Keeping the Wilds at Bay

I pulled weeds today, and I cut back the crazy wisteria vine—it’s pretty, but annoying. A few months ago I'd chopped back a dead shrub as far as I could, thinking Todd could help me yank out the rest later. Long grasses have since grown up through what's left of the shrub's dry branches, and when I pulled up those grasses I saw new glossy leaves emerging. Maybe I won’t yank the stump just yet. After surveying my work, I also trimmed the daffodil and tulip growth to about five inches.

When I placed the tulip trimmings into the compost bin, I saw how the blackberries are taking over the side stairs. My youngest daughter likes to say, “Blackberries want to take over the world.” To keep my tale from getting as long and prickly as a blackberry vine, imagine eight trips up the stairs to the compost bin as I gingerly balance an armload of brambles. Oh, and I cut back the rosemary, too. I have no idea what time of year I should be cutting back rosemary, but I have a feeling it doesn’t matter.

You see, it’s happening again. Now begins the cutting and pruning and showing those plants who’s boss. The rains are falling and the days are warmer (or soon will be) and everything just grows. This temperate rain forest is perfect for a haphazard gardener like me. The weeds thrive, sure, but so far the trees and shrubs and flowers do, too. I cut boldly, knowing that these darlings will all grow back soon enough. No worries about trimming too much. This is a good way to live.

My Mother-in-Law

When I started writing about my relationship with my mother-in-law, I wrote the first essay as a break from my Middle East writing, to have something new that wasn’t filled with Calls to Prayer and swirling desert cadences. I wrote my day-to-day life with Jeanne in an essay about the intimate acts of caregiving.

As that first essay reveals, I knew early on that the story of our extended-family household would reach its resolution only when my mother-in-law passed away. We lived each chapter together, and in the early mornings I wrote the events of our relationship as essays, each one complete on its own but linking together to form the narrative of Jeanne’s final years—the darkest, hardest years of my life so far.

I’m still sorting it all out—the frustration, love, and physical hardship. Yesterday I re-read an email I wrote to Todd’s brothers in 2007, telling them how painful it had become for their mother to have her blood pressure taken. We were in the midst of a cancer scare, waiting for test results, and I thought the pain might be related to cancer. But Jeanne didn’t have cancer. Her body was simply wearing out. I feel the weight of how the nurse’s blood pressure cuff constricted Jeanne’s arm, Jeanne cringing each time but seldom crying out. She had her blood pressure taken at least twice a week for eighteen more months, bracing herself each time for the pain. Now it’s my turn to cry as I remember when the pain started and how much suffering still lay ahead of Jeanne, all of it with the hope that she would “get better.”

The comfort comes as I remember the final chapters—the confidence Jeanne had when she decided to forego fruitless treatments and painful procedures (including the blood pressure readings) and the way her dark depression lifted when we all stopped pretending she would get better and began to help her through her final journey.

Now that I’m assembling essays into chapters and chapters into a book, I find that the last two years of Jeanne’s life were full with repeating thoughts and motifs, like the chorus of a hymn. As full of loss and lies and tensions as our life together was, the memories I have of Jeanne’s final years form a story that’s worth telling, perhaps a story that will even end up to be lovely.

Known by Name

We’ve identified the bird of prey circling over our canyon. Several times this past week the hawk flew over the house and rested for a few minutes in one of the cedars on the far bank. Long enough for us to admire his red tail before he continued south over the creek canyon.

We spent Sunday afternoon with our next-door neighbors—an established Newberg family with five children—grilling out on their deck and enjoying their view of the canyon instead of ours. On their side of the property line, hundred-year-old cedars grow right behind the house, providing shade from the morning sun. Such a different view from ours, I remarked. When I told them about the hawk, they were surprised. “There’s a hawk here?” they said. The neighbors have a shaded deck; we have a wide view of birds and sky.

We’re becoming bird watchers, much to our surprise. We told our neighbors how two nights ago, a pair of turkey vultures flew over the canyon, easy to identify in flight by their white markings. It took us longer to identify the yellow pair of western tanagers, the male with his blushing red face and the female with a head as green as the leaves of the tree she perched in.

We have not yet learned to identify the trees. Here’s how our bird watching sounds.

—Look, there—it’s a little yellow bird!

—Where?

—There, in the tree.

—Which tree?

—The first tree there—the one with leaves.

Okay, that was me identifying the tree by the fact that it had leaves. It’s not as silly if you keep in mind that our home is surrounded by mostly coniferous growth. But we laugh and keep trying. I know pine from fir now, and I know cypress from cedar. I can admire the tanager’s yellow feathers just as well when I don’t know her name, but when she’s nameless I don’t notice the ways her coloring and beak shape differ from the oriole’s. Naming these birds, these trees and flowers, gives me a deeper knowledge of this place.

And on Sunday afternoon I finally learned the names of my next-door neighbor’s middle children. We’ve lived here nearly a year; I know the eldest and the youngest children, but the two boys in the middle blurred, and I wasn’t sure which was which. After spending a relaxed afternoon with their family, I easily learned the differences between the two boys—so entirely individual!

Most precious to me, I learned the name of the sister who died long before we moved here—twin weeping willows grow down by the creek in her honor, and the children call these trees by their sister’s name. “We know they aren’t really sierra trees,” my neighbor said. “But those weeping willows are in memory of our first daughter, Sierra.”

As I learn to name, I am learning also to know.

Time Travel

Yesterday I started proofreading my galleys for Through the Veil. I am rereading many of these essays for the first time in well over a year. In fact, the last day I had this manuscript spread out before me was the first week of October, 2008, when I was preparing to send my book proposal, along with a complete manuscript, to Canon Press.

Jeanne, my mother-in-law, lived with us at that time, and her health had been quite poor for months. In October she began to have intense pain in one foot and leg. A trip to the emergency room to rule out a blood clot revealed that her port-a-cath was infected, too. The leg and foot pain increased each day as I helped Jeanne go for blood tests, special circulation wraps, and consultation about surgery to remove the infected port. My days were too full that week, always worrying and calling doctors and trying to read the pain level in Jeanne’s face. I pushed Jeanne’s wheelchair down hospital corridors and watched her grimace while three different nurses tried without success to draw blood from Jeanne’s impossibly fine veins. As my mother-in-law grew more discouraged and the pain grew worse, I carried the pleasant, more hopeful weight of a book proposal and full manuscript submission—but I found little time to proof two hundred pages, and my deadline was approaching.

So one afternoon when Jeanne took two narcotic painkillers and lay down for a nap, I left the house and went to a coffee shop to spread out the last fifty pages or so of my manuscript. I worried about Jeanne, and I thrilled at the thought of finding a publisher for my first book. I drank coffee, ate chocolate, and proofread, returning for a couple of hours to the Middle Eastern life and friends I had loved so much. When I finished, I stacked the pages, tucked Jordan and Syria back into the place of memory, and drove home.

I remember sitting in the driveway that afternoon, not wanting to go back in the house, to the claustrophobic intimacy of being a caregiver.

Today I return to the Middle East of my memories as I sit at my table and proofread this book for the last time. Jeanne is gone, and I have written of our life together—over two hundred pages about living as an extended family, the caregiving, and the hospice care Jeanne began to receive just days after I sat in the driveway, reluctant to leave my book and return to my life.

I’m nearly done proofreading Through the Veil. It is time for me to return to the caregiving book, but I am reluctant to re-enter the writing project and stand face-to-face with those difficult memories. I’ve completed a new essay that may well be leading me into my next book. But I can’t leave Jeanne yet. I must go back to the manuscript, back in time to sit a while longer with my mother-in-law, to finish telling her story and mine.

Pre-ordering Available for Through the Veil

Canon Press is offering free shipping on all pre-orders of Through the Veil. Click the link on Canon's order page to read the first three chapters of Through the Veil and admire the beautiful job Laura Storm did on the layout.