T.

All weekend I dug in the garden and sawed and clipped and transplanted and pulled weeds and cursed morning glory, called it by its more appropriate name bindweed. The Chehalis apple tree is blooming and it's a considerable bit of heaven, just outside my kitchen door. Out the front door the clematis blooms pale pink and I think that maybe some bushtits or wrens are building a nest in the tangle just under the eaves — time will tell. Cats attend to my tending, Kitty Boy from across the street or Oliver from who knows exactly where these days, he might be calling my house his home. Flip and Lucy, mine, patrol the deck and pretend to be fierce but we all know that they're not. I can hear neighbor children pounding drums and laughing. Someone has grilled meat three nights in a row — I want a bite.

This benediction with the earth keeps me steady in a week where foundations have been cracked and sundered. My sister L. has lymphoma, and is still in the discovery stage, on heavy-dose pain-killers that render her a bit loopy. I visited her Friday night, and left feeling helpless, mortal.

(My own health is well. Thankfully.)

There have been lots of phone calls and text messages, one from my younger sister K., who wrote, I always thought that you, L., and I would live together when we're old. I texted back we will.

Damn it.

I hate this.

---

I planted sunflowers in little starter pots, and gave the wintered-over geraniums new soil and a tincture for health and vitality. I moved mint, ripped ivy, trimmed violas.

The nursery man at Holly Park Greenhouse said that he might have heliotrope this year (I count on him for this) and maybe cosmos — sales have declined, and only the oldsters (I'm assuming he included me in this category) ask for them. We'll see. I've been shopping there for 25 years — it's time I asked him his name.

Everything grows — tumors and parsley and collards and, if I'm lucky, heliotrope.

---

On another note, my son left for work today when I was working in the garden, and he locked me out. Oy. ("Oy" is my current favorite new word.) A back window was unlocked (bad in general, good for me) and I climbed through it onto a winter's accumulation of plastic sacks and assorted cast-off debris. Landed, balanced, got on with the business of being alive.