Pat Bertram's Blog, page 56

The Love of Gardening

A friend sent me the following quote today: The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies, but grows to the enduring happiness that the love of gardening gives. ~ Gertrude Jekyll

I often think of something a bereaved woman told me back in my actively grieving days. She said she knew a woman who had lost everyone she had ever loved, but that woman was the most joyful person she had ever met. The woman was elderly, but still gardened. We marveled at the incongruity of the woman’s joy despite all her loss, but perhaps her secret to happiness was her love of gardening.

One of the many surprises of my current life is how much I have grown to love gardening. Even when the weeds take over, there is a certain satisfaction to clearing the area to make my plants pop into view. When they die, there is some satisfaction in learning a lesson, perhaps the plant is in the wrong place, I need to take better care, or I should just let it go and concentrate on the plants that are doing well. And there is a special joy in watering the garden areas by hand because it allows me to get acquainted with each plant, watch its progress, and enjoy any flowers that might bloom that day.

Today I had a special treat:

A squash blossom! The zucchini seeds I planted are flowering and perhaps someday I might even have a few zucchini to eat, but if not, the flower is a joy in itself.

I found some radish blossoms. Apparently, I didn’t find this radish in time to eat it.

There are also some petunia blossoms,

and more hollyhocks. The fence is five feet high, so you can see how tall the plants can get!

Several people have mentioned that they’d love to see my garden, but the truth is, you’ve seen it all. Every flower that has ever grown in my yard has been posted here, which makes it seem as if I have a lush garden. Some year I might, but for now, there is one flower here, one there, and another somewhere else. Still, I enjoy showing off my small successes to those who stop by, telling the story of each plant and sharing my newly found love of gardening.

***

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

Story Elements

There are certain story elements all new novelists learn if they want to write compelling books. One such element is R.U.E, meaning resist the urge to explain. Too often, new writers fill their first chapters with the myriad details they think is necessary to explain who the characters are and what brought them to their predicament instead of simply diving into the story and trust in the intelligence of the reader to put it all together.

Another major element, perhaps THE major element, is conflict, conflict, and more conflict. Without conflict, there is no story. It’s just a meandering anecdote, though even an anecdote, to be interesting, needs a bit of conflict and some sort of resolution to the conflict.

A third element is . . . the magic of threes. You know about threes, you learn it as a small child with tales such as the three bears and the three little pigs. In fact, you can’t escape threes. They are everywhere. The Three Stooges. Three outs. Best two out of three. Three Faces of Eve. Three Days of the Condor. The Three Musketeers. The magic of threes even works in essays such as this. As you can see, I laid out three story elements rather than two or four.

Apparently, although new writers do well to incorporate such elements in their writing, long-time authors with over a billion books sold (not an exaggeration) don’t have to pay attention to any story elements. The most recent example I came across was so horrendously awful and amateurish, it was laughable.

Throughout the entire book, all the author did was explain. In the first chapter, she must have repeated at least a dozen times that the woman was in love with her house, that she’d had to give up her first child at sixteen, and that a later son was now dead. I got it the first time, and I’m sure even the most unexacting reader would have gotten it by, oh, the second time. The second and third chapters were repeats of the first.

When the story finally got underway, there was zero conflict. In fact, the woman decided to look for her daughter again, even though the first time she searched, many years previously, she’d been told the records had all been burned. So she went to the town where the institution for unwed mothers had been, talked to one person who happened to have been there at the time, and the person told her that she only remembered three names of possible adoptive parents (out of possibly hundreds) because they’d all been famous actresses. So the woman looked up one of the actresses, found that the woman’s daughter (now a grown woman) resembled the birth mother’s mother, and contacted her, and it was the right person.

That’s it. That was the story.

Too much explaining, zero conflict, no magic of threes. The first person she talked to at every step led her directly to the next step. You’d think such a simplistic storyline would presuppose conflict later in the book, but no. That was all there was to the story. The daughter and mother loved each other. The two mothers loved each other. The birth mother’s new boyfriend loved all of them. At the end, the actress dies, which makes the remaining two women sad for a few paragraphs, but then comes the giddy ending that left the original mother and daughter back together where they should have been all along, and loving it.

Sheesh.

To be honest, I can’t really fault the author. The main goal of the publishing industry is not to put out good books but to make money, and apparently, other people don’t mind such execrable writing. I’d just made a mistake in getting the book. I knew what a terrible writer she was (I once studied her books to see what made them so popular, but the only conclusion I came to was her overuse of the word “love.” Her characters love everything). But I am a sucker for the “lost child” genre, and I let myself believe that perhaps she actually had written a book worth reading.

Luckily, there are readable writers out there. In fact, I recently read a science fiction book that still makes me smile. Reminiscent of the movie Enemy Mine, two people from different worlds become friends and allies as they try to save both of their worlds. In this case, admittedly, there was too much conflict and too many plot twists because everything they tried didn’t work at first, which got a bit old. (The magic of three to the third power seems to have been this author’s goal.) But he did a good job of only explaining what needed to be explained at any given moment, mostly the science part of the fiction. But any faults in the execution were negated by the perfect ending.

***

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.

Hello, Seattle!

No, I’m not going to Seattle. Seattle has come to me. At least, their weather has. In an odd twist of fate, Seattle is getting our normal record highs and we are getting their usual cool and rainy days.

It’s truly a pleasure getting a rest from baking in the sun. In fact, I rather overdid it today, clearing out a couple of overgrown areas where I’d started growing plants in the hope that someday they will be gardens. Since I triage my yard — ignore the spots that will do okay regardless, ignore the spots that won’t be okay no matter what I do, and concentrate on the areas where I might do the most good — there are always areas in need of intensive care.

I worked more than I should have perhaps, but it was cool, and once I got started clearing out a particular area, I wanted to finish. For some reason, that’s not the area I’d planned to work on next, but apparently, after I dug up a monster weed (I needed wet ground for that because when the sun bakes the ground around here, weeds are cemented in) I just continued.

I couldn’t really do much of anything else. A couple of workers came today to grind the stumps of trees that had been cut down, and that machine is noisy! It takes a long time to grind the stump because it can only do one small strip at a time, so they were here all day.

At one point, the worker was loading the machine back on the trailer, so I went out and asked about the roots. The stump wasn’t a problem for me. It was just a stump. A lump of wood. But the exposed roots all around the stump were growing a massive number of trees, and I figured the easiest way of getting rid of those roots would be to grind them. I reminded him of that, but he said they’d bring a tractor to pull them up. I mentioned how disappointed I was to have that incipient forest still there, so he used my pruning shears to cut them down. Since I am a bit possessive of my tools and people tend to forget whose tool they are using, I stayed in the vicinity and ended up digging up thick clumps of grass that were too tough for my mower, which is what I’d intended to do anyway. Surprisingly, it was easy enough to do because of the soft, wet soil, but it still took a long time. As it turns out, it was a good thing he waited because when his boss came and saw all those roots, they ended up doing the roots, too.

That whole long boring story really served no purpose other than to iterate that I overdid it today, which is amazing to me in itself. No so long ago, I could barely do anything. Of course, come tomorrow, I’ll probably be too stiff and sore to do anything, but that’s fine, too. I’ll enjoy the day of rest here in the coolness of Seattle’s weather.

***

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

There’s Always Something

We had big winds last night that blew leaves and twigs all over my yard, especially in the gravel areas and pathways. What seems strange to me, is that the winds always blow these things into my yard, but once here, they never get blown back out again. They just stay, which makes the ornamental rock around my garage and house look terribly unkempt.

The people who are laying down the rock told me I will have to get a leaf blower to keep the rocks clean, otherwise, the leaves decay and sink to the bottom of the graveled area, and will eventually destroy the weed-blocking fabric. I figured I’d have to blow the leaves off the rocks once a year or so, but the way things look, I’ll have to do it rather frequently. Also, to my surprise, plants do grow in the rocks, though supposedly, they are easy to pick out because of shallow roots, which is only partly true. Some are easy, but some are as difficult to remove as they would be from soil.

I always thought the purpose of xeriscaping at least part of a yard was to make it maintenance free, but as it turns out, I was wrong about that. Still, my main reason for the rocks around the house and garage was not easy maintenance so much as to protect the foundations, and the reason for the pathways was for my safety as I age. I don’t suppose I’d mind the work as much if it were my leaves and twigs settling in the yard, but they’re not. I don’t have any big trees any more. Mine were diseased, and had to be cut down. I will plant new trees, but it will be years before they would affect the xeriscaping areas of my yard.

Looking on the bright side, I get to buy a new tool! I’ll probably get a leaf blower that plugs in rather than a battery-operated one to make sure it’s not too heavy for me to carry around because there is a lot of area to cover.

Unless there is a way to redirect the wind to send the detritus back where it came from? I’ll work on that.

Meantime, the good news of the day is that the mechanic came to pick up my car so he could fix the brakes. Yay! I also enjoyed showing off my garage to the mechanic and his helper. It really is quite a wonderful building, and well organized, if I do say so myself, with metal shelves along one side, racks to hang long-handled tools on the other, and counters under the window for a work space.

More good news is that a daylily I planted a couple of years ago finally bloomed! I was surprised to see it was orange for some reason, perhaps because the other daylily, which did bloom last year, was yellow.

I’ve been checking out daylilies, and found a company that will sell untagged batches, so I wouldn’t know what I was getting. Sounds like fun! I discovered that it’s possible to plant them in the summer, so it would give me a more interesting project for the next few months than blowing leaves and twigs and such.

Good or not-so-good, there’s always something new, it seems, when it comes to landscaping and gardening.

***

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.

A Possible Showplace

After my tulips and other spring bulbs faded, larkspur grew in that same garden. I harvested what seed I could, then had to cut down the dead larkspur stalks, so now nothing is growing in that area.

I now know I have to do a better job of “layering” for lack of a better word, making sure that after the larkspur are gone, something else grows in its place. It’s too late in the year to plant anything, so I will have that bare spot to look at for the next several months. In the fall, chances are more larkspur will grow, but meantime, it’s not very pretty.

A friend has this “layering” thing perfected. After her tulips bloomed lavishly, other types of flowers grew, and now that the second generation of flowers are gone, her garden is filled with bluebells and orange daylilies.

Admittedly, her garden is a lot older than mine and has been well-established for perhaps decades, but if I do things correctly over the next few years, perhaps I too can have flowers for many months.

I’m thinking of borrowing her idea of daylilies, even though I never done well with them, which is odd because they are supposed to be so easy to grow they have a tendency to take over a garden. Still, it’s worth a try. Or I could plant zinnias — in another area where I cleared out the larkspur, zinnias are beginning to blossom. In this case, though, they are not “layered,” but were planted next to the larkspur. So only half of that garden area is bare. Zinnias are just about the only flowers I can grow from seed, probably due more to this area than anything I am doing — at one time, 90% of the world’s zinnia seeds were grown not far from here.

I’d worry more about my lack of knowledge and experience, but this is supposed to be the project of a lifetime, so perhaps in five to ten years, I will have a showplace.

Or not. There’s still the harsh sun, lack of moisture, and alkaline clay soil, and an inexperience gardener (me) to deal with. I’m amazed I can keep anything alive. It seems the most prolific growers around here are weeds and trees that have been chopped down. Luckily, I just got word that the workers are on the way to pick up a stump grinder so they can get rid of the stumps and the unwanted “forest” that is growing from the exposed roots of the downed tree.

One more step to that possible showplace.

***

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

Never a Dull Moment

There’s never a dull moment when one owns a house. Actually, that’s not true. There are a lot of dull moments, but the not-so-dull moments quickly remove any complacency that might arise during the dull times when nothing goes wrong.

Today was one of complacency-breaking times. I went down to the basement to change the air filter on my furnace/air conditioner. I’ve done this many times in the past couple of years, so I didn’t expect a problem, but problems are what I got.

When I pulled the handle to remove the old filter, the handle came away and left the filter in place. This has happened before, and all I did was use my fingers to get it out. This time, however, instead of pulling it out, I somehow managed to push it to the side. The more I worked on it to try to get it out, the more recessed it became. Which is silly. Why wasn’t there some sort of framework to hold the filter in place and keep that from happening?

I finally gave up and send a frantic message to my contractor asking him if there was anything he could do. He responded saying that he was sending a man right out. The worker was there almost immediately. He couldn’t dig out the filter, either, so he removed the entire connecting piece between the vertical air duct and the furnace. (The thin black rectangular space between the connecting piece and the furnace on the picture is where the filter goes.)

A little later the worker came to find me and said the furnace had shocked him. He’d taken the panels off the front of the furnace looking for a tool (they had the impression I’d dropped a tool into the space when I tried to get the filter out) and when he put the panels back, the middle panel shocked him and shorted out the furnace. Apparently this had happened to previous owners because there were several black spots on the panel where it had previously made contact with the prongs of some sort of switch. He fixed panel to make sure it couldn’t short out again, but when he reinserted the panel, the air conditioner wouldn’t go on. He checked one of my circuit breaker panels and I checked the other (weird, huh? I have two, one inside and one outside), but none of the circuits had been tripped.

He took the switch to a furnace guy he knew to see if he could get a new one, but the furnace person said the switch was good, that he must have burned out the fuse. The fuse? Apparently, there is a separate fuse, the pre-circuit box kind, inside the furnace.

He replaced the fuse, so now I have a working air conditioner, an extra fuse (they came in a package of two) and a new filter.

Whew!

People often wonder why I stick with this contractor, and this filter situation is a good example of why I do. He might be slow getting things done around here because he always has way too many jobs to juggle, but in an emergency, he (or one of his guys) is always right here. And if they make a mistake or cause any damage, they go out of their way to fix it.

That, to me, is priceless, and helps me greet any of these not-so-dull moments with an equanimity I might not otherwise be able to summon.

***

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.

Grief and Gardening

When I was out weeding earlier, it dawned on me that grief and gardening have something in common. With gardening, you have to concentrate solely on what is within arm’s reach. If you think of the whole yard as a single entity, you’d never get anything done because the totality of the work involved is immense, more than one mind can hold. So the only way to get a yard or garden the way you want is to do what you can when you can and hope that someday the whole will be worth it.

That’s pretty much the same as grief, though with grief, you also have to deal with a whole lot of pain and trauma and sorrow. The totality of the loss and the pain is beyond the comprehension of most of us, so all we can do is concentrate on each day, each hour, sometimes even each minute. As with a garden, you can only hope that there is something at the end of all the grief work you’re doing that will be worth it.

Nothing, of course, will ever be commensurate with the death of that one person who was intrinsic to your life, but there needs to be the hope that someday, somehow, you will find a new way of being — of being you alone, not you as half of a couple.

It’s a long time coming, that hope. For years, most of us can’t even imagine having any sort of hope, and yet we get up each day, survive each minute the best we can, deal with all the tasks that can’t be put off. That all of this is accompanied by tears or anger or screaming or any of the other ways we have of dealing with the pain and stress of grief doesn’t mitigate the hope that getting up each day signifies. Even if we don’t feel hopeful, the mere act of living shows hope. A rather despairing sort of hope, to be sure, but hope nonetheless.

It’s only in retrospect that I can see the bigger picture of grief. For a very long time, all I had were the small increments, though over the years, the increments did expand from seconds and minutes to hours and days, and finally to years. And now I am in a place where I have a house and yard and garden and thoughts of bigger pictures.

I can’t say that that all the grief work was worth it to get me here because while the work of a garden might be worth it, “worth it” is meaningless when it comes to grief. Once I lived a shared life and now I don’t. In the end, after years of pain and sorrow and grief, that might be all it comes down to.

But I am here. And I am surviving on my own. That has to mean something.

***

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

Clean Slate

There were several things I wanted to remember to do today, so I made a list. The first thing on the list was to remember to water the plants that need it, but it rained last night, enough that I had to close the windows, so I crossed “watering” off my list when I woke this morning. Instead, I went out to pull weeds because, as I’ve learned, they come out so much easier when the ground is sodden. I pulled the first fistful. Then pulled and pulled. And nothing budged. Except me. I almost fell backward from all that pulling. It turns out the clay soil was so dry adobe bricks could have been cut out of ground to build some sort of structure, but since I didn’t need any adobe bricks (and had no way of cutting them out anyway), I gave up on pulling weeds and decided I better water my poor desiccated plants.

Apparently, it only rained inside my house. (Raindrops blown through my windows caused a bit of a puddle.) I have no idea what happened to the rest of the moisture — I’m fairly sure it couldn’t have been vaporized by all that sheet lightning keeping me awake last night. If any rain did fall, it certainly didn’t do the plants any good. The storm cooled things down, though, which did me good. It’s 66 degrees Fahrenheit (18.9 C) right now. Temperatures are expected to climb back into the hundreds by tomorrow, but I prefer not to think about that and simply enjoy the cool.

Other things on my to do list were to call my mechanic and reschedule an appointment to get my brakes fixed (they were supposed to be done last Friday, but he took that day off) and to call my contractor to see if he’d forgotten me (he was supposed to send one of his guys to work here starting last week, but except for a few hours, the guy was a no-show).

The last thing on my list was to get ready for work. Since this isn’t my regular day, I had to make a note to make sure I got there when I was supposed to. Because I am neither a mechanic nor a contractor with more business than I can handle, I need to honor my obligations.

I have a clean slate now, with nothing on my list, and I hope to keep it that way because the problem with a list is that it’s only good if you remember to read it. Luckily, today I did remember.

***

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.

Fearfulness and Grief

There are many changes that come with the death of a spouse or life mate. The abrupt change in circumstances, of course. The emotional and physical changes that grief and stress bring. A change in identity, both in how we see ourselves and how others see us. And a change in how we interact with the world.

After such a death, many of us left behind find ourselves unable to do the things we did with our mates. One woman I know had to change grocery stores and the brands she used because it was too painful going to “their” store. Some people change their eating habits because they can’t bear to eat the same foods or drink the same beverages. It took me years before I was able to make some of our favorite dishes, and even then, I mostly did it to prove to myself how far I’ve come because none of those foods are currently part of my diet.

Something else I’d forgotten about until an email discussion today with a person who’s dealing with the changes that death and grief bring to us, was how truly hard some things were, such as getting new glasses.

For decades, Jeff had gone to the eye doctor with me and helped me pick out new frames. After he died, even though I could tell my eyesight was changing, I didn’t go until I was forced to get new glasses so I could renew my driver’s license. The mere thought of going through the experience alone was simply too intimidating.

Now that I think about it, it’s such an odd thing — grown-up, independent people being intimidated by such simple chores. Admittedly, Jeff and I had done almost everything together for many years, and it did take a bit of adjustment to do those things on my own, sort of like the first time you step onto an escalator. But to be so intimidated by doing things like getting new glasses? Yes, definitely odd, at least in a non-griever’s world.

But grief changes things around you. And grief changes you. There is so much thrown at you all at once, from the horrendous pain as well as the hormone and brain chemistry changes to the way we do . . . everything. Much of life is habit. When we do the same things with the same person all the time, and suddenly that person is gone, we are suddenly thrust into a world where nothing is solid.

And in the fluid world of grief, we are easily overwhelmed and intimidated and fearful. I remember trying to find “rock bottom,” a place where I could stand to get my bearings, and there never was such a place. Well, not never. As much as anyone can find a footing, I have found mine now, though because of my years of grief, I am aware of how uncertain such a footing actually is. There is no certainty in this world, but there is definitely more certainty now in my life than there was after Jeff died.

All of that contributes to the feelings of being so intimidated by the new world we have to deal with that even something relatively common as a trip to the grocery store or an appointment to get new glasses becomes all but undoable.

The only other time as an adult that I felt so intimidated by life was when I destroyed my arm. My balance was off, my thinking was off, I couldn’t do anything the way I once had, and so I was easily intimidated. And fearful of people who came too close. (And angry at those who didn’t respect my new boundaries even when I asked them to.)

I sense this same feeling of fearfulness and being intimidated in old-elderly people for the same reasons — so much of what they knew — or thought they knew — is gone. Their sense of self and their physical abilities have changed. Their interaction with the world is different from what it once was.

I understand that if I wait long enough the same thing will happen to me when I get older, but it won’t be an unfamiliar sensation. (Unless, of course, I’d forgotten what grief felt like.)

I don’t know if this feeling of being intimidated as part of grief is something I ever wrote about before. Because I don’t like thinking of myself as a fearful person, it’s possible only the distance of all these years enables me to accept how intimidated I felt back then by something as simple as getting new glasses, though I do remember forcing myself to do new things so that I wouldn’t become paralyzed by the fear.

***

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

The Day Before Summer

Today was my day for watering the garden and since I had to go to work mid morning, I went outside fairly early to take care of my gardening responsibility. And eek. By 8:00 o’clock, it was 80 degrees with 80 percent humidity, and 80 parts fleas and mosquitos.

We generally have low humidity here, which makes the days of high humidity an especial affront. And the mosquitoes . . . they must be new to the area because they didn’t get the message that mosquito repellants were supposed to repel them. Still, I got through the task, though it was an effort, not just because of all the annoyances but because of the toll the high heat and searing sun and no rain is taking on my yard. Many of my poor plants are desiccating; I have brown stalks where once the larkspur held pride of place; and too much dying grass and invading weeds are making my various garden patches unsightly. It’s simply been too hot to spend much time outside cleaning out the beds.

Even worse, a few baby bushes look as if they’re giving up. Not that I blame them. Except for trying to keep the plants alive and doing whatever non-gardening jobs I need to do, I too have more or less given up. And it won’t even be summer here until 9:31 tomorrow night. I can’t imagine another three months of this heat, though I suppose I will make an accommodation with the weather as I have done with every other obstacle in my life.

Just not today.

I couldn’t bear to be outside even long enough to take a photo of the few flowers that are so bravely blooming. The cactus flower that accompanies this article was taken yesterday as I left the house to go to work. It’s gone today, and there will be no more pretty yellow blossoms to mask the vicious prickles on the plants.

***

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