Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Housewife Therapy

Another morning of why and how but I walked and walked and wore myself out walking and then did house things. Scrubbed bathroom things, did laundry things, swept floors and floors and floors things, dustmopping up great wads of dust, gray and light and hard to capture. It flies away from the broom and does not care to go into the dustpan. Not a bit does it want to go there.

Sometimes cleaning things up is cleaning up my heart, sometimes walking to exhaustion is exhausting my anxiety. Sometimes it is good to do these things for no other reasons than those.

When I got to the point where I should have gone out to the garden to work, all I could manage was to pull a row of spent lettuce and arugula, and there is still another whole row of arugula left and I still can't bring myself to pull it, even as it bends over on its done stalks with its tiny flowers which the bees gladly swoop so close to the dirt to enter and sip from.
I did not, need we say? get my nursery plants planted, much less my corn and I am not sure that squirrels have not snatched and eaten my bean seeds. The leaves on the pecans are coming out so it is time and past time to plant.

I passed a house this morning on my walk that had a rose growing on its fence. I saw it and I knew that rose. It is the same species I had planted one million and twelve years ago on my garden fence when I lived in Lloyd before, when I was a hippie child mother. It bore the most beautiful scarlet roses, perfect in all regards, with a scent like every rose should smell, as deep and intoxicating as its color. I used to cut the blossoms and bring them in and set them in vases and my whole house would be perfumed with their rosy spice. I've never been able to find another like it to buy and cannot remember what its name was although there was an old shack on the corner of Chaires Crossroad and Highway 27 where one grew, the same, and I tried to root a piece of it when the shack had been abandoned but it didn't take and now the shack and the fence and the rose are gone.
But this morning, I smelled that rose again. It is not a figment of my imagination. It is as real as anything in this universe of swiftly evermoving atoms can be.
I will find that rose again (Scarlett O'Hara shakes her fist defiantly to the flat blue sky as she kneels on the red dirt of Georgia, retching up a carrot) as GOD IS MY WITNESS and I will buy it and I will plant it and it shall grow!

Miss Dottie is sitting a few yards from the hen house. Her sister, Darla, is having a last bite of supper and sip of water in the coop with the rest of the chickens but Dottie seems to be waiting. Is she waiting for Mick to get on the roost and become drowsy so that he will not try to have sexual congress with her? Do not tell me that animals do not think and plan and worry and fret and realize consequences just like we humans do.
Whether we live in cities or on farms or far away from anyone in woods or fields, there is so much going on at all times. Decisions being made and observations being made and mistakes being made and plans being made and cultures are influencing us all whether we are mammal or bird or fish or insect. That is just the way of it.
And now I'm going to go chop peppers and eggplant and green shallots and mushrooms and carrots to make a stir fry and that is yet another kind of therapy. A therapy of hands busy, of senses and intuitions and habit and wooden cutting boards and sharp knives and glass bowls and hot metal and spitting oil.

Might as well get to it.

I wish we had rain.

Love...Ms. Moon












8 comments:

  1. Isn't it uncanny how a smell can whisk you back to an earlier place and time, and the power and realness of the experience? I hope you find that rose.

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  2. I can almost see and smell that rose from your description. I hope your desire bears fruit.

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  3. Could you ask the owner of the rose for some cuttings? Most people who love gardens and flowers are generous souls...at least in my experience.

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  4. I tend to stay busy when upset too. When Katie attacked me a week and a half ago, it came home and cleaned and reorganized by pantry. It gets rid of the nervous energy that I don't know what else to do with.

    Walking is good too. Spending time outside. Spending time with grandbabies. All good for an aching soul.

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  5. you should try to root another cutting from the rose you found. I spent the day yesterday cleaning things and furniture and baseboards and oh the living/dining room looks so good. it really needed to be done after all the deconstruction and construction that has gone on since the flood. still need to vacuum and attack the bedroom. it's supposed to rain all day but it has yet to start.

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  6. If you're feeling brave you could stop at that house and ask them what type of rose it is. Then you could buy that variety. Or, like Ellen said, maybe you could get a cutting!

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Tell me, sweeties. Tell me what you think.