Reminiscing

She has been gone two days now.  I'm full of sobs.  Not fair, not ever fair.  And yet, lucky for her that she went peacefully, in sleep, shortly after we spent an hour on the couch in the living room, and I brought up every memory from our big pond of lucky, happy moments.

The smile was bigger than the woman.  The eyes!  I told her she had the prettiest eyes I'd ever seen.  I snapped this picture in 2010 when members of her family visited us in University City before our move to St. Peters.

Today I went through my pictures and selected a nice set for Kathy's memorial visitation.  They bring back memories, and it's as if she comforts me in my grief.

We had just fallen in love a few weeks before we set up this "selfie" in University City on New Year's Day, 2009.

We were made for each other.  That's what it felt like every day we were together.  We had done the work of growing up and shouldering the pain of loss, and when we discovered our pathways of communication it was as if our late spouses had manipulated Fate to bring us together.

Kathy had bought a collection of daylilies at her West Plains home several years before we got together.  I was a hybridizer; she wanted to try her hand at hybridizing.  Her intellectual gifts were formidable.  She applied them to our daylily collection -- the dozens of plants I bought for her and "my" plants at the top of our lot.  She evaluated all the collection and gave me a list of "my" plants that she wanted in the back yard with her collection.  She would have become an outstanding hybridizer, though she only had two seasons available to her.  Here she is last summer in the back yard.

She was so thoughtful about the process that she never made a high number of crosses.  She ran out of time each day.  She was one for the proper equipment and clothing.  A shady hat, a vest from the Bass Pro shop with innumerable pockets and places to clamp things.  She worked at exploring the potential of various color combinations, always trying to make the most use of her favorite cultivars, FLYING TRAPEZE and WIZARD'S WAND.

I planted Kathy's 2013 seedlings two weeks ago, when she was too weak to walk the property with me.  Today I spent the morning replacing the plastic labels in the seedling bed with sturdy metal ones.  I love the way Kathy worked at hybridizing; I love the plants she made.  I miss her like crazy today, when I would have told her about the growth of those new transplants.

She struck poses for me wherever we went.  She knew I enjoyed her animation.  Here she is on the beach during our Florida trip in 2011.

She struck this pose for my iPhone in Santa Fe a year ago.  She had lost about 60 pounds due to the difficulty of eating during and after radiation to the throat and neck.  But when this picture was taken, we believed she had been cured.

I love this pose from that Santa Fe trip.

And then....  And then....  

When she complained about pain long after she should have been pain-free, her ENT specialist ordered a biopsy of the "fried" node in her neck.  There were live cancer cells there.  He said, "I don't like what I see; it has to come out."  So at the end of October, he performed what he later called "the hairiest operation I have ever done," and followed the legs of an octopus-like tumor wherever it went and was confident that he "got it all."

Before this operation, Kathy asked me to take some pictures of her in case the surgery would disfigure her.  This is my favorite of the set, from October, 2013.

Oh, if only that had been the end of it.  But there was more cancer, this time eating away at her neck bones, discovered when she suddenly lost the use of her left arm on Christmas Eve. And so, from then until she died peacefully two days ago, we became a couple using our wits and ingenuity, and all our talents, to survive a killer condition.

It was not all-consuming, though it was a dominant feature of our lives.  Under that dominance, we wallowed in the joys we shared.  Kathy had collected all the Erle Stanley Gardner stories of Perry Mason, and she was reading her way through them and giving me the best for my bedside reading.  We grew up with that TV series in the 50s and 60s, and so we watched all the DVDs of those programs all over again.  We had loved the work of James Garner, beginning with the "Maverick" TV series, so I bought all the Maverick DVDs and we watched them starting in her hospital room in January when she was in for several days of tests and strategizing before surgery on her neck.

As we got to the end of Maverick, I bought all six seasons of "Have Gun - Will Travel" with Richard Boone.  We were on our second time through that series when Kathy ran out of life.

She set up a little "desk away from my desk" at her favorite Living Room chair, a little area of essential office supplies and a rack for storing her current magazines, books, and her tablet.  She used the tablet to read her daily newspaper after she lost the ability to hold up the pages, as in this photo I took at a Starbuck's a couple of years ago.

Yesterday when I went through her little "office" area next to her chair I found a doodle that I think she wanted me to come across on my own, a little light-hearted surprise.

One of our running jokes had to do with Kathy's "recommendations" or "tips" about how to drive, do laundry, wash her hair, etc. etc.  I would say, "Thanks for the TIP!"  So I suppose she worked out international symbols for tips and reminders and tucked her doodle away for me to find.

Kathy was a great organizer of space.  She could hang pictures in a gallery, design home renovations or an entire house (she did this in West Plains), and equip her household with all manner of organizing supplies from the Container Store.  We moved into a thirty-year old house that needed a lot of work.  Kathy mapped out the changes in the windows, the floors, and the spaces of the house, including a total remodel of both bathrooms.  Here she is with our beloved contractor, Steve Brandt early in the demolition of the wall separating the living room from the two bathrooms.

I fell in love with Kathy's nature, it's as simple as that.  I thought of her as the adult embodiment of the child on a hiking trip with her dad, one of my favorite pictures of her.

This vivacious ten-year-old was present in the adult.  She was hungry for life to her last day, when she allowed her death to complete its work while she rested.

I have resolved to honor her nature in all my days ahead, as I still honor San, who died in the summer of 2008.

Kathy's Cool Vegetables

Here's my KEB planting the last of her garlic over the weekend.  She is by nature a careful planner and planter, a designer of spaces indoors and out, a lover of proper containers for everything, including screenplays, stories, and sentences.  She likes to think about the structure of things as they are and as they might be.  I am in awe of how her intelligence works.

 The device you see lying on the dirt used to be the "dog door" that kept Lola out of the cat's room (our office) in our former home in University City.  The door is her planting guide and the little flags hold it in place until she needs to move it, and they mark what has already been planted.

Kathy had worked out an intensive planting "map" of each garden bed.  The map showed plant spacing and the overall allocation of space so that peas of one variety were in a different bed from peas of another.  All we are saying is give peas a chance!

Garlic must have its day, too.  In addition to choice varieties from our friend, Richard Mock, we have other garlic that came in the mail.  The box was so full of aromas!  Just like our kitchen yesterday with I made a new batch of Balsamic vinaigrette with three or four cloves of crushed garlic and almost a tablespoon of Dijon mustard.

Here's the bed closest to our birdbath and deck.  I think of it as the bean bed only because they provide the most green at the moment, but the peas on the other end will soon surpass them in color.

There is no wasted space.  Raising the beds slightly spared us the futile task of trying to spade or till the thick clay in the back.  We just lined up bricks and blocks and filled in with a topsoil and compost mixture from Daniel's Farm and Nursery down Jungermann Road.  I can't imagine a better or more helpful family-run nursery than Daniel's.  And he probably can't think of a better residential customer than us!  We are almost customers-in-residence there!

One more bed to show...this one next to the bean bed.  Here goes:

That white stuff on the side is a porous cover.  If a light frost comes along some night, this will provide a few degrees of protection.  Kathy covered the seed bed with it (loosely) and as the seeds germinated and plants appeared, they just pushed the cover up like a tent being raised.  It lets light and rainfall through to the plants and keeps insects out.

Here's the longer view of the area taken from the patio under our deck, which I'm about to go out and stain this morning.  You see my big "retirement present" wind chimes.  They make comforting deep tones much of the time.

When I looked at this image I recalled part of a poem by James Stephens set to music by the American composer, Samuel Barber.  The poem is titled "Mary Hynes," and the last part of it goes

Lovely and airy the view from the hill
That looks down Ballylea;
But no good sight is good until
By great good luck you see
The Blossom of Branches walking towards you
Airily.