. The months went by. 

The store put a limit on toilet paper. I bought a pack every week. More months went by. I had a pyramid of toilet paper packs in the basement. I kept buying more. One day out of the blue, we got a box in the mail, and when I opened it, I didn’t understand what I was looking at. It was a very small pack of very small rolls of toilet paper. 

My husband figured out that this must’ve been the order he’d placed back in March. The toilet paper had come from China on a barge and it was just now reaching us. I added it to the pyramid in the basement. But I was starting to have a queasy feeling. 

What the hell was this pyramid anyway, but scarcity and terror. Also, it was absurd. I stopped buying toilet paper. The pile dwindled. Eventually there was only the pack from China left. My husband gave it to our son who was van-life-ing across the country at the time. 

I must’ve memory-holed this whole thing, because there we were back on the couch, and only a few rolls of toilet paper in the house. I could feel the panic rising. I wanted to change out of my pajamas and run right over to Kroger and start building the pyramid again. 

Instead, I went outside and checked on my lettuce, which is growing like crazy. In a few weeks I will be filling up big salad bowls and picking more to give to neighbors and friends. I will be giving away so much lettuce, people will see me coming with my bags of it, and say, please, Jody, we’ve had enough of your lettuce, give it to someone else. 

And I will. 

What If

Every spring I plant lettuce and every spring I worry the lettuce won’t come up. A week goes by from when I first dropped the seeds into the ground, and then it’s ten days, and still no sign of the lettuce. Maybe I didn’t water it enough or maybe the $&$^# squirrels destroyed it with their maniacal hole-digging. 

(A word about the squirrels. A few weeks ago I wrote about the peas I planted, but what I didn’t tell you was that five minutes after I planted them, a squirrel dug them up and scattered the seedlings, and I had to replant everything and block off the garden bed, which was quickly breached by the squirrels with more digging up and more scattering, until I set up a fortress-like fence, which seems to be holding, for now.) 

Meanwhile, the mourning dove mother on her nest on our back porch who has ballooned up to twice her size, patiently plonked over her eggs, keeps blinking at me in mild amusement whenever I tear out the back door to chase off a squirrel. Ten days, two weeks, three, and the bird is still out there and no hatched eggs. Rain, sleet, a freak wind that flipped over the hammock next door, and I am worried

about the mourning dove mother, about the lettuce, about the new law in Ohio that regulates classroom discussion about controversial subjects, controversial apparently referring to talk about “climate change,” “immigration,” and “diversity” among other things, because what in the actual F—

What if the lettuce doesn’t grow this year and what if there are no baby mourning doves? What if the State doesn’t stop at the universities but goes after the public libraries next and who am I kidding, of course, they'll go after the libraries, and what is anyone going to do about it? What am I going to do about it, when I can barely manage the squirrels digging up my pea plants? This is all to say 

that this week, I hit a low point with the whole thing. Still, I wrote every day at the kitchen counter, keeping an eye on the not-growing-lettuce-in-the-garden, the devious squirrels, the dove plopped over her unhatched eggs, 

only half-noticing the orchid plant in its pot on the window ledge, the orchid that hasn’t bloomed in five years and why am I keeping this orchid plant, when it is so obviously played out, long past dormant, fully crossed over into the land of the dead? 

But then yesterday—and I don’t know what it means—nothing, everything, spring, beauty, goodness, love—

the lettuce came up, the eggs hatched, and the orchid plant bloomed.