Category Archives: Worrying

heirlooms

after a few days of drops for my eye infections, sprays for my nose, and allergy pills for the general misery of everything else, i am somewhat recovered and able to get back to running and do some work outside. it is a bit of a bitter pill to swallow (haha) that i have always regarded the outdoors as a healthy place to be, feeling virtuous whenever i get my vitamin D or go for a run or a long walk, and to be brought to my knees, figuratively, by doing something healthy seems simply unfair.

anyway.

my tomatoes have been such a disappointment over the past couple of years that i decided to get serious and go straight to a local greenhouse that grows and sells heirloom tomato varieties that are specifically chosen for michigan’s climate. michigan heirlooms has an awesome website with a listing of all the plants they sell, great descriptions and pictures, so i picked cherokee purple and paul robeson. my original bestie k. ordered some varieties too, so yesterday i packed miss l. up in the car and we drove out to fetch all of them.

i’d just showered after a run, my hair was pinned up, i filled up my water bottle, and miss l. was grumbling a bit about having to leave her swingset. i thought it was a quick drive but my nav kept taking me deeper on country lanes. after informing me “THIS IS WHY I DIDN’T WANT TO GO TO THE TOMATO FARM”, miss l. fell asleep in the back and the sky was jewel blue and the roadsides were full of tall slim trees and marshy bits where ducks and their babies swam and turtles sunned themselves. i was somewhat annoyed at having to be in the car for so long on a lovely day, and remembered that when i was little, driving was entertainment for our family. my mom and dad would load us up into the old brown buick and we would find country roads to drive down and look for bunnies. then my imagination took a darker turn and i started thinking about a stephen king story about a woman and her child taking their Ford Pinto to an old country repair station far from civilization and being trapped in the driveway in their baking, broken-down car by a rabid St. Bernard. luckily, i thought, i have a very reliable vehicle and a working cell phone and just an extremely overactive imagination. even after a year of taking aggressive steps to manage my various anxieties and worryability, i still have moments where i have to shut myself down, even over ridiculous things like a nice drive on a country lane on a sunny day.

and when we got to michigan heirlooms, of course there weren’t any rabid St. Bernards, just friendly chickens.

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and a really lovely little cottage industry greenhouse run by an extremely helpful and good-natured family who, when they found a problem with my second paul robeson, gave me a jd’s special c-tex plant to substitute. which i was assured would be a superior tomato.

on going out and coming home

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I try not to talk much about a variety of topics on the internetz, including my work and my personal relationships and now, as she gets older, my daughter, whose life and image and thoughts and feelings belong to her, not me to share with the general public. But I’ve been through a lot over the past year, and there were many days when I just didn’t think I could get out of bed and face the day.

All my life, I have felt that I needed someone else to trust and to lean on, because inside I never trusted my own self to get me through hard times. I felt fundamentally unreliable and flawed. When I faced a challenge, I never truly believed I had the ability to get through it.

It’s a terrible weakness, not to trust or like your own self, and although I wish I could change many things that have happened lately, the silver lining of all of it is that I finally know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I can get through what I have to, and that I am more than I ever thought I was. Part of me hates to see that written out in black and white, because my old self would feel that was tempting the universe to knock my feet out from underneath me. I don’t think like that anymore. Now I think the universe is more receptive, it’s something that responds to the energy you put out into it, and gives it back, and if you wake up every day to see the beauty in what is around you and feel gratitude for it, and love the people in your life and what you have been given, and you work to be happy, the universe responds to that. The only person who is responsible for your happiness is you.

This is a long way of saying that I flew across the country this week, and visited new places, and saw new things. I spoke in front of groups of people and laughed with them and made friends. I wasn’t perfect, but I was real, and I wasn’t afraid, and everywhere I looked I saw sunshine and warmth and new things. I trusted myself and enjoyed myself and when I came home, I was so happy for the little life I have here. California was hot and dry and bright, the Santa Ana winds moving restlessly through the palm trees against the blue sky. Traffic wound in glittering ropes along the asphalt. There were people everywhere, great waves of people pressing in on all sides. When I wasn’t presenting, during our car trips and at the airport, I couldn’t even speak for staring around me.

And then I came home, and my world was small and damp and green, full of cats and a chattering child, cluttered with construction paper and crayons and toys. I dreamt last night of five cardinals in the branches above me, and picking up a small colored bird, thinking it was dead, and having it come alive in my hand, fragile and prickly. I liked coming home the best of all. It’s so strange to feel that at the age of 40, I’ve been newly born into something I never was before. I have such a short life left to enjoy, I’d better get to it.