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I am back in LA, tanned and happy and in possession of several dozen farm-fresh eggs, some of which I have already distributed to friends and neighbors. I then spent two hours madly watering and pruning.
Some garden shots. The lavender flowers are from a potato. Some of my potatoes died in a heat wave, alas. I am hoping to salvage the cucumbers, which were badly affected. When I pulled up a dead potato plant, though, I found two baby potatoes! A harvest!
Harvest. The "crystal melon" is also known as a lemon cucumber. I ate the cucumber and carrot raw, sautéed the potatoes and chard (sequentially in the same pan), and ate them with a fried double-yolked egg from the chooks.
This is everything I wanted.
It feels strange and insensitive to say that I'm happy, considering everything going on. But I am, in between periods of panic and rage and stir-craziness and numbness and so forth. I'm in such a better place than my three years of absolute personal hell. Even if I do end up dying of covid-19 (I'm high-risk), I feel that I'd be much more OK with that than I would if I'd died then, which would have essentially been because I couldn't get doctors to believe that I was actually sick.
At this point, I have the world's best cats, a beautiful garden that's already starting to feed me and others, an eager audience for my writing, and a business that's providing financial stability to me and others... self-publishing my id-tastic romance novels about traumatized shapeshifters and their pet flying kittens.
And those flying kittens bring me enough money that I can do some good with it, from donating to organizations like OutRight to helping out some individuals. Other people helped me so much, in so many ways, from paying for my medication to letting me live with them for months to finding a treatment to simply believing in me, when I was in no shape to give anything to anyone else, literally or emotionally. It feels really good to be in a place where I can give some of that back.
A garden symbolizes hope. It symbolizes the possibility of new life. It symbolizes persistence. But it's not just a symbol. It's a real thing. Put a seed in dirt, water it and tend it, and a sprout may grow. If it doesn't, try again, or somewhere else. When you get a sprout, keep watering (but not too much) and pick off the bugs, but don't be surprised if one morning you wake up and bugs ate the entire thing, or someone pulled it up. Try again, maybe in a different place. Use some bug spray, or maybe try a different plant. If you don't give up, eventually you'll learn how to tend your seeds, and one day you'll have a harvest that will feed you and others.
Some garden shots. The lavender flowers are from a potato. Some of my potatoes died in a heat wave, alas. I am hoping to salvage the cucumbers, which were badly affected. When I pulled up a dead potato plant, though, I found two baby potatoes! A harvest!
Harvest. The "crystal melon" is also known as a lemon cucumber. I ate the cucumber and carrot raw, sautéed the potatoes and chard (sequentially in the same pan), and ate them with a fried double-yolked egg from the chooks.
This is everything I wanted.
It feels strange and insensitive to say that I'm happy, considering everything going on. But I am, in between periods of panic and rage and stir-craziness and numbness and so forth. I'm in such a better place than my three years of absolute personal hell. Even if I do end up dying of covid-19 (I'm high-risk), I feel that I'd be much more OK with that than I would if I'd died then, which would have essentially been because I couldn't get doctors to believe that I was actually sick.
At this point, I have the world's best cats, a beautiful garden that's already starting to feed me and others, an eager audience for my writing, and a business that's providing financial stability to me and others... self-publishing my id-tastic romance novels about traumatized shapeshifters and their pet flying kittens.
And those flying kittens bring me enough money that I can do some good with it, from donating to organizations like OutRight to helping out some individuals. Other people helped me so much, in so many ways, from paying for my medication to letting me live with them for months to finding a treatment to simply believing in me, when I was in no shape to give anything to anyone else, literally or emotionally. It feels really good to be in a place where I can give some of that back.
A garden symbolizes hope. It symbolizes the possibility of new life. It symbolizes persistence. But it's not just a symbol. It's a real thing. Put a seed in dirt, water it and tend it, and a sprout may grow. If it doesn't, try again, or somewhere else. When you get a sprout, keep watering (but not too much) and pick off the bugs, but don't be surprised if one morning you wake up and bugs ate the entire thing, or someone pulled it up. Try again, maybe in a different place. Use some bug spray, or maybe try a different plant. If you don't give up, eventually you'll learn how to tend your seeds, and one day you'll have a harvest that will feed you and others.
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Thank you. <3
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Also I love the meditation on gardens at the end. <3 I have an uneasy relationship with gardening myself due to personal history, but there is still something magic in planting something and watching it turning into food. And this outlook of hopeful persistence is how I try to live. Thank you. <3
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I'm glad that you have joyful things in your life again.
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I love looking at photos of your cats and your garden, and I'm just so happy it's this way for you now!
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