Eating Medicinally. Again.

"You eat medicinally!" a distant co-worker announced ten years ago, with the inflection of a scientist making an important but distasteful discovery.

He was right. I ate for the most basic of reasons: to fuel my body and improve my health. And, once I got past the carb cravings, I enjoyed eating that way. I liked my thinner self. I liked the way we can detect the sweetness in so many foods when we don't allow sugar to confuse our taste buds. Most of all, I liked knowing I was foiling the nasty combination of predispositions I'd inherited.

My family has a strong history of diabetes and heart disease. My paternal grandfather died of a heart attack at 61. My maternal grandmother died of a heart attack at 46. My theory—and I'll never be able to prove it—is that she had a tendency toward high triglycerides, and the German desserts she loved to bake were her undoing. I have the triglyceride problem, which can be a serious heart risk for women, and the only way to keep it in check is to severely limit carbohydrate consumption. They didn't know this, of course, in my grandmother's day.

I inherited something else, too: my dad's unusual fat-clearing (or, more accurately, fat retaining) gene. Well, I don't know if there's a specific gene for this, but it's the way I've always thought of it. Here's the story.

My father was 40 when I was born. He and my mom had met on the tennis courts, and he remained actively athletic until he was practically crippled by angina. This happened when I was quite young. I remember that he couldn't walk up a subway ramp without stopping to put a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue. Any kind of exercise was out of the question. Back then nobody heard of cholesterol, but my dad's doctor was ahead of his time. He said saturated fat was the culprit, and advised my dad to give it up. All of it. No more cheese. No more ice cream, hot dogs, or juicy hamburgers. No more sausage. No more eggs. No more butter.

So he did. I grew up in a saturated-fat-free home, where polyunsaturated and cholesterol were household words. My dad stopped having angina pain, and was able to quit the nitroglycerin. He was able to start playing tennis again. He bought himself a bicycle, too. Over the years he found he could eat eggs without a problem. But if he ate fatty meat, or butter (this would usually happen at a restaurant), he would be in trouble the next day. Several times the resulting heart pains were strong enough to land him in the hospital.

For years he was told that it doesn't work like that. Cholesterol builds up gradually in the arteries; ingesting saturated fat doesn't clog them instantly. But in some people it can. A research study proved this a few years ago, but I had my own proof earlier than that.

It was about 20 years ago.....a cardiologist was preparing to perform a test in which my blood would be drawn and shaken in a test tube. When he shook the blood, he was appalled to find fat floating in it. He said he'd never seen anything like it. (And I think I just lost my more delicate readers.)

So. Whatever we want to call my father's odd fat metabolism, I share it. For that reason, and for the triglyceride issue, about 15 years ago I began eating medicinally. I got very strict with my diet, giving up saturated fats for one side of the family, and most carbohydrates for the other. It worked well for a good decade.

But at some point I started easing up on it. I was good about the fats, but I began allowing bread "if the restaurant is good and the bread is warm." Pasta once in a while. Some "whole grains," because they sound so healthy. That type of thing. But never, ever any sugar. And never ever any butter. Until the week before this Christmas.

My granddaughter and I had gotten together to bake cookies. I don't know what possessed me to taste them, but I did. I had just a few, but with cookies it doesn't take much. Cookies have got to be one of the most deliciously unhealthy things going. I had joked that our baking efforts were supporting the butter industry. And now some of that butter was coursing through my veins.

The next day I was standing in front of my washing machine, calmly folding laundry, when I experienced what felt like a dead-serious angina pain, traveling down the left side of my neck and into my chest. It was brief, but scary as hell. I've had little twinges where the arteries join the heart, but never anything like that. Being Harry's daughter, my first thought was, What did I eat? It took me a few minutes to remember the cookies of the day before. And then I remembered the goat cheese, of all things, from the day before that. Yes, I ate some of the goat cheese that a restaurant served with my lunch salad. I never do, but I did that day. Call it temporary insanity created by the merging of the Christmas season and my last day at work.

It was clear what had happened, and it was clear what I had to do. That day, three days before Christmas, I started eating medicinally. Again. As for all the foods I've had to turn down since then, I'll leave that to your imagination.

Christmas Eve makes me think of cookies......

.......and this year all my cookie recipes came from the Internet. I often get recipes online, and I look for ones that have lots of stars in their reviews. I don't know why I do that, because so many of the positive reviews are written by people who made so many changes to the original recipe that the review ends up being useless.

Consider this 5-star review of a recipe for bran muffins--regular old plain (but yummy) bran muffins. I'm shaking my head. :-)

I omitted the sugar and the raisins to form a batter that I could then half. One for a savory and one for a banana chocolate chip nut muffin. For the savory I added finely chopped boiled brocoli 1 1/2 cups, added 1/4 cup dried onion flakes, finely chopped sun dried tomatoes, 1 tbsp feta cheese, 1 tbsp romano, 4 tbsp shredded cheddar, and oregano. This is now one of my favorite breakfasts on the go. For the sweet I added 1 mashed banana 1/4 cup dark mini chocolate chips, 2 tbsp maple syrup, 1/2 cup combined chopped walnuts, almonds and sunflower seeds.

Merry Christmas, everyone!! Here's wishing you a year filled with fun and good health—and not a speck of broccoli in your bran muffins.

This Time Six Years Ago.........

It's December, and we all know what that means. Rather than write about shopping, wrapping, mailing, decorating, and baking (which is all I can think about this month), I'm sharing something I ran across this morning. I wrote it at the end of my 2004 Christmas letter:

As I write this, two guys from my gas company are attempting to convert the new range from natural gas to LP. They’ve been attempting this for about two hours now. When they arrived they took one look at the stove and said they didn't have the right tool. It sounded like they needed some special screwdriver bit, so I got out the set I'd bought myself a couple of months ago and asked if one of those would do. One would.

But there were other obstacles, and the guy in charge opened the owner's manual to do his research…until I discovered that he was reading the one for the microwave. Now I'm sitting here writing to you, and they're hunched over the stove, saying things like, "If you lose that, we're dead." and "Now which one goes in here?" and "Oh, boy, do I hate engineering!" and "Which one is the big one?" and “We lost 30 minutes because you didn’t listen to me when I said I was right!” and “How’re we gonna figure this out?” and the worst: "I'm gonna stick a piece of paper in here" "I dunno...I don't like the idea of paper in the gas burner." It’s a remarkably good rendition of the Three Stooges, minus one.

A sense of humor is a great blessing.

These Are My "After" Pictures

I actually took these pictures an hour before a small party I gave last week, but I call them my "after" pictures because it took years to get my house to this point.

I'm not showing you any "before" pictures. At some point I realized that the state of my house almost always reflected the state of my mind. If that's true—and I think it is—my mind was in complete disarray for a long time. That's not hard to believe.

Adding to the emotional issues was The Remodel. Even the happiest people report difficulty surviving a remodel. The decisions! The intrusion! The mess! Although I have to say the mess didn't bother me. I already had a mess. I viewed the remodel as a way out of the mess. And it was. But for over a year we moved stuff from one room to another, clearing areas to be worked on, while I tried to keep the cats from escaping out doors that were left open for the contractor and his crew to go back and forth.

When it was all done I was still left with a living room full of things that didn't belong there, some of them rather large—like the bed that belonged in the guest room upstairs. I was also missing a few things. I had paid a furniture-maker in advance for the pieces I ordered. He delivered some, but not all, and was never heard from again.

It took a long time to sort through everything and put together a decent living space. My lack of decorating confidence certainly didn't help, and I don't know whether it's harder or easier to have to make all the decisions alone. (Shell White paint? Petal White? White Swan? Mirror here? Mirror too high? Too low? Eeek!) As I've said so many times, thank heavens for the Internet. In this case, thank heavens for the home forums at GardenWeb. I didn't always agree with the decorating, kitchen-designing mavens, but seeing photos of their homes, and reading their discussions, helped me clarify my thinking.

This year clutter started building up. Nothing like years past, but it was one more indication that I needed to do some evaluating. After a lot of thought I realized that the job I've held for two years was dragging me down. Not the job itself, which is pleasant and not demanding, but the isolation of being the only staff member present at night—and the nasty, mountainous, circuitous 45-minute drive home in the dark. I realized I had to move on, and I needed more contact with people.

So I took what felt like two bold steps: I gave notice at work, and I sent an invitation to a dozen or so friends, inviting them to come sing with me at my piano. This is something Jill and I used to organize at Christmas, but I hadn't hosted it—or done any other kind of entertaining—in over a decade. It turned out so well. It gave me the push I needed to get the house in shape for visitors, and the gathering itself was great fun.

Ah, chaos. I don't miss it. I have no doubt it will come creeping back to one degree or another, but I'm on guard and I have a plan. Starting in January or February, friends here to play games. And another songfest in spring, before I give up housekeeping once again to turn my attention to the garden.

Oh, okay.....here's one during-the-party pic. My kitchen is not yellow, BTW. (Not that I have anything against yellow kitchens!)

So much traffic on those airwaves........

.......but we can't see it. My son can hear a lot of it, though. This weekend he talked to people in Greenland, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, Italy, South Africa, Svalbard (in the Arctic, off Norway), the Canary Islands, Germany, Scotland, Cuba, Romania, Austria, and Greece. Gotta love ham radio!

Thanks for the Push.

I went through my blog the other day, reading over many of the old posts, and found a number of comments urging me to exhibit my photos. Thanks to your encouragement, and that of other friends, I began showing my camera work last year, doing two exhibits. This year I've had three. The one running now opened on Friday, and we had a great time at the reception.

The show is at a beautiful shop selling amber jewelry from Poland (and online, too), by the way.

Oh, and check out the way they hung the oil-on-water pictures (and Lizzie's eye)!

My sincere thanks to those who urged me to "put it out there." (In a manner of speaking.)

The Elopers Have Been Partying!!

The bride's family threw a party (I guess we can call it a wedding reception) Saturday night for the beautiful couple who dared to elope in August. It was a wonderful gathering—and now I can officially think of my son as a Married Man. (Yikes!)

Annie has been organizing!

This is Annie. It hasn't been easy persuading her and her son Pogo to be indoors full-time (after all, they started out in my neighbor's barn), but we've been doing pretty well since spring.

Maybe Annie's been a little bored in the house. Or perhaps she has strong organizational instincts. But whatever the reason, she has been on a mission that good housekeepers (and others, like me) can appreciate. She has searched the house for Wolfy's leftover dog toys and carted them one by one upstairs, depositing them outside my bedroom door. Wolfy was a big dog, and some of these toys seem awfully heavy and/or awkward for a small cat, but Annie managed somehow. Then a few days later she gathered up all the cat toys and set them together just inside the front door.

With her mission accomplished, I figured she could use something new to occupy her, so yesterday I bought one of those laser lights for cats ($4 at Walmart). What a big success!! I can see both my cats are going to be well exercised (for a change).

Now if only someone could interest me in running back and forth and around in circles after a laser light.....

Fifteen two, four, six.........

If that title means anything at all to you, you've played cribbage. My dad was taught to play cribbage by a hospital roommate many decades ago, and that was the start of countless games between the two of us. We loved our cribbage games so much that one year I bought him a giant cribbage board, four feet long. Because he lived in Florida, mud-daubing wasps filled up all the holes. But I cleaned them out, and I still have the board somewhere. I should find it and hang it up.

This week I discovered online cribbage, playing against the computer. Believe me, it is not as much fun as playing with Harry. But I was surprised at how quickly the game came back to me, considering it's probably been close to 20 years since I've played. And I learned something else. There's a certain lingo attached to cribbage, and after I played a few rounds with the computer I began to remember it. It felt good to speak it aloud.

"See one, play one."
"Fifteen four is all I score."

I don't know why cards are so much fun. How we found hilarity in sitting at a table staring at them and adding up points, I have no idea. But we did. The banter was fast and funny, our laughter frequent.

My dad loved playing cards. If we had a group, we played knock rummy. If it was just the two of us, we played cribbage, honeymoon bridge, or some variation on rummy. And you had to play for money with my father. Not a lot of money, but some coins had to exchange hands at the end of the evening. Said coins usually ended up in his hand.

My daughter Jill was the only one of my kids to inherit the card gene. She and I played several different games, but it is our hilarious double-solitaire battles I remember best. No money was involved, but you'd think we were playing for megabucks the way our hands slammed those cards down to beat the other to the center. Like her grandfather, she usually beat me.

Playing against a computer really can't compare. No matter how many qualities one tries to attribute to one's opponent, it's just a hunk of metal. And the charming British accent of the recorded scorekeeper fails to save the experience from being so quiet. Maybe this is why I find myself saying out loud all those expressions my dad taught me so long ago.

"Fifteen two is all I do."

Old Stones, Old Lives

I've been spending a lot of time in old cemeteries, photographing gravestones as a volunteer for FindAGrave. I went to this one, in the photograph, yesterday. Here I found a stone that read George, son of Charles and Mary Daniels, born Mar. 25, 1845

DROWNED

in the Narrows of Lackawaxen on Friday the 11th day of October 1861 his body was found in the Delaware River at Cars Rock on Sunday Oct. the 20, 1861. Aged 16 years, 7 mo. & 14 days.

I couldn't read all of the bottom inscription, but I made out the following, and I think we understand, without words, the rest.

From the beautiful world tis lived for parents and children
. . . . . to part . . . .
O may we meet . . . .
Where parting shall be no more

I have long accepted, if not exactly embraced, the premise that we live until we fulfill whatever it is we're supposed to accomplish on this earth, but the more trips I make to old cemeteries, the harder it is to hang on to that concept. In the 19th Century, so many died so young. Childbirth back then was risky business; you see the evidence of that on the gravestones of all the young wives. And the children! An epidemic would sweep through an area and take a good percentage of the young with it.

Some of the tales told on the gravestones are heartbreaking, like the family who, in 1878, lost a son named Earley, not quite two years old, on May 24; a nine-year-old daughter, Ann, on May 28; and on June 4 little Samuel who had turned four nine days earlier. Then, seven years later, they lost two-and-a-half-year-old Dessie.

The parents of George, above, might have breathed a little easier having gotten their son to the ripe old age of 16—until the unthinkable happened, and he drowned.

I remind myself that the 19th Century doesn't have a monopoly on tragedy. Those multiple deaths could be happening right now in other parts of the world. And it was unthinkable when a friend's son (and good friend of my daughter Gillian's) drowned in Lake Champlain two years ago—on the same day he was his sister's Man of Honor at her wedding.

I guess it's not for us to know what purpose anyone's life might have served, or be serving still. We can only assume that Samuel and Dessie and the rest got it right. And hope that in the end we will have gotten it right, too.

What do you make of coincidence?

I often say I don't believe in coincidence. That is, when two things happen, seemingly coincidentally, I usually attribute some sort of significance to it. There's a message in there somewhere.

Well, I haven't figured out the most recent message I received, but it was impossible not to notice it.

At work yesterday I filled a request to send out a number of books. One of them was Gangrene and Glory, a history of medical care during the Civil War. I thought that sounded interesting, and although I had no time to sit down with it, I opened the book at random before I scanned the bar code. It opened to an account of General Stonewall Jackson, mortally wounded, being examined by his physician, Dr. Hunter McGuire.

It was rather fascinating, but I didn't have time to read on. So I scanned the book and packed it up with the others. Then I got my salad out of the fridge and grabbed a copy of The New Yorker to read while I ate.

I opened the magazine, and the first thing I read was a letter to the editor by the great-great grandson of Dr. Hunter McGuire. The letter was about the death of General Stonewall Jackson.

How often do I think of Stonewall Jackson? Do I ever think about Stonewall Jackson?

I do now.

Eleven In¢hes!

A lot of considerate folks have been leaving comments on my blog concerning peni$ enlargement. Perhaps this explains the size of the beans I've been harvesting this year.

Bean Excitement!

Over the years I've devised some pretty feeble methods of growing pole beans. I guess the most memorable was my Rube Goldberg-like nest of tomato cages, which had to be tethered to the house and a radio tower. Last year's effort, a curtain of beans, was prettier, but the yield was almost non-existent.

This year I have nailed it (almost literally)!! Checking out a message thread entitled "Show Me Your Trellis" on GardenWeb, I saw the bean support of my dreams: a 16-ft. cattle panel (I had never heard of a cattle panel) bent to make an 8-ft. tall arch. The base was secured with posts driven into the ground. The whole thing cost less than $35. The bean arch met all my criteria for the perfect support; it was homemade, easy, permanent, and cheap. I was in love.

I borrowed my son's pick-up and set out in search of a cattle panel, which turned out to be surprisingly easy to find. It was only slightly more difficult to persuade my son to set it up for me. ("Homemade" and "easy" are relative terms.) Once he did, I planted my beans: Kentucky Wonders, which my family has always loved, and Fortex, which the bean people on GardenWeb rave about all the time.

It was exciting to see the seedlings emerge, and even more fun when they got tall enough to start climbing. I can walk under the arch, and I'm so looking forward to reaching up to pick handfuls of beans.

I chose the terrace to set it up because (so far) deer don't walk there. Apparently a woodchuck does, though . . . the lettuce I planted in a big bin got eaten the other night. Also growing in containers on the terrace are cucumbers and beets. Oh, and two containers of pole beans, which are climbing up my son's radio tower. When I thinned the plants growing by the arch, I couldn't bear to throw away those thinnings. They had tried so hard to produce their beautiful, strong root systems. (Can you tell I anthropomorphize everything?)

Intentionally Bad Poem

This morning I was reminded of a poem I wrote for a Bad Poetry challenge issued by my online writing group a number of years ago. Whenever I run across it, I still laugh.


To My Soulmate

When I saw you walk into the room
Well it wasn’t the room I was in or anything
But it was like through the hallway, you know,
That I saw you,
And I knew.
I just knew.
My heart it like opened.
And you walked in.
Just like how you walked into the room.
Not the room I was in,
But the other room.

Blacker-Than-Black Humor

One day a couple of years ago I called the veterinarian's office:

Hello, I’m calling to inquire about cremation options . . .

Aha! Amazingly, you’ve got the right person. I do the cremations. I don’t usually answer the phone, but the girls aren't at the desk (where do you suppose they could be? it's not lunch time) and I was standing nearby, filling out some forms, so here I am.

Oh. Well, perhaps you can give me some information. I have two elderly dogs . . .

You know, I have two Afghan hounds, Liberace and Barbra. They were from the same litter, and they are both 12 years old. But one of them acts much younger than the other. It's really amazing to watch. Like the other day Liberace . . .

Right. My dogs are 13 and 15, and I was wondering . . .

I’m sure if you’re calling about two dogs you love, you’ll want their ashes back.

Well, yes, that’s what I was . . .

Then you won’t want the Group Cremation. That’s with . . . a group. I offer what I call a Semi-Private cremation, with one dog at the back of the chamber and one in front. It’s not guaranteed to be “pure,” if you know what I mean. Depends a lot on the size of the dog. How much do your dogs weigh?

Um . . . they’re fairly large—about 65 to 70 pounds.

Hmmm…….yes, I think you’ll want to go with the Private Cremation. For that, we charge $195 . . . no, $160 . . . no, $140.

Okay. Well, thank you very much. I’ll be . . .

I also want to offer you something else. I don't offer this to just anyone, mostly because most people don’t want it, but you have a nice voice and maybe you will. If you like, I’ll be glad to show you the equipment and the process, start to finish. How does that sound?

No!! I mean, no, thanks. Add me to the list of people who turn down your offer, but thanks anyway.

Well, I’m in this business because I feel I’m doing something for the pets. I wouldn’t stay in this job if I felt otherwise. I’m sensitive to it, you know what I mean? I want you to know you’re doing the right thing for your dogs. I don’t know if you have any loved ones who have been cremated . . .

Um . . . yes?

Well, I’ve seen crematoriums for humans that aren’t up to my standards.

Mmmm.

I heard that a local funeral home is going to be offering pet cremation. I was going to call them about offering my services, but I don’t know if they even have an oven yet . . .

I really have to go. Thanks so much for the information.

Alrighty then. I hope we don’t see you any time soon! (chuckle, chuckle)

A Light Upstairs

A lot of people who live in my area go to bed early. I know this because I drive home from work in the dark every night, and I see a lot of dark houses. They could be empty, I suppose, but I don't think we have that many weekenders—or at least not that many weekenders who don't put their house lights on a timer.

If I'm very tired, the dark houses have a certain appeal . . . I envision everyone asleep, no one needing to do anything or be anywhere. They're all in what my mother called "Bunkyland." They went to Bunkyland, and I've got my foot on the gas pedal and my hands on the wheel. My eyes strain to see deer at the edges of the dark, winding road.

The occasional house is all lit up. I'm convinced these are happy homes. Nothing bad can happen in all that golden light. Don't tell me the lights are on because someone's being chased through the house with a baseball bat. I just know the family members are moving from room to room, offering food to one another, sharing a joke, perhaps singing a song. These are the Irish and Italian families I idealized in my youth, the ones who spent all their time with their arms draped over each other's shoulders, singing, laughing, and eating. That was my made-up version of a perfect life: singing, laughing, and eating. I guess it still is.

But the houses I'm most drawn to on my late drive home are the ones with a single light upstairs. Only one person is still awake, and he or she will soon turn off the light. Once again, it's the yellow light that pulls me in; blue lights from TV screens don't count.

Although the shades are drawn, I can tell you what those rooms look like. They are sparsely furnished, with very little in the way of decoration, but they invite sleep. A braided oval rug lies at the side of the bed. The bedclothes are always white, and the beds are always soft. The occupant may be reading in bed, or seated at a small desk, perhaps writing a letter in the fashion of Rebecca de Winter, but at night, and in far more modest surroundings.

As I get closer to home, the percentage of dark houses rises. The hour is later, of course, but also I am surrounded by farmers who get up very early in the morning. For a while I was leaving my house dark as well, using a flashlight to walk from the car to the porch and into the house. I was unwilling to face the receiving line of moths that always show up this time of year in the presence of light. But after a home invasion took place on my road last month, I've been leaving both porch lights on plus a lamp in the living room.

One of these nights, when I've closed things up and only my bedside lamp is lit, I'm going to slip down the stairs and out the door. I'll navigate the porch steps, pass the old well and the flower beds, and walk out to the road. From my position in front of the house I'll look up at the yellow glow of my bedroom window with its drawn shade and tell myself the light is mine to do with as I wish. What I will probably wish is to turn it off and go to sleep.

My sheets aren't white, by the way. But my bed is soft.

What do I do with my car?

This evening I was reading a delightful blog having to do, more or less, with parking spaces, and thinking I haven't worried about where to park my car since I left NYC years ago. Then I realized I have a parking issue coming up next month.

I'm having an in-and-out minor surgical procedure done, and it's the in and the out that's presenting a problem. I have to be there at 6:00 a.m. I live an hour from the hospital, and no way will I ask someone to drive me in at that hour. Why I've been asked to come in so early is beyond me. I think the surgery is scheduled for 10:00. What do they plan to do with me for four hours? Maybe it's a clinical trial . . . maybe they want to find out how long it takes my back to start hurting on their new gurney. Maybe they want to see how low my blood sugar can go. Or maybe things are a little slow early in the morning, and I'm their entertainment.

Anyway, I'm arriving in my own car, and I'll park it at the hospital. But I can't leave it there. Nor can I leave under my own steam. The hospital won't discharge a surgical patient, even when it's minor surgery, without a designated driver. The driver has to show up in the flesh; you can't try to pull the old "My driver's waiting outside with the engine running" flim-flam.

So Lizzie will probably come and get me, and we'll go home in her car, and . . . well, you see my problem. I'm thinking this is one of those things that someone under 20 could solve in no time. Lizzie is 19. My current plan is to put it in her lap and forget about it for now. Maybe I'll start thinking about it next month. I didn't agree with everything Scarlett O'Hara did, but sometimes the girl made sense.

The Sign in the Old Well

Sorry if my title sounds like a Nancy Drew book. Maybe that's why I like it . . . Nancy was my constant companion when I was little, and when Gillian was in first grade her teacher would let her read Nancy Drew books at the back of the classroom while the rest of the class had their first reading lessons.

I wrote the following in 2004:

For the past three years—more than three years, actually—I hadn’t the heart to do any gardening. Gardening was such a shared activity in our family. Even if all hands didn’t pitch in, there was a shared spirit, a mutual appreciation for the blue blaze of a delphinium in the sun, or a bowl mounded high with tiny perfect yellow crookneck squash. Joe taught me how to grow a garden, and Jill and I put our heads together over the seed catalogs every year. Then I was the one left to do everything, and for a long time I did nothing.

Jill loved that I planted our old well with flowers every spring. The well is a round opening about two feet in diameter, surrounded by a slab of rock. Filled with flowers, it was always a bright spot under the Winesap apple tree in front of the porch. When I stopped planting it, weeds took over quickly. It depressed me to look at it, but there it was, in sight whenever I left the house, and when I came back.

Last year a plant I recognized sprung up at the far edge of the slab. It came literally out of nowhere, as I hadn’t planted one like it in more than a dozen years, and never in that area. I mowed around the single plant, and it grew and bloomed. At the end of the season it fell over onto the well, seeding it. This spring, the well was transformed. Gone were all the weeds. In their place was a profusion of blue and white flowers: forget-me-nots. They were so clearly from Jill. She would never have to ask me not to forget her. Instead, I think she was saying, Don’t forget the joy we once took in this. You can still love growing things. We can still love them together.

**************************************************************

In the six years since I wrote the above, the forget-me-nots have proliferated, showing up all over the property. I took this picture of the well last month. One of my favorite sights a couple of years ago was about 100 feet down the road, where a ring of forget-me-nots encircled a sweet-rocket plant.

A Nature Tale

Yesterday I spotted baby robins in the nest above my car, and took some pictures of them. They were so cute, with their mouths wide open, just waiting for their parents to come along and drop something in. They looked so trusting, although I suppose trust, at least as we know it, wasn't part of the picture. Like the parent robins, who react to the sight of the interior of the babies' mouths by inserting worm, the tiny birds were operating on instinct.

Apparently something else was operating on instinct, too, because when I went to my car this morning I found the nest on the ground, the babies gone. Poor little things. All I could hope was that they died quickly.

Snake? Raccoon? Hawk? It doesn't much matter, because there's nothing I can do to prevent it from happening again. Next time will arrive and proceed on schedule, whether or not I'm aware of it. And I hope I'm not. I hope it happens deep in the woods, although robins probably don't nest there. So in that case I hope it happens on the property of my neighbor, who wouldn't know a robin from an ostrich.

"Nature is cruel." We hear that all the time. We forget that we have a place in nature. Human nature can be cruel, too. Sometimes our nests are destroyed. And sometimes someone goes and finds a nice sturdy ladder, manages to carry it without tripping, and makes an effort to put things back where they're supposed to be, as best she can.

Honeysuckle From Heaven

In the nine years that Gillian’s been gone, I’ve been blessed with many signs from her. In the beginning, especially, they were frequent and dramatic. I’m surprised I haven’t written more about them here. I didn’t take them for granted, exactly, but it’s only now that I fully realize the magnitude of the gifts I’ve been given. Jill, in spirit every bit as loving and creative as she was on this earth, has shown me miracles.

Most of the signs have involved animals or plants. In one of Dr. Michael Newton’s books (the second one, I think—Destiny of Souls) I read how some souls are taught how to create plant matter. It’s possible the book also contains information about souls’ communication through animals, but I may never get to that part. His books meant so much to me that so far I've left them unfinished.

One day in June, less than a month after Jill died, I was washing dishes at the kitchen window overlooking the backyard. Years earlier, I had ambitious plans for part of that yard. I’d planted a white rose, Sir Thomas Lipton, that was supposed to be the start of a garden. I got distracted with other things before designing the rest of it, and the garden never materialized. In fact, after my failed attempts to clear the area, most of it reverted to a wild tangle of blackberries and grape vines. Sir Thomas bloomed for a number of years before harsh winters took their toll. Eventually the rose bush died.

That June day I looked up from the dishes in the sink and saw a cloud of white at the far left side of the yard. Could it be the rose? Impossible! I dried my hands and walked slowly to the back door, afraid that if I went outside I’d find the rose bush as dead and bare as ever. But the white flowers were still there when I stepped out into the sun, and they were still there when I picked my way through the weeds to get closer.

The rose bush was covered in blooms, brilliant and fragrant. But another scent was even stronger. Blanketing the rose was honeysuckle. Thick, dense honeysuckle vines where none had grown before. Not ever, in the 25 years I’d lived here.

You have to understand that from the time we moved here, I knew the name of every plant that grew on this property, domestic or wild. Never had I seen honeysuckle. It’s not something I would have forgotten, either. Honeysuckle had special meaning for me.

My mother, raised in what was then rural New Jersey, longed for a garden. Floral abundance didn’t exist in New York City, where I grew up. We spoke of “a house in the country” the way people today talk about winning the lottery. It was our ultimate dream.

It’s hard to imagine nature walks along 32nd Avenue in Queens, but that’s how I think of the walks I took with my mom when I was little. In the shade under a railroad trestle, she found a wildflower—the tiniest thing, surely overlooked by everyone except a woman who was pulled as if by magnet to anything green and growing. She opened my eyes to the detail in ivy climbing on brick buildings. She revealed the heavy, sweet scent of the seemingly insignificant flowers that were part of the hedge around our apartment house. But the plant I associate most closely with my mother is honeysuckle.

We came upon it on our way to visit a friend one morning. I was probably around six years old. As we neared the end of a block of row houses with tiny fenced-in yards, my mother stopped abruptly.

“Oh!” she said. On one of the fences grew a vine that had spilled over the top. It was covered with clusters of pale, delicate, oddly-shaped flowers, their scent carrying to where we stood. My mom leaned in to inhale their perfume, touching her face to the thin, tubular flowers. I did the same.

“It’s honeysuckle,” she said softly. She gently separated a flower from its base and showed me how to suck the nectar from it.

A few years later she was gone, dying suddenly from breathing toxic fumes while cleaning a rug. And almost 50 years after that I was given the gift of roses and honeysuckle.

Was Jill saying, “I’m with your Mommy now”? Or “I was your Mommy”? I don’t think it matters. Either one would be fine. Either one was wonderful.

The rose never came back after that. In fact, the entire bush disappeared. But the honeysuckle has thrived. I just took the above picture. This spring the honeysuckle is so prolific that its scent is unmistakable 100 feet away, and around a corner of the house. Heady. Gorgeous. Strong. Miraculous.