The Season Changed

The path between the scarlet runner beans; Deb Marshall photo

The bean tower, which is also a morning glory tower this summer, collapsed; I propped it up with another bamboo pole, but a chipmunk climbed it and it collapsed in a different direction. Now we’ve got it tied up, sort of, but that means you can’t walk past it without garroting yourself, if you go in one direction, or ducking under it all and scuttling from the other direction. 

One zucchini plant gave up in despair, at all the wetness, fell over onto its side and expired; but the other, which is doing battle with the tumbling bean tower, is doing just fine. Half the giant sunflowers are so heavy and tall they’ve tipped over and been caught by the fence that’s supposedly keeping the raspberries out of the pathway; now to use that path, you have to hunker down and swivel past the sunflowers and their resident, scolding chipmunks. The morning glories have finally found their glory, and besides adding to the weight on the bean tower, they’ve taken over a good part of the back fence and one of the compost bins, and are running about on the ground, as well.

Somewhere under all this is a compost bin; Deb Marshall photo

On either side of this jungle-like mess, winter squashes are sending out thick tendrils through nearby beds and across paths. Walking in the garden has become like running an obstacle course. I’m not complaining – well, I am – we really needed the rain, rain, rain we got, and things are totally bursting with growth. And the chipmunks are doing as much damage as possible, as fast as they can.

There are teethmarks on the zucchini and beans, and I’m patrolling the tomatoes daily and picking ones that are anywhere near ripe as soon as I spot them. So far the little buggers have only eaten one before I got to it. The part that hurts is that they’ll stand up on their hind feet and eat the tomato from below, leaving a perfect-looking empty shell behind. They munched on our one peach then tossed it onto the ground because it wasn’t quite ripe; the Husband and I washed it, cut off the chomped part, and ate the rest of the delicious, not-quite-ripe, peach. So there!

The path of the fallen sunflowers; Deb Marshall photo

One potato bag has given up the ghost; today, while it’s not raining, I decided to see what treasures were there. Several weeks ago an exploring hand produced two lovely purple potatoes; I hoped the rain, rain, rain hadn’t rotted, rotted, rotted the rest, and was thrilled to discover a basketful of beautiful pink and purple potatoes, more than I’ve ever had; and out of only one of the potato bags. I left the other alone, as the plants in that one are still very much alive. This has been a fine year for potatoes and onions – my onions are bigger and more numerous than ever before, very few succumbing to whatever it is that usually disappears have my sets. Even the Egyptian onion bulbs have gotten large, and the little sets at the top of the stalks are large and numerous.

The passionflower, out on the wart for its summer vacation, produced a flower the other day, and the kaffir lime has a baby lime or two, one almost the size of a ping-pong ball. The cucumber has produced enough fruit that I have a quart jar of cuke and onion slices in vinegar that refills as fast as we empty it. And I managed to produce a pretty decent beet soup last night, against all odds. I’d never eaten a beet soup I liked, but the beets were getting far ahead of me so I had to do something. Last spring I managed to turn too many green beans in the freezer into a decent green-bean soup – the trick was bacon and some cream and blending it all; and it turns out that the trick to decent beet soup is, besides blending it all into a gorgeous ruby-red thick liquid, tamarind powder, paprika, lots of garlic, onions, ginger root, and a little bone broth to add unctuousness. Good thing to discover, because the beets, even after making a pot of soup, are getting ahead of me, too.

August passionflower; Deb Marshall photo

The season has changed; it’s now the third season of five, which the Chinese call Late Summer. The light’s different, the bird song is different, the crickets sound different, even the garden smells different. Late Summer can last for two days or two months or longer – it’s the time of year when everything is at its fullest and ripest and sweetest. Certainly my garden is a sweet place to be, and I almost can smile at the fat chipmunks who are busily storing up for winter. The hummingbirds are very busy amongst the scarlet runner beans, which are growing long pods and still producing a mass of flowers, making Buzzy Boy slightly crazy in his attempts to protect both the three garden sites of runner beans and the two sugar-water feeders, located around the other side of the house, from hummer invaders. He buzzes me when I’m out in the garden too late, and sometimes sits atop the tomato cage on the wart and sings and fluffs and preens if I’m out under the tent to admire him. In just a few weeks the season change will send him south for the winter, and the day he leaves will be bittersweet.

Winter squash heading for the blueberry patch; Deb Marshall photo

I’d like to be able to say that getting into the garden and weeding out under the blueberries – a miserable job, only half finished, that leaves my hair full of detritus and my temper frayed as I do battle with invading brush, brambles, and vigorous weeds - has taken my mind off the death of my last Barkie Boy; but it hasn’t. Garden work mirrors the life and death cycles in its smaller, microcosmy way – do I yank out this beautiful weed which is going to seed and will cause me no end of trouble next spring if I don’t, or do I leave it and enjoy its beautiful flower that the bees and moths and butterflies are using for food; and if I pull these weeds, or these root vegetables, or the strawberry plants that have never borne fruit – who am I to end this burgeoning life? It’s one of the many tragedies of being human that we can think about the injustices in our ability to, and need to, end the life of other beings, either to survive or grant mercy. 

In my garden, one old raised bed holds the bodily remains of two beloved cats; another lies in the woods past the edge of the field, under the giant pine tree; another cat by the garage wall where she hunted mice in her old age, and yet another lies at the head of the driveway where he would sit and plan the destruction of the chipmunk nation. The First Barkie Boy’s ashes are by the front wall of the house where he most loved to lie and survey his domain; the area is thick with thyme and mint, now. Dad – part of him, anyway – resides under the giant, flourishing rhubarb plant he gave me at least three decades ago, one he split off his own plant, which is one he took from near an abandoned farm cellar hole he came across deep in the woods at least a decade earlier.

The tiger on his way to the catnip patch; Deb Marshall photo

The two Barkie Boys’ ashes are currently in tins on the table next to my couch. Roo has been there since last November; Abu joined him last week. At some point, maybe not until next spring, the Boys will go out  to mingle with the world again. Roo wanted to be buried in the couch, his favorite place in all the world, but Abu enjoyed the field. I think they will be happy together, and I think they may join the two kitties that Abu knew but Roo never met.

From there they can continue to protect my garden from deer, and something wonderful will grow above them all.

For the blog alone, 20 August 2018; herondragonwrites.blogspot.com

Green Love Lies Bleeding; Deb Marshall photo

Goodbye, My Old Buddy

Abu in his older years

This is the day after the most horrible day.

Yesterday was the most horrible day. Or, maybe it was the two days before yesterday. It’s hard to tell.

Yesterday was the day we had my 16-year-old Barkie Boy, Abu Dhoggi, euthanized. Our wonderful vet, Mona, came to the house with one of her vet techs to do it, to save Abu what would have been an uncomfortable ride to the clinic, and the fear he would have felt once there. Here at the house, he spent a comfortable morning sleeping until almost 10, then had an hour of me massaging him while he ate almost an entire bag of lamb-meal treats. Then he decided to get up, and out we went to pee, and stagger around; then had breakfast with added cat food; then out again for a walk around the garden, to sniff all the deer and other critter scents; then back in, with a biscuit, a Greenie, a rolled jerky dog treat, and a rest. 

When Mona arrived just after noon, I took him to his bed and kissed his three soft, sweet-smelling kiss spots: between his eyes, next to each ear, over and over, as we do every night before bed, me telling him how good he is and how sweet smelling and warm. Mona gave him a sedative, and when his breathing was slowed and his eyes shut, she gave him the stuff that stopped his heart. 

Abu, who had been abused as a puppy and then spent too many months at a Humane Society in a cage before we adopted him, was never very comfortable with people who weren’t his people, and this sweet way of letting him go gave him only a moment of alarm, when Mona and her tech bent over him on his bed; but he had his Daddy and me to look at and distract him, his own house and bed and smells around him, and even one of his cats who came over to see what was up and get some admiration from the ladies. I feel blessed that we could give him the release this way, rather than in a rushed trip to the clinic on a day when his body gave out completely and there was no question but that it had to be done immediately.

And that’s why I’m not sure if yesterday was the most horrible day, or the two days before were, while I tried to decide – is it time? How awful is it for him that he can no longer stand for long without falling over, that he can’t take the long walks he was able to take only two weeks before but still wanted to take? How likely is it that his increasing weakness will result in a serious injury that would remove the option of choosing his time and subject him to acute pain? How do I balance his obvious enjoyment of food and rubs and naps and short games, with his ever-shrinking world? What’s the math about his deteriorating body, which is stronger in the morning but weakens over the daytime hours until he needs help to stand up and someone nearby to keep him from drifting into the bushes when he went out to pee, and help climbing the outside stairs in the evening? How likely is it that he’d fall down those stairs again, as he had twice in the last two weeks, and seriously damage himself? And yet; and yet; he enjoyed standing outside and sniffing the night air, looking at the stars, anticipating his treats. Who was I to decide to put an end to that?

The risk of serious injury – the likelihood of serious injury – and a couple of days when he was restless all night convinced me to call and schedule his euthanasia. As soon as I did, I had doubts. I hoped for an extra day. I considered calling and rescheduling for the next week. I cried. I tried to comfort myself. I asked Abu over and over whether he was weary of his age-damaged body, did he feel it was time to move on? I didn’t get a clear answer. You don’t, sometimes – sometimes our beloved critters will manage, even when they can barely stand up, because of us – they love us, and they know we aren’t ready. They go on; and we miss the small disintegrations that affect their daily comfort.

What finally made me comfortable with my decision – sort of – was when the Husband told me that Abu was more and more agitated at night until I got home, which is usually very late. As he grew ever older, after Roo died last fall, Abu was more and more unhappy to be alone, except for a few hours during the daytime when he was used to us being out. Some of his agitation, I’m sure, was because he’d become nearly deaf, but he could still hear Roo bark; when that disappeared, a big thing went out of his life. And for whatever reason, my absence at night made him very anxious, even though the Husband was there.

Several months ago, when I realized that going downstairs was too scary for Abu, we began taking him outdoors via the ramp the Husband had built for aging dogs, and I moved downstairs to the room we call the chapel, to sleep on the futon there so he could still be with me at night. I tried, a few times, to put him to bed downstairs then sneak upstairs to my own bed, but he’d wake sooner or later and pace, and try to get upstairs – which he could do, unfortunately, and climbing stairs was not yet a problem. But then we’d have to face that long steep descent  in the morning, and he came very close to falling downstairs and taking me with him more than once. Abu was a big dog, a 75-pound dog, and neither the Husband nor I are able to carry 75 squirming pounds anymore, if we ever could.

Once I was downstairs with him, Abu was content to sleep downstairs. He’d slept on my bed for years, but within a few days he gave up the futon and moved himself to the nearby dog bed – no more struggling to get up onto, and then down off, the bed. We drifted along like this for what was a long time, in a dog’s life.

But there was slow deterioration. Like many big dogs, Abu was strong, but the hind end became weak. If he was going straight ahead, he could walk comfortably for half a mile. Some days he could still lift a leg to pee, instead of squatting. If he was standing still, he started to fall over after a few seconds. He could usually get himself back up again; but not always. Not if his feet had slipped off the rug onto the slick floor; not if, in plopping down, his rear end had slipped under the corner of some piece of furniture. Not if, outside, he was on a slope or an uneven surface. And then, in the last week, his hind end started drifting to the side, so he was no longer walking straight, and falling over happened more often.

He could still climb the steps up to the kitchen deck, and preferred to do that than go up the ramp by which we took him outdoors. But a couple of times, in the past couple of weeks, a foot would slip, and he actually fell down a few steps – hard landings, from which we needed to disentangle him and help him up. At night, his weak time, we started going up behind him, hand under butt, just in case – and even that didn’t keep his feet from slipping a few times.  A claw got broken; arthritic joints surely were strained; there were a few slips even in the daytime. 

We developed a geriatric care routine, and we settled into it. I don’t know how much this bothered him. He was an amazing athlete most his life: I think it surprised and scared him when his body stopped responding, and suspect needing help bothered him a lot. He refused to learn to eat lying down. But was that reason enough to make the decision I made during the most horrible days? 

I don’t know. I’ll probably never know. I’ve had to make the decision too many times, and each time, my soul feels destroyed. Those of us with ancient or terribly injured humans who rely on us to make that decision for them, have often had the grace of being able to discuss it in advance; or if we have not, we can at least more clearly empathize with how another human feels in the condition they’re in. It’s not easy, it’s never easy, it’s almost always horrible. But unless we’re very unlucky, we have to make that decision for another human only once or twice in our lives. Those of us with beloved pets lose the advantage of being able to fully empathize with what a cat, or a dog, or a bird, or a rabbit might feel about  their deterioration from aging. And we have to make that decision for our beloved pets often. My grandfather, after his last dog died, in spite of being a great lover of critters, swore he’d never have another pet – it was just too, too hard when the decision had to be made. 

Abu, like all our pets, was a special being. He’d been abused as a puppy, and was afraid of tall people, especially men, and afraid of loud noises, unexpected or odd noises, of cardboard wrapping paper tubes, and the cellar. It took us a long time to convince him that loud or unusual noises could be fun – the start of a game, in fact, and he came to love being chased around the house. He learned that wrapping paper tubes weren’t dangerous, though he never learned to enjoy them. Toilet paper tubes, on the other hand, were a total joy, and he could smell, or hear, or somehow sense when one was becoming available, and be at the bathroom door waiting to chase it, toss it, stomp on it, and eat it. I’m happy to report that he chased (just a few wobbly pounces) and killed and ate his last toilet paper tube the night before he died.

Old friends: Abu Dhoggi and Catmandoo

He was never entirely comfortable around tall people, but he learned to enjoy a few special very tall male friends. The Tall Dude and the Sailor and a few others were on his OK list. For awhile, he had a girlfriend – a female Malamute who belonged to a colleague of the Husband, who was the butchest female dog I’ve ever encountered. They’d spend hours following each other around the field when she came to visit, lifting their legs on each other’s pee, and once on their owner’s legs. Abu loved to swim, and would go ‘round and ‘round out-back neighbor Eddie’s pond until I decided he was too deaf, and too visually compromised, to be able to find his way back to shore reliably. And he had a very large, very hard, very heavy red ball that he’d chase around the field for hours, engaged in a one-dog and sometimes one-dog/one-man soccer game. 

I’ll never know if I made the right decision at the right time. Maybe I should have waited another week; or another month; or maybe I should have made the decision a week earlier. Whenever I made the  decisions would still have been horrible. All we can do in such situations is let our heart do the thinking, as much as possible, and ignore what we want, what we wish, what we hope might happen. 

Abu’s passing was as calm and gentle as such a thing can be. I think he was ok with it. All I can say for sure is that later that day – after a lot of crying, a lot of cleaning to distract myself from crying, and some more crying – I opened the door to the kitchen wart, to see what the weather was like outside. While I stood there, door open, I swear Abu’s spirit ran out the door and down the stairs, lithe and vigorous as he was as a young dog, and took off across the field where he’d played so many games of big red ball. He took my eternal love with him.

For the blog alone: 9 August 2018.

Deb Marshall photos

This Is The TIme Of Year

Lord of the Garden; Jake Letourneau photo

This is the time of year.

This is the time of year when the garden is mysterious, too full to see into, too lush to see out of, if you can even find a pathway to the inside.

This is the time of year when the greens are more than green, and the garden hums a low, buzzing song, under its breath, deep in itself, to itself. This is the time of year when the eye catches and sinks in; this is the time of year when dreams are filled with sun, and the smell of damp earth, and flashes of poppy orange, balm magenta, bean scarlet, foxglove cream, delphinium purple, rose yellow, dianthus pink and salmon.

Busy Bees; Deb Marshall photo

This is the time of year when a garden snake flows by, deep in the verdure – just a swish, just a brush of air in passing. This is the time of year when a mouse rustles below the green, hustling from her nest under the overturned, chipped birdbath bowl that looks like a blue pool nestled amongst the green green green. This is the time of year when a burnt-orange salamander scuttles off into the tomatoes when a rock is lifted from its cool, damp spot under the green leaves of the bright yellow calendula. This is the time of year when crickets hop and crickle,  and birds pounce. This is the time of year when the chipmunk invasion feasts bulgingly on barely-ripe sunflower seeds, swinging on the hammock the heavy flower becomes.

This is the time of year.

Hummingbird Moth; Deb Marshall photo

This is the time of year when the tall weeds blossom and are beautiful. This is the time of year when the beans grow plump, the peas die back, the tomatoes gather and deep inside themselves, begin to ripen, their glossy green skins mellowing slowly to a yellow blush, on their way to final, deep, red. This is the time of year when the prickly cucumber climbs the tomato cage and heavy fruit hangs down, down. This is the time of year when the bees are too laden to fly and they stagger from flower to flower. 

This is the time of year when the bricks in paths bake, and the water in birdbath sparkles. 

Nasturtiums and peppers; Deb Marshall photo

This is the time of year when runner beans and morning glories reach up, and up, and twist about any rising thing: sunflower stem, bamboo pyramid, fence, netting, tomato cage; and when they reach the highest peak, stretch and reach and fly straight up in the air, reaching for the sun, reaching for the sun.

This is the time of year when Buzzy Boy flies endlessly between sugar-water feeders and runner bean blossoms, stopping to sing his frustration at invading hummers.  This is the time of year when beets swell out of the ground, and onions, already swollen, topple over. This is the time of year. This is the time of year.

I cut back the marjoram and sage, and days later, it needs cutting again. I apologize to the bees, and trim the flowering tops off Catman’s many catnip patches. I look at a lovely, thriving plant and think, “I wonder what that lush and lovely plant is, that I planted, or is it a weed?” I count the sunflower blossoms and lose count. I look lovingly on the three little kaffir limes on their potted tree; I breathe a prayer to the holy basil in its pot to grow taller and fuller. I wonder how, in the limited time available, I’ll ever preserve all this richness.

Pure sunlight,  to burst out of freezer in winter. The cellar filled with bee hum in January. The cheerful dried flowers changing the mid-winter corner. Capture the garden, capture the garden. Capture the garden while we can.

This is the time of year.

This is the time of year.

This is the time of year.

Bulgy Cheeks; Jake Letourneau photo

August 6, 2018. Published in the Concord Monitor 29 August 2018 as " This is the Time of Year."

Cosmos among the summer squash plants; Deb Marshall photo