Bumps in the road

It's been roughly a week since I have been able to spend time in the garden. I have been spending my days in the emergency room of our local hospital, patiently waiting for the doctors to locate the source of internal bleeding that my 74 year old father has been experiencing. It has been a very stressful week, to say the least.

I developed an aversion to hospitals and doctor's offices after three years of cancer visits with Mom. To be back again was traumatic, especially given the circumstances. Not only did I feel helpless and frightened that I was about to loose Dad, the proximity of tragedy sent me to cry in the bathroom more than once. Listening to the family of the woman who had just had a stroke, behind that thin privacy curtain to our left, broke my heart. I felt their sense of desperation as they coaxed her to open her eyes, to speak, to squeeze a finger.

In the end, we were lucky. They were able to deal with Dad's bleeding, and (fingers crossed) the danger is over for now.  I am so grateful for another day with Dad, who  is a wonderful person. He will turn 75 next week, and I will meet his girlfriend for the first time-at his birthday party, not his funeral as I had feared.

I returned to my garden this morning to find that the daisies are beginning to bloom.

I even spotted a few lady bugs, who were a little camera shy.

This week should be better than the last. 

Rolling thunder

I carried my camera out to the garden this morning expecting to find things just as I had left them. Sadly, the storm that moved through last night left my roses looking like this:

While the weather has improved substantially since last night, the bright blue skies and warm sun still have not made an appearance this morning. I contemplated not taking photos at all, until I spied this beautifully bright bloom hiding behind a more faded and wind whipped, older version of itself.

Without the sun, it's difficult to make out the dew gathered in the folds and along the edges of the petals. My disappointment was short lived, as I realized that-once I dead head, I have several weeks of these gorgeous coral roses to look forward to.  Now, I won't go through the poetry of comparing gardening to life in general. I'll let you do that yourself.

Oblah dee oblah da....

After my Mother died, I was in a fog for a very long time. Actually, I believe the fog started during her illness, probably as a coping mechanism. Watching someone you love endure cancer requires many, many coping mechanisms-some of which work better than others.

It hasn't been that long really since she passed into peace, only 19 months. In the beginning it felt like I would hurt forever. Then, one morning not too long ago I was going about my day, toiling in Mother's garden, and I realized that what had felt like a sharp pain had now dulled substantially. With that realization came guilt.

I now spend a good part of each day working in the garden that she loved so much. Even when she was so weak that she could hardly hold a blow dryer, she would walk out to her garden and show me how beautifully the roses had recovered from the hard winter, and how the orange lilies were placed just where the garden needed a little more color. No one- not the gardener that cared for the rest of the yard and certainly not my father- was allowed to tend her garden until she became too ill to do it herself. Then she would supervise, watching me or my brother pull weeds, making sure that we weren't unearthing anything that had promise.

The garden went untended for most of the past year and a half. I made a short-lived effort to care for it last summer, but the sheer size of the garden, which stretches out for roughly a half-block means constant weeding and tending. What felt like work last summer now feels like therapy. I can't go a day without spending at least a few hours in the garden, and it's now beginning to show. Mom would be proud.