On Resiliance

My garden used to be full of these coneflowers. The were always the first to come up in the spring and their bright purple colour made me very happy. I love it when there’s something so unbelievable in nature–a colour that bold–how can it exist?

The space outside our house, well, I’ve tried to tame it. It’s got flowers that I planted from seeds, it’s got many different kinds of lavender, it’s got all kinds of native plants, and then the leftovers from when it was landscaped for about six months before my garden simply said: nope, we far prefer to be this way, wild as wild can be.

But my coneflowers have disappeared. This is the last of them, and it’s weak and barely hanging on, finally giving up the ghost to the many many brown-eyed Susans that propagate like, well, plants. And oh, the metaphors. I’m getting there. My mind this week has been wild, too, vacillating between trying to prune negative thoughts, and the kind of emptiness you get from days without sleeping. Hollowed out, a bit. Exasperated.

We are going up north tomorrow to begin to clean out my grandmother’s cottage. We’re going to rebuild, on the exact same footprint as the building that’s there now, grandfathering, it’s called. (So the permits and stuff haven’t been as complex as if we were building a cottage from scratch). The new building should be up this year, and then we’ll finish it this year. Like anything, I’m pruning memories, gearing up for the well of emotions when the old building comes down and we replace it with something else that’ll last for generations in my family like this one has. Don’t get me wrong, the building isn’t anything special–as a friend of my brother’s joked, “it rains in the cottage before it rains outside.” Last summer we went up for a bit of pandemic break when we were allowed to travel, and the whole place was filled with mites. The outhouse is seventy years old. Honestly, it’s time for it to go–but it’s created friction between my brother and I, as he doesn’t want us to tear it down (he has a separate place on the property), like I’m taking something away instead of looking at it like we’re building something that’s going to last.

Like my coneflowers, as the gardens of our life expand and contract, certain plants come and go, and the building is after all, just a building. But it’s hard when emotions keep winning over. It’s been a hard week for me. Work reviews and disappointment and never-ending Covid (I get my shot on Monday) and really late nights trying to get everything finished, and feeling very upset at myself–like wishing I could prune the wild out of me that sometimes doesn’t quite fit in with the world. Get deep down in the mess of that feeling of failure, and it hurts–it does, like I’ve failed to save my poor coneflowers.

All my tricks aren’t working and I’ve resulted to sleeping meds, just to get a break from the relentless chaos in my mind. Which is a bad cycle anyway. I can feel the disease grumbling but the doctors think I’m imagining it–maybe I am–but . . . maybe not. So now I’m going to sleep in a medicated haze for a week, stop taking the meds, be awake for about 48-hours and hopefully things in my mind will have levelled out by then. Or maybe not–I just keep thinking if I can get to next week, maybe the chaos will level out.

The news, can’t without crying.

Reading: Laura Lippman’s latest.

Watching: Exceptionally terrible but deliciously good Discovery of Witches.

Tomorrow I will be near a lake, and looking at scenery that’s different from the view out of my front window. What?