Things Are Shaping Up Nicely

My title is taken from a the mouth of a character in one of the novels of the French author, Colette, who I remember reading during the summer of 1977 after I moved to Vermont to join my life with that of my wife of one year, "San."  I think the novel was The Vagabond, but won't swear to it.  San and I gardened like mad in our northern Vermont property, eighteen years of rural happiness before we moved to a city neighborhood in St. Louis and lived the best, and the last, twelve years of our marriage.  San died of breast cancer in 2008.

I became attached to Kathy Wofford six months later, and we married in 2009, hoping for decades together, but having only five years.  Kathy's life ran out last August.

My fiancee, Karen Berry, has been wearing an engagement ring for a month now.  We have been moving pieces of her carefully-chosen plant collection from her cottage twenty miles east of here to this landscape.  I have made room inside the house and outside the house for Karen's presence, her interests, and her creative soul.

Karen knew Kathy.  Karen was a new member of our daylily club when Kathy was elected President, just months before her diagnosis and treatment for head and neck cancer.  Kathy had the misfortune to have to inform the club membership of the board's decision to host a regional convention with only 18 months' lead time.  The matter was not put to the membership for approval, and a good number of members were hopping mad that the club's traditional way of undertaking a big project had been sidestepped.

Kathy weathered the onslaught without a ruffle, visible or invisible.  Cancer was the ruffle in her life.  Reporting a board decision to the membership was not in the same league.

Karen was the only member of the club who approached Kathy a year later and asked how she was holding up with her battle.  And Karen was the only person outside the family who Kathy told that she was worried how hard I would take her death when her time ran out.

During the change of season from summer to fall, Karen and I became a couple and Karen moved into a house in which Kathy's presence is visible everywhere you look.  Kathy was a designer by nature.  When we bought this house, she set upon a program of converting a trashy place into a classy place.  The closets are her doing, the doors, the new windows here and there, the new sliding doors, the new front entrance and the stone work leading up to it, the raised vegetable beds, the shade garden, the redesign of the block wall outside the garage, the placement of artwork in every room.

I began last fall to make space for Karen in this house.  I removed Kathy's rug and Kathy's filing boxes from our "office" and opened that space for Karen's work-from-home office.  We donated Kathy's bed from our guest room and have a replacement on order.  We took down most of Kathy's collection of Shawnee pottery and made space for Karen's collections of horse figurines and glass objects.  We replaced the dishware with Karen's Fiestaware, replaced San's Farberware cookware with Karen's preference for All-Clad and cast iron.  We have retained San's Le Creuset set.

This is Karen's place now, and we are shaping the landscape for our garden projects.

Today my contractor, Steve Brandt (right) and Tim Yankow arrived to contour the ground where storm water runs off the high side of the neighborhood over my neighbor's lawn and then across my "highland" daylily beds.  They are contouring a curved swale to  direct the flow of storm water around the daylily beds and over to the main drainage channel to the right of their position.

They are shaping the side of the new channel so that 36" wide mowing equipment can easily follow the curve without shaving off the top.  The whole area will be covered with sod tomorrow.

Here Tim is raking out the side of the swale.  You can see the elevation of the rest of the neighborhood with respect to my gardens.

Tim asked  Steve to break up one more area here.  They picked a perfect time for this work.  A few days earlier and the ground would have been too wet.  A few days later and it would have been hard as a brick.

Just below the curve of that swale is a new garden for Karen to "curate" her collection of vines and butterfly-friendly plants.  Steve and Tim will put up a 5-foot fence on the left side, thirty-six feet long, for the vines.  They will surround the bed with metal edging.  Karen will start moving plants this weekend.

Our car park area is serving as a staging ground for trays and pots of plants that will go all over the landscape.  I have three trays of a variety of Portulaca that resembles Purslane, but with narrower leaves.  I used this last summer and thought it was sensational.

We're going to try some coleus and lots of "blue stuff" and at least one Clematis.  Who knows?  I may put in four or five of them!

It was just a year ago that Kathy's friend Laurel visited here and helped me plant trays of annuals along the front.  It was seven years ago that San was unable to finish the last week of her classes at SIUE.  She passed away seven weeks later.

Spring is the season of the assertion of life in the garden.  I have been blessed in all my marriages to share the lives of women who loved plants, birds, art, and music.  Grief may continue at its own pace; but so may life.

Joy in Grieving

Yesterday was the 6-month anniversary of San's last breath, five hours after my children and I blessed her and bid her leave to go as she slept away the last of her life of almost 68 years.  I did not think of her as "old" in any way.  Until her liver failed in the last couple of weeks, San never looked her age except in infancy.  The people who knew her thought I'd made a typo on her memorial service when I gave her birth year as 1940.  Her students may have thought of her as a mother figure.  To think of her as a grandmother was a real stretch.  I thought of her as my girl.  We were youthful with each other and for each other even as we neared the dimming of our days together.

I have done no research into grief.  I can't tell you about stages of it unless I notice I have moved from one form of it into another form.  I don't want to know the template.  I only want to know experience as I live it and look back on it, this experience, anyway.  In the history of the world, San was just a speck, as I am.  In the history of 2008 in the U.S., San was just one of 40,000 women who perished from breast cancer.  Yet, to say that is to reduce the dignity of human life to a statistic, and I am sorry for even putting a number into this memorial of grieving.  Every one of the 40,000 was one.  We do not live as a statistic, we live as a unity, a point of focus of the grand energy that spins life, weather, worlds, galaxies, epochs, sinners, and saints.  

The one is the one I bless here.  San was one and now she is one with the One.  I have only indirect knowledge of the One.  I sense that I am its instrument, but I can't tell you more than that.  The One is the source and also the final home of all the little ones.

So, rather than tell you all that I have done since my grieving began in July, I will tell you a thing that came to me from that source that feeds my imagination with metaphors.  A friend approached me at a conference in early November to ask sincerely how I'm doing.  I gave a sincere answer.  The words are somewhat different each time I give that answer.  That's OK; there is more truth than one telling ever can express.  Just as you can't talk about The Border War era in Kansas and Missouri in one voice, you can't talk about the loss of a spouse in one telling.  I said what my friend hoped to hear, that San had suffered no agony at the end, that the vigil at her side that last day was much like watching the tide go out.

Little did I know what I'd released with that metaphor.  Ten minutes later, while listening to an angel, who appeared in the person of the poet Naomi Shahib Nye, give one of the best talks I've ever heard, I realized that I had just received a poem.  It came in one piece admitting of no editing, and it stands as my report on the life that passes and the life that continues.

When I woke and sensed

the tide of her life

had gone out,

I knew I was not

the dry beach

but the ocean.