Pat Bertram's Blog, page 18

When Four O’Clocks aren’t Four O’Clocks

This morning I was outside before the sun came up — I needed to water before it got too hot to be outside — and I noticed that my wild four o’clock plant had buds.

I came inside and set my alarm for four o’clock so that I wouldn’t miss the blossomed flower. When the alarm went off, I braved the heat (105˚ F), but alas, no flower.

Aha! Daylight savings time! Maybe the four o’clock plant is now a five o’clock plant! It’s five o’clock as I write this, so I peeked out the window, and still no blooms.

According to a couple of articles I stopped to read, the plant won’t flower in the heat, so it waits for the temperature to cool off a bit, which means it could be a seven o’clock or even an eight o’clock plant. Or it might not flower at all. In fact, although I got the plant almost three years ago, this is the first year it even came up, so I’m grateful for that, anyway.

Luckily, the heat will break tonight, and next week will be considerably cooler, with some highs in the eighties and some around ninety. Most days even come with a possibility of rain.

I am so looking forward to a bit of cool. The searing sun is not at all pleasant. The only things I know that appreciate the heat are tomatoes. And zinnias.

It’s funny to think that not that long ago I was thinking the cold would never end, and lately I’ve been thinking the heat will never end. (Just because the seasons have always changed doesn’t mean that they always will.) Luckily, if the weather forecasters have any credence (which up to now, I haven’t seen much of that), it will cool down for a few days anyway.

Then, perhaps, my four o-clocks will bloom.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Telling a Tarot Story

I don’t often deal out tarot readings for myself that make a lot of sense. The cards seldom tell me anything I don’t know, mostly because all I can do is read what I know into the cards. Even leaving me out of the reading, the cards still don’t make sense since they don’t seem to relate to one another. Today’s reading, however, delighted me because the cards all fit together to tell a story.

The deck I’ve been using this month is the Renaissance Tarot Deck, a deck that reflects interests of that period, using deities of Olympus and other mythological gods and goddesses. The ordinary folk, such as the court cards (ordinary in comparison with the classical deities, that is) are dressed in garments from the era.

I’ve never used this deck before because I wasn’t sure I liked the anatomically correct nakedness, but I’ve come to appreciate this deck. It helps knowing that the naked people aren’t people at all but various mythological beings. Still, in the photo accompanying this post, I castrated the poor fellows, lest I offend anyone with such “pornography.” (I have a hard enough time with how people perceive this blog without adding fuel to the fire.)

The first card, representing the past, was the eight of swords. The picture is Achilles grieving for his friend Patrocius, who was killed by the spear of Hector of Troy. The meaning of the card is emotional disaster, loss of a beloved person or a valued situation, a sadness that creates new strength and resolve.

The second card, representing the present, is the ten of cups. The picture is Psyche and Eros in perfect happiness, reunited in a marriage feast on Olympus. The meaning, of course, is happiness in love, balance in friendship, and joyful equanimity in oneself.

The third card, representing the future, is the two of cups. The picture is of Eros falling in love with Psyche. The meaning is love at first sight, the invisible and formidable bond between two people.

So, the story of the cards is loss, finding eventual joy and a new balance and, if this were a romance novel, finding a new love. But since this isn’t a romance novel, since the reading is only good until the next reading (tomorrow morning), and since the chances of me meeting and falling in love with someone this afternoon are nil, the future card has to mean that the bond between Jeff and me is still strong, in my own mind if not in fact.

Or something like that.

Whatever the cards actually mean (as opposed to what I say they mean), it does seem as if these particular cards tell a very linear and distinct story.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

A Day in the Middle of Summer

I spent the morning outside. I hadn’t really planned to. Since it rained last night, I didn’t have to water today, and I figured the ground would be too sodden to weed my flower gardens, so I thought this would be a good day to take it easy.

Still, I had to go outside to toss out the furnace filter I’d just changed (after being very careful going down those old basement stairs), and I needed to reattach a motion-activated light that had somehow become unattached from its perch on the side of the house (I was especially careful going up the ladder since I’m not sure it’s something I should be doing), and because I was outside anyway, I pulled a weed or two.

A couple of hours later . . . Yep, that weed or two turned into a massive cleanup of one of the two uncultivated areas of my yard. It’s not as if the area needed it — the weeds were only waist high. (I’m being ironic here, if you can’t tell. Not about the weeds being waist high, because they were, but about the area not needing to be weeded.) I would have to clear it out eventually — I will be ordering some purple echinacea and Goldsturm black eyed Susans to plant there this fall, so this gave me a head start on the project.

Speaking of which, the echinacea that I planted last year came in a five-inch pot, and they did well. The price has gone up quite a bit, so I’m considering getting plants in three-inch pots, which are half the price, but obviously smaller. Would that be a foolish economy? Obviously, for the same budget, I could get twice as many of the smaller pots, so if a couple of the plants died, I’d still be ahead of the game, but am I sabotaging myself by getting the smaller ones? Or does it sound like a smart choice? I sure don’t know.

But I’m getting off the topic of spending the morning outside . . . After I finished my chores, I took a few photos of flowers. I love how this morning glory turned out — as if the sun were rising from its center!

About then, a friend stopped by and we sat in the comfort of my gazebo (me with dirt still under my fingernails) to chat for few minutes. Next thing we knew, the church bells were tolling the noon hour. Yikes! Those hours do tend to disappear on a person.

We said our goodbyes. She headed out to finish her errands, and I went to harvest my cherry tomatoes. All three of them!

And then finally, I went back inside.

What a nice midsummer’s day!

Only it isn’t a midsummer day. It’s merely a day in the middle of summer. A quick Google search to find out when midsummer really is told me that midsummer is celebrated around the summer solstice, which we call the first day of summer. So confusing!

Still, whatever you call it, I spent a pleasant — and unplanned — summer day outside.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

Adorable

A woman saw me getting out of my vintage Beetle today and told me, in a distinctive southern accent, that I was adorable. Or maybe it was the hat she thought was adorable, or the car, or both. (I get a lot of admiring comments for both of those accessories.) It does come as a surprise at times that I have reached the “adorable” age, though why older women with a different sense of style (such as it is) are considered adorable, I don’t know.

I smiled, of course, and thanked her, because what I else could I do? Shortly afterward, I thought of her comment when I acted considerably less than adorable. I was waiting in line for a checkout clerk, but the clerk kept looking around and seemed to be interested in everything but me, as if I were invisible, and I know I’m not. Invisible, that is. I finally said that if she weren’t going to help me, I was going to leave. She did approach me then, but there was something about her lackadaisical attitude that rubbed me the wrong way, so I said rather irritably, “Forget it. I’m going to leave anyway.” And I did.

It was the right thing to do because by that time, I didn’t want to have anything to do with her or the business that employed her, but I would have preferred leaving the irritation out of my voice and adding in a bit of the “adorableness” that the woman from the first encounter had seen.

Ah, well. Who wants to be adorable, anyway? I’d rather be known for a razor-sharp wit (which, unfortunately, I don’t have) or . . . hmm. I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be known for. I certainly wouldn’t want to be known as an irritable old grump (which, unfortunately, I was for a moment today.)

On second thought, maybe it’s not so bad being thought of as an adorable old woman wearing an adorable old hat and driving an adorable old car.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Downpour

I had a wonderful surprise last night, and you’ll never guess what it was. Aww, shucks. You guessed it. And here I thought I was being subtle and crafty.

Last night’s surprise downpour was anything but subtle, though it was crafty how it slipped in past the weather forecasters’ crystal ball. The meteorologists all said there was almost no chance of rain for the near future, and a few hours later — deluge!

I was thrilled to see the rain for many reasons. One, we needed it. Two, it was a lovely sight — and sound. Three, I was dreading today and having to be outside to water when it was so dang hot.

I also dreaded today because I’d signed up to work at the museum, and although I would have liked to help, I simply did not want to go meandering about in the afternoon heat. I lucked out on that, too. Because of the rain cancelling my morning chores, when a friend called and asked if I wanted to go to the “big city” with her (big only in comparison to this town; anyone anywhere else would consider it a miniscule place) I jumped at the chance to get away for a bit. Shortly afterward, I got a message that the time to help at the museum was changed from the afternoon to the morning, but it was too late; I was already on my way out of town.

So the day I dreaded turned out to be not so dreadful. Even better, I got to see my yard from a different perspective (from the street as we drove away from my place), and it looked pretty good for having to survive such a searingly hot summer.

It’s funny that although we are in the midst of summer (“midsummer” sounds much more romantic than it actually is), I only have three months to come up with and to write a mystery for the museum’s October event.

A friend is doing research for me on a tale she was told as a youngster — something about the military, the Cheyenne, gold, a cave, pictographs, and a totem pole. There was also a hanging, but I don’t remember if that’s part of that story she told me or a different one. (Not only did I talk to her yesterday about what she remembered, I also leafed through a book that gave some of the history of this area, and all that input is jumbled together in memory.) I sure hope she can track down some people who might remember the story because it sounds interesting (more interesting by far than this heat, that’s for sure!). If necessary, I could use those same themes to create my own story, but since it’s for the historical museum, I’d just as soon the mystery have some basis in fact.

But for now, it’s a matter of waiting to see what transpires, both with the story and with our midsummer weather.

We could see a few more showers tonight, but since it’s in the forecast, I wouldn’t be surprised if the rain passed us by — those crystal balls the forecasters are currently using seem rather murky and not at all trustworthy. Because I don’t have my own private rainstorm tucked away somewhere that I could trot out on days like today, I’ll just have to hope that everything again turns out for the best.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

Homefull

I often write about (or at least refer to) the changes in my life since Jeff died twelve-and-a-half years ago, but I don’t write that much about the changes since my older brother died. Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of his death, and it surprised me that it wasn’t that long ago (or perhaps it surprised me that it was so long ago — with death and grief, it’s sometimes hard to tell). His death set into play a long string of happenstance that ended up with me, in a house, in this sweltering corner of Colorado.

Mostly, his death changed me in some fundamental way so I was ready when my other brother suggested I take my small savings and buy a house. He’d come to help me clear out our deceased brother’s things and deal with any legal issues, and I have a hunch he wanted to make sure I was settled so he wouldn’t have to worry about yet another sibling. Whatever his reasoning, the idea he broached made sense to me, especially when he told me about this area that actually had houses I could afford.

The time was ripe, apparently, for buying houses in and around this area, because every one I liked (and could afford) disappeared from the market even before my real estate agent could look at it.

Luckily, I only needed one house, and that house came looking for me.

It seems as if I’d been looking for a very long time before I became aware of this house, but considering that my brother has been gone only four years and that I’ve been here a couple of months shy of three and a half years, the whole upheaval to my life — ambitions, geographical location, as well as the mental change from life-long renter to homeowner — happened in a matter of months.

It’s ironic that because of the death of my homeless brother, I am homefull. (That’s not a word, though it should be.) At any rate, whatever the proper word, because of him, here I am, with a home of my own.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Balancing on the Fulcrum

This heat sure is zapping any energy I might otherwise have had. I still do my early morning yard chores, but the effort required to slog my way through the heat leaves me without any resources for the rest of the day. Even when I’m finished and am inside with the air conditioner going, I can still feel that lack of interest in doing anything. Except for reading, of course. That I can do anywhere or at any time, though I have to admit, few books can hold my interest enough to keep me awake for very long. Naps anyone?

It’s times like this when I can feel the pendulum swing of life. Here we are, stuck in a slough of over 100-degree temperatures, but it wasn’t that long ago when the temperatures were dipping below 0 on the Fahrenheit scale. On a day-to-day basis, the pendulum of the seasons might not seem as if it is moving, but it is. In another six months, we’ll be back to those frigid temperatures.

Another pendulum I could feel today is the one that regulates how I feel about my yard and the work I’m putting into it. A few months ago, I was enchanted with the way everything looked and how everything was going. Now I am definitely unenchanted (meaning the enchantment is at an end) though the pendulum hasn’t yet swung all the way to disenchanted (meaning disillusionment and disappointment). And perhaps the pendulum might not swing that far. My love affair with my garden was a shallow one, based entirely on its looks. As the old flowers and plants die off and late-bloomers blossom, and as (perhaps) the rather bleak look of midsummer desiccation gives way to a more robust autumn look when cooler temperatures favor cool-temperature plants, such as New England asters, chrysanthemums, and my grass, then I might become enchanted again. If not, there’s always next spring and the inevitable pendulum swing.

I try not to be too influenced by wild pendulum swings because life is so much more comfortable on the fulcrum. I do, as much as possible, try to remain emotionally centered without going to extremes of moods. (Grief was an aberration, an insane one-sided, one-way swing of the pendulum of life, though even then, I tried to find whatever balance I could.) Still, even centered as much as possible on the fulcrum, small daily mood changes can seem immense when influenced by the out-of-my-control swings of nature.

And especially when the heat wipes me out, leaving me without the energy to balance on the fulcrum.

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***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Vexatious Issues

When I first started working outside this past spring, it felt as if my yard were an extension of my house — an outdoor room, perhaps. Now the outdoors feels hostile and alien, a place that I cannot control, at least not in the way I can control the “climate” inside my house. We can’t control the inside one hundred percent, of course. So much is still out of our control, such as bugs that find their way inside, appliances that go wonky, as well as any number of things that can go wrong. But at least inside (so far anyway) I don’t have to deal with searingly intense and dangerous heat, slime molds, dead birds (well, one, anyway — I found it on my front lawn when I went out to mow today), clouds of grasshoppers that chomp on non-suspecting plants, grass that turns brown and desiccates overnight.

The past few days, dealing with all those vexatious issues, I haven’t even felt like sitting in my gazebo to enjoy a few minutes of rest after my hard work. I’ve just gone inside, closed the door, and felt glad to be in a more familiar place.

At least for a while, that is, until the phone rings. And oh, does it ring! In the past couple of days, I’ve received maybe forty calls from entities with names like “Spam Risk,” “Haitian Chick 5,” and “Telemarketer.” I don’t answer (well, I do, but I hang up immediately; if not, the calls go to voice mail, and then I have to delete all of them) so I don’t know if there are real people behind the calls or if it’s all robots. But it doesn’t matter who is calling — the ring always startles me, though I have it on low. And I turn the phone off at night to keep from being awakened.

Apparently, after the slowdowns and shutdowns and sheltering-in-place during the past couple of years, the telemarketing machine gave us a bit of a break, but now it’s going full bore, trying to make up the money they think they lost. (Though why, with all warnings about spam and identity theft and fraud, people are still buying into these scams, I don’t know. They blame the “old people,” but my generation and even the one before me are tech savvy and wary. Or so I thought. But maybe we’re losing what few brain cells we have left, and what we once knew we no longer do?)

But luckily, it’s cool inside, so there’s that. And I have books to read and food to eat. And, if necessary, I can mute the ring so I don’t hear it at all to give my poor frazzled nerves a break.

Even luckier, I was able to leave all the rest of my vexations outside where they belong.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

Gardening is Like Life

Sometimes gardening it too much like life to suit me. Come to think of it, gardening isn’t “like” life, it is life. All those plants and other living creatures go through the same sort of life cycles we do, with ups and downs, growth and stagnation, illness and death. They might not have to deal with the angst of their traumas, but we — in this case “I” — suffer the angst for them.

This has been a particularly confusing time for me garden-wise. The sun desiccates plants so quickly, that what was thriving yesterday, is all but dead today. I’m glad I took a photo of these petunias yesterday because today, not only are the flowers gone, but the plants themselves look as if they might not make it through another drastic heat wave.

The same thing happened to the zinnias, though I don’t know why. They generally like this climate and this area especially — at one time, 92% of all zinnia seeds were grown in this valley not far from here. Luckily, only the flowers desiccated. The plants themselves seem strong enough to produce more blossoms.

The grass especially confuses me. The large area of the lawn that had turned brown about a month ago was doing well until last night, and now it’s even worse than it was the first “brown” time. As if that weren’t bad enough, I’ve been infested with slime mold in a different area of the lawn. How the heck does such a dry climate even have slime mold spores? And how can a certain area be moist enough for the slime mold to take hold when the area all around it is gasping for a drink? (A while back, a cat with diarrhea left its offering in that very spot, so all I can think of is that it somehow ingested the spores and was generous enough to share.) Even though I clean up the slime mold every morning and sprinkle the grass with baking soda, it grows again overnight in a different spot.

And no, I didn’t take a picture of the white blob. I wanted to get rid of it as quickly as possible; I certainly didn’t want to memorialize the creature. (I suppose it’s a creature, though it’s not an animal, a fungus, or a plant but an amoeba. A smart amoeba. Supposedly these plasmodium can solve problems even though they don’t have a brain. Sheesh. As if the life of a garden — and gardener — wasn’t horror enough.)

Another issue I encountered was with a hen and chick plant that flowered. This rooster, as the blooming rosette is called, came right on time. (They flower about every three years.) One gardener told me the flowering stage was the end of the cycle and to pull up the whole rosette so the “chicks” could grow. After I did that, I found out the flowers produce seed, so I could have left it until the rosette died on its own. See? Too much like life. Either way, the chicks will soon become hens. And that, too, is life.

Although I have enjoyed the wildflowers, I’m not sure if I’ll buy more seeds to plant next year. (I still have some left over, so I can change my mind about planting them at the last minute.) The blooms are staggered, so there’s not a lot of color at any one time, and the mass of plants mask weed and weedy grass growth. I’ll need to completely clear out some of the wildflower areas since that will be the only way to get rid of the weeds, but it won’t be a problem since most of the flowers were annuals anyway. The flowers that went to seed won’t be affected — the seeds should still grow.

One thing that does so very well here is the magnus echinacea no matter how the weather or the gardener treats it. I’m considering getting a lot more of those plants for problem areas.

And that, too, is like life — when one thing comes to an end, you do your best to find something else to start.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Liking What I Write

Sometimes I read an article I wrote, and I think, “I wish I had written that,” then it hits me that oh, wait. I did write that.

A case in point:

This morning someone left a comment on my post “Let It Ride,” telling me he was doing a podcast about the movie and wanted to know if I would like to join the discussion. Not remembering having ever written about the film, though it is one I like, I went back and read the post. The piece turned out to be not so much a rehashing of the movie (which the critics hated and apparently, so did the screenwriter, because she had her name removed from the credits), but a discussion of the philosophy of luck.

I generally do not like stories about gambling. They set my teeth on edge because of the inevitable slough of despair the character falls into when the addiction gets the better of him. Despite that, Let It Ride is one of my favorite movies, probably because although the story takes place at Hialeah amid the horse racing culture, it is not a movie about gambling. It’s the story of how the forces of the universe align to give Jay Trotter (Richard Dreyfuss) one perfect day, how he had the wisdom to recognize the gift, and how he had the courage to accept it. Not everyone accepted the gift. Even those who saw what was happening to him and were jealous, refused to follow his lead when he so generously offered to share the luck.

I think the part I liked most about that particular post was my summation: What does this philosophical vision of the movie teach me? Perhaps that luck — and life — should be taken as it comes, we should trust ourselves, and beyond that, we should just let it ride.

So, that was an example of something that I wish I’d written and had. On the other hand, there are a lot of things I read that I am very glad I didn’t write. The last book I read (or attempted to read) was a mystery written by a man from the point of view of an alcoholic woman journalist who kept sabotaging her life. It was a popular book, though I don’t know why. A writer struggling with alcoholism is such a trite theme; hundreds, if not thousands of books (though not a single one by me) have been written with that same generic character.

Another book I was glad I didn’t write was the one I read before that — a novel by a youngish white woman whose point-of-view characters were a flamboyant black woman and an old man (who turned out to be younger than I am). I thought such stories were no longer acceptable in a world where people don’t appreciate race appropriation.

I suppose I should be grateful that I like the things I write since there is so much writing out there that I don’t like. I also suppose I will follow through and email the guy about his podcast, though I’m not sure I’ll accept his offer. I really have nothing much more to say about the movie than what is already in this post and the one where he left his comment.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.