Garden Wars

Love Lies Bleeding and squash; Charley Freiberg photo 2016

The seed orders have arrived, the over-wintered parsnips pulled and relished, Bear has come to snack on the dregs of winter birdseed, tree frogs and peepers are chirping away, and I’ve scheduled the last two weeks in May to plant my garden - so expect those two weeks to be continuous pummeling rain with nor’-easter-worthy winds, broken up by rare milky-sunshine moments filled with clouds of blackflies. You may count on it, so plan accordingly.

You might think that if I need two weeks to plant my garden, it must be gigantic. It’s not, but it’s just a little too big for someone who works long hours to take care of well. No, I need two weeks because the weather gods think it’s funny to make the time I chisel out of a busy schedule insufficient unto the task, so they always make certain that the best I can do is plant a couple of soggy rows of peas and get the onion sets into the ground; the rest always has to wait for odd free moments, later.

Given the gods and the unending struggle to keep things weeded, watered, de-bugged and picked, it’s fair to wonder why I put myself through this annual exercise in stress. One summer some truly monstrous grass took over the entire garden - growing merrily through newspaper-and-straw mulch that was more than a foot deep. That fall, I covered everything with a deep layer of newspaper, and next spring, the invading grass was twice as thick. I gave up. I fed most the garden seeds to the birds, threw a few into the compost, turned my back, and made do for 10 years with a couple of tomato plants and some basil in big pots on the back wart. Most years the chipmunks ate the heart out of the tomatoes before I could pick them, and the basil didn’t get watered enough and dried out long before its time.

But my New Englander’s heart couldn’t stand it, and eventually the three pots grew to 15, plus a couple of potato bags, and before I knew it, two raised beds over deep bases of cardboard and newspaper were erected near the south wall of the house. Those two beds morphed into the slow resurrection of most the beds in the original garden. Even another 10 years later, the evil grass and I wage continual war for dominance, and the huge pile of old newspapers and accumulated flattened cardboard boxes that grows dining-table high over the winter is the first thing to hit the ground as soon as the snow melts – if I’m speedy, before the grass has a chance to get a new root-hold.

I plant a garden because my parents had a garden, because Gramp and Nan had a garden, because great-grandpa and grandma had a garden, because great-great grandpa had a garden…and from the time we were old enough to pull weeds, Brother and I were expected to help out in Dad’s and Gramp’s gardens. After supper, when the gardens were located in a neighbor’s field, we’d pile into the back of Gramp’s pickup truck (back in the day this was common, seatbelts hadn’t been invented, and Mom would hang out the window shouting at us to sit down and hold on, darn it!) for the short ride up the hill. Weeding stint over, we’d watch the neighbor’s tamed chipmunk scramble all over him collecting the peanuts he’d hidden in his pants and shirt pockets, then pick wild strawberries and blueberries in the field until the parent-generation had finished the more delicate gardening tasks. Most people had gardens back in the dark ages and you couldn’t grow up without learning to plant and harvest, then preserve the results.

One summer I got home from college to discover my father’s spring-time spine operation had left him unable to plant the garden, which by then had migrated to our side yard. That May, Dad sat on the screened-in porch drinking lemonade and singing Spirituals while I labored below in the clouds of blackflies, planting beans. He discovered I’d learned some words at college he was surprised to hear I knew how to apply.

I can’t help gardening, it’s in the blood, and as soon as I lived in my first post-college apartment with a little back-yard space, I grubbed out a small garden to plant stuff – edible stuff mostly, but always some poppies and calendula and nasturtiums and cosmos and herbs that reseed. In recent years, I’ve added giant sunflowers and gladiolas and Love-Lies-Bleeding for the exotic savor. That decade of not gardening was sweet; but eventually my blood won out.

Gladiolas and very tall sunflowers; Charley Freiberg photo, 2016

When the Husband and I built the house we’ve lived in for so long now, we put it in the middle of an old cow pasture. Immediately I thought, wow, flat space that doesn’t need clearing – I’ll have a great garden! Turns out that when cows spend decades stomping around a field, they turn the topsoil into hard-pan, which neither rototiller nor tractor could cut through. We built raised beds, we hauled in topsoil and manure, we made compost as fast as we could, and between the rows, I mulched heavily so the earthworms would slowly build good garden soil. Which they did – even after the wicked grass took over. 

In today’s garden, I have decades-old chive plants, a rhubarb plant that Dad dug up from next to an old abandoned farmhouse he found in the woods, planted in his garden, then 30 years later split to plant half of in my garden – that plant is likely close to 100 years old. I also plant edibles my lineage never dreamed of: fava and scarlet runner beans, parsley root, purple-podded peas, giant sunflowers, a peach tree…

I also still have that evil grass. And you know who’s gonna win that battle, doncha?

Originally published in the Concord Monitor as “Garden battle lines and the seeds of change,” May 13, 2017.

The Sailor and I

Charley Freiberg photo

The Sailor and I have been friends for many decades; I met him originally when he was dating a college housemate. Back then he wasn’t a sailor, but the interest and desire already ran deep.  Like myself, he comes from a land-locked town somewhere in New England, but I remember the look of longing in his eyes when he visited the Husband and me, back in the dark ages when we lived on the coast of Maine, and he first caught sight of the Windjammers anchored off-shore. A few years later, the Sailor signed up for college classes in ocean studies, with the wild hope that assignments would involve long walks on the beach searching for washed-up treasure, gathering around a beach firepit to cook supper and sing sea chantys, and dressing like a pirate to practice saying “Arrrhg, matey.”

He was soon disabused of that fantasy and had to admit that just maybe he’d been reading too many works of sea-based fiction. But he did eventually learn to sail, and spends summers crewing on racing boats. He has stories to tell about nearly dying in weather on the deep ocean between Cuba and Florida, and that’s just about close enough for me. I’ll get on a ferry to the Isles of Shoals every so many years, but I don’t particularly enjoy the interminably boring 10 miles out and back. I wouldn’t like it more if it were exciting.

Star Island, Isles of Shoals; Charley Freiberg photo

We have things in common, however, as all long-time friends do, and many of the things that interest us don’t interest our mates. Amongst the things the Sailor and I do together are: haunt bookstores, the more and the more frequently the better; and peer into other people’s homes - specifically, homes of dead writers and others that are now historical sites; and go to museums, where lots of dead people’s stuff is stashed. We also both live with musicians, and musicians notoriously don’t often enjoy listening to other musician’s music, and they have their own performances that need to be attended. The Sailor and I perform the audience role for them and for musician-friends that our musicians won’t listen to. And finally – we like Chinese food, which neither of our mates enjoys at all.

Happily, each time we head out together, if we plan it right we can spend several hours in bookstores, eat supper at a Chinese restaurant, then go to a concert. Or on our way to or from a museum or a dead writer’s house, we can also slip into a local bookstore and catch supper at a Chinese restaurant on the way home. The combinations, like those at a dimsum restaurant, are endless.

We each have a pile of books next to our beds waiting to be consumed,  but we’re more likely to actually buy books at the Five Colleges sale in the spring, where a cloth bag brought to Lebanon can be filled  to overflowing for 30 bucks. Bookstores are – well, a good bookstore is like a sacred place: it will be quiet, but energized, and the mind relaxes and becomes soothed. Visiting a good bookstore, for people like us, is like visiting a spa for other folks: deeply relaxing, and sometimes we go home with a treasure.

Peering into other people’s homes is similar. We’re both readers and writers, and have read many of the same things, so seeing how some of the authors we’ve admired lived adds richness to the context of what we read. For those of us who enjoy such things, it’s fascinating. For someone who isn’t interested – it would be like going to a hardware store with the Husband is for me: time drags, my feet hurt, I want to sit down, I don’t like how it smells, I’m hot, nothing is interesting, and – can we go home now? Please?

Old friends are treasures, especially those you‘ve known since you were a barely-formed adult person, who can remember, and recount, all the people you’ve been from then to now. There are things the Sailor knows about me that the Husband never could – not only did he know me for years before I met the Husband, but we share different stuff. When I look back over the decades at friendships that have lasted so long, that have lasted sometimes through years when only letters at long distances maintained the connection, or a rare, once- or twice- a-year visit could be managed; friends who fell out of touch because of distance and personal circumstances, but who were the only ones to call in times of crisis; friends who can guess what I’m thinking and feeling about things before we ever talk about it – I realize I’m looking at a precious family who have chosen each other, and who will grow ever more precious as we grow even older.

I know a man who sets all things aside every Saturday morning until he has talked  with his dear friend who lives in California; I know a woman who schedules a long weekend every summer as inviolate - she and woman friends from college gather from all the corners of the world, to catch up and renew their bonds - she says that not one of them, over all the decades, has missed this reunion. I remember the surprise and wonder in my mother’s mother - my Meme’s - voice when she suddenly realized that all the “old people” at her retirement home were actually cherished friends from her childhood whom she hadn’t seen in a very long time. I remember hearing, or perhaps reading, a story about an old man who was dying: his wife called her husband’s dear old friend the day before he died, and held the phone to his ear so he could tell his friend for the last time that he loved her, “in the same old way.”

May we all have such riches, for all our days.

Charley Freiberg photo

Originally published in the Concord Monitor, May 4, 2017, as "Sea of Friends."

Eulogy for a Classy Dame

Marjorie Estes art; used with permission of the family

 March 29 was a difficult day, and a wonderful day. When I got home late that night, a message from a dear friend was waiting for me: his Mom had moved to Hospice House, and if I wanted to see her again, I should plan to do so soon.

And of course I did, so I got up early, rescheduled my patients, and hurried south to see Marge. We had a lovely talk, laughed, told terrible stories about dead and dying people we’ve known, caught up on living people we know in common, wondered what the world will be like in 25 or 30 years, discussed how long it takes for the body to shut down once one has stopped eating and drinking, and told each other how wonderful it’s been to know each other. After I wished her a safe and comfortable journey, we promised to meet again – somewhere, sometime.

I’ve long had jobs that sooner or later bring a lot of sadness. For more than 20 years I taught t’ai chi ch’uan, and about 10 years into that profession, because so many of my students were coming to class to remain healthy as they grew older, or to improve health after an illness, I decided I needed to be better able to help them, so for the last dozen years I’ve been a Chinese medical practitioner as well. Marjorie, besides being the mother of a best friend and of a dear patient and their sister, was long one of my t’ai chi students – she earned an interesting notoriety as the student who took the longest time to learn the style – more than 10 years. She also won the hearts of many of her fellow students, largely for her kindness and wise advice to younger students facing life challenges, but not least for sharing with the class the series of anatomically correct and detailed Life Sketches she’d drawn in her art class. When I wrote to let students know that Marge was dying, several wrote back to say, in the words of Pat who always says it best, “Marge is one of the classiest dames I’ve ever known.”

When you care for people for decades – I have students who have been part of my t’ai chi family for more than 20 years, some of them now scattered across the country; and patients I’ve treated for more than a decade – you watch them grow old. You watch their health improve and decline, and you can sometimes help slow the decline or improve their health, at least for awhile. But more important, you get to know them, often in a way no one else knows them; you learn to love them; and some of them you fall in love with, and they become part of your tribe.

The list I keep in my head of students and patients who have left this life grows ever longer, and at times like this, I can’t keep myself from ticking through it. I’ve had the joy of being able to walk part of that path with many of them; others I worry about when they disappear for some time, and sometimes I hear later that they’ve died, sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes at the end of a long illness, sometimes simply from using up the allotment of their days. And sometimes I discover that they’ve simply moved to California!

Many who’ve died have done so in ways that totally amaze me, with grace and courage. One lady, knowing her cancer left her only a couple of years to live, learned to surf, and spent most of the remainder of her life chasing waves across the country. Several embraced death as the first step into a completely new adventure they could barely wait to start upon. One, on hearing she had a heart defect that she might live with for months, or might die from any moment, called her kids to come home for the weekend, then called me to cancel next week’s appointment. “Are you going somewhere?” I asked her. “You might say that,” she said. “I won’t need the appointment after Monday.” “Monday?” I asked. “What happens Monday?” “Oh, that’s the day I die, I hope,” she said. And that’s exactly what she did: after an excellent weekend spent celebrating with her whole family, she went to bed, and slowly, and gently, passed away during the Monday.

So many of the folks I’ve known and loved who have passed on have taught me priceless lessons about love and acceptance, courage and determination. And now it was Marge’s turn. She waited until her kids were home from their winter travels; she chose every part of her journey to this place with thoughtfulness, care and determination. She had bucked up during a long, exhausting illness during the winter. And then, before Spring had truly arrived, she decided it was time. She was tired, she was weary, but not uninterested. Her body was giving out; she was ready to go. And almost exactly a week later – after spending sweet time with family and friends, and determinedly insisting to her doctors that she was there on the express plan, not the 2-month tour – she left us, to go on her next great adventure.

I hope we all have the circumstances, and the ability, to decide when it’s time; and to be comfortable - even eager - to discover what comes next, and craft our own final Journey. Goodbye you classy dame – you will be missed.

With sadness and admiration for a remarkable woman. For the blog alone.

The Veil was Torn from Side to Side

Rip at the Piano

I have a charming friend who is a stellar pianist, who lives part time in the Northeast Kingdom, and part time in sunny Chile. In order to have the means to feed body and soul, he – as did I – used to work for various computer magazines, writing articles, doing some freelance editing, sometimes translating, and occasionally taking on a big project, like a white paper, that we would work on together.

When he’s in the Kingdom, the Musician lives in an old hippie house, cobbled together out of used parts, loose stones, salvaged windows and doors, and anything that would fit in his car to make the trip down the dirt road and the next dirt road to his house in the old, overgrown field that’s situated between an ancient cemetery and a growing beaver pond. 

Back in the day, the house had running cold spring water, gravity fed via pipe and hose from a springhouse on the hill, an attached outhouse, and one giant room. One end served as a closet, the other as a kitchen (portable 2-burner Coleman stove and a giant insulated cooler regularly filled with bags of ice for cold storage). The middle of the house was a big room that was dining room, bedroom, sitting room, workroom and concert hall, as needed. For bathing purposes, a solar shower bag hung off the corner of the building near the loo, and next to it a shallow pit, straddled by an old-fashioned, footed, cast-iron roll-top bathtub. When the Musician wanted a bath, he filled the tub, started a fire in the pit, and after a couple of hours – hot tub! To put out the fire, he just pulled the plug.

 

 

This was back in the dark ages when a solar shower bag (black plastic – leave it in the sun and the water inside heats up, the on-off toggle lets you sploosh yourself with warm – sometimes very hot – water) was pretty high-tech. Solar panels existed, but didn’t work very well and were extraordinarily expensive. The Musician’s house was completely electricity-free, and the expensive propane alternatives were too expensive and hard to acquire for someone saving every extra penny for the annual winter trip to Chile’s summer and the services of a piano tuner who charged extra to travel to the back of nowhere to practice his craft.

The house was brilliant in summer, and I can attest, as I borrowed it for a few weeks one year, snug and comfortable in winter so long as you were willing to pack in and out, via sled and skis or snow shoes, your food, water, and trash, and also willing to share the building with the winter shrews who move in as soon as the Musician migrates south. In the Northeast Kingdom, for reasons I don’t know, there are very few mosquitoes, so doors and windows could be left wide open to gather summer breezes. 

Without the subtle hum of electric devices that we civilized folk have become so used to hearing that we don’t hear them anymore, the house was incredibly still, incredibly silent. When I spent long weekends there working with the Musician, we would work by the light of the sun all day on the manuscripts that provided our life’s booty, with no noises except the scratching of our pencils, and those of the birds, the mice, the squirrels and chipmunks, the occasional deer that visited the garden we grubbed out of the long grass one summer, and the ever-present chorale of crickets. Thunderstorms were monumental; nightfall was inevitable and eagerly awaited. 

When dusk drew the sun too low for us to continue work, we’d put away the pages and red pencils and various other hand-held writing devices, and ritually light the candles and oil lamps that chased the dark to the corners of the house and dimly illuminated the big room at night. The Musician preferred candles over oil lamps, because the smell of  kerosene or other lamp oil was intrusive; but they helped keep our fingers safe while we were chopping vegetables for the evening stir-fry and lighting the propane burners. 

Meal accomplished, the Musician would extinguish the oil lamps and rearrange the candles so he could see his music; and then he’d retire to the baby grand piano that took up most the space in the big room. The next four, or six, or eight hours would be devoted to practicing the classical music that he lives for and that comes alive under his fingers. I would take a book, or my works-in-progress, and crawl under the piano with pillows and a blanket to read, or write, or simply listen, until sleep spirited me elsewhere.

If you never have, take any opportunity that arises to sit under a piano when a musician is playing. The vibration of the strings and the resonance through the wood of the instrument will overwhelm your body, and sometimes your mind. You’ll find you’re experiencing the music in a way you never have, or could, before; it will master you, and make you its creature, and send you to realms you’ve never imagined. I believe it’s as close as those of us who aren’t musicians can get to entering the creative genius of the musician as she gives in to Muse. It’s similar to other creative spells, but different, because it’s so physical and fills the body, and the ears, and the entire mind, with something other than our usual experience.

One night, late in the evening, the Musician began a new piece. Something about it resonated with the beat of the blood in my veins, with the path of my breath through my cells; it picked me up and turned me inside out, and I was no longer me, except for a dimly-aware, tiny hard pebble deep in my mind. A veil was torn; I saw other worlds. I ran out into the night, into the field where the moon sailed high and shone on mysteries I’d never before imagined. The music followed me, having hooked a claw into my heart and gut, and was like a ribbon of mystery fueling my new sight: there, there were wildings in the long grasses and under the trees, there were wisps threading through the garden, and there were strange beings peering at me through the darkness. The Musician played on, and I watched myself, from up in the sky with the moon, grow feral, and sensitive, and strange, tethered to the earth by the ribbon of music that wound out from the open door and windows of the house. I could see it, like fireflies, lighting the way back and glittering brilliantly forward into my new realm; I could see, like fireflies, the energy of the music rising up the Musician’s spine, down his arms, into the keys.

My soul howled at the night sky; and then the Musician ended his practice, and the fireflies winked out, the heavens stopped spinning, I returned to myself. Over the years, every time I heard that particular piece, I was tossed back into the Other World. Even now, decades later, I can tell by the stirring in my heart and belly that the background music I was barely hearing has me by the heartstrings. My eyes open; the veil rips; I become Other.

The piece was Brahms’. I’m not telling which one.

Rip and Reinmar

All artwork by Deb Marshall.

Originally published in the Concord Monitor, April 29, 2017, as “Set Adrift on the Notes of Brahms",  in a slightly shorter form.