I’m not cooking fabulous meals, and I’m not running around Dallas doing fabulously fun stuff because I’m spending every minute that I’m not cleaning, doing laundry, running errands, overseeing homework, showering, or writing — out in the garden. There is nothing fabulous about gardening, but being in a beautiful garden is fabulous, and I can make that happen by Spring if I work hard now.
This week in Paris, the French authorities arrested a man named Callixte Mbarushimana at the request of the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands. Mr. Mbarushimana is wanted for charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is allegedly one of the leaders of F.D.L.R., a military group in central Sub-Saharan Africa that has perpetuated shocking atrocities against civilians in a bid for power. They are going to extradite him to The Hague to stand trial.
I don’t know enough to say anything more about what’s going on in Africa. But I do know this one thing, and that’s a start, because if I don’t know then I can’t care.
I’ve seen a lot of men planting beds of pansies this week. It’s time to get them in the ground, when it’s not so hot that they will wilt but still warm enough to let them put out roots before the freeze comes. I always wonder, about the men I see digging in the dirt on their hands and knees. I wonder whether they are getting minimum wage, or whether they are day laborers willing to work for $3/hr, because 12 hours at $3/hr cash is enough to buy dinner for their families. I wonder whether the people who own the houses in front of which they are planting winter annuals will let them use the bathroom, and if so, whether it will be the guest bathroom or the one off the laundry room. Will they bring out a cooler of ice water, or feed them lunch, realizing that the cost of a Big Mac Meal might be a significant portion of the man’s daily pay. I know these are things to consider because I am lucky enough to be good enough friends with people who work as day laborers that they share them with me.
I also wonder what they think when they drive by, sitting six in the bed of a pickup, on their way to or from a job, and see me in front of my house, on my hands and knees, with F.C.U.K sprawled across the backside of the French Connection U.K. sweatpants I wore so often to chemotherapy, setting out pansies. I know for a fact that they think, correctly, that I’m doing it wrong. I’m not strong enough to break through the Texas clay and limestone in my yard with a shovel or a trowel, or a hoe, so I got out the hose with the super-high-pressure nozzle attached, and offered up a prayer of thanks for my plumber friend who showed me this nifty gadget in the hose section of Home Depot, and fixed it up with an on-off lever that even I can use. Instead of digging, I blasted holes in the packed dirt in my yard to plant pansies in, raking the weeds and dead grass roots out of the soupy mud with my pink breast cancer awareness gardening tool Chris gave me for Christmas two years ago. Immediately, I was splattered in mud, but my mad plan worked. I planted a flat of pansies in the window of time between when I bought the pansies after lunch and when I had to leave to pick my kids up at school. I even had time to clean my tools, spray the mud off the sidewalk, and shower most of the mud off of me.
I have four flats of pansies left. I know what I am doing tomorrow.
I probably could find someone do it for me, the right way, with a spade, not the high pressure hose. But I won’t.
Fort Worth City Councilman Joel Burns, you make me proud to be a Texan.
Thank you.
Our new house is perfect. It really is. It has flaws, and I love each and every flaw, because every one of the tiny things about our house that makes it not perfect all came together for my benefit in that this big beautiful house was within our budget, and we were lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time with an extraordinary real estate broker. It was a miracle, and every time I drive up, I am thankful.
There was less than a month between when we first made the offer and when we closed on the house, so, while we did our due diligence on the big things (our house has no major issues), we did not notice the small things until after we’d moved in.
The first of these was the large tree in the front yard. Every major limb was rotten to the point of being hollow. We’d planned to take it down and replace it within a year, but a month after we moved in, one of the limbs cracked and started leaning on our house. The tree was down the next week, much to the dismay of our tree-hugging neighbors who feel, like the prior residents of our house, that any tree is a good tree, even a non-native notorious house-destroyer. I’ve since planted four new trees in the front yard, a (native) maple, a ginkgo, and two (native) Mexican plums. All’s well in the tree department, but the shock of losing a major shade tree killed half of my lawn.
With no sprinkler system, making the garden look respectable again is going to be a challenge .
You read that right.
My wonderful, big, beautiful brick McMansion on a creek in my favorite neighborhood in Dallas does not have an underground irrigation system.
I am certain that the prior owners of this house, who had it custom-built, did it deliberately, as a cost-saving measure (they spent money on things that mattered, like great construction) but also out of concern for the environment, since sprinkler systems are notorious water-wasters. And, if I had left the Arizona ash in place, I, too, would have been able to maintain my lawn with a hose-fed old-fashioned sprinkler. The rest of the garden was fine, but nothing special, overgrown in some places, but mostly thin grass. Since the weather turned cool a month ago, I’ve been working outside in the yard nonstop, and so has Chris. We’ve cleared out a lot of brush, put down ryegrass seed, transplanted bushes, and planted eighteen trees. I’ve been outside with the hose for two hours every day trying to give my new garden a good start.
I love working outside. I love being able to BE outside. I love having the strength to hold the hose for two hours. I love having the cognitive ability to remember where I have watered, and where I have not. I love being able to figure out how to use the nozzle on my sprayer. I love being able to read, and research, and plan, and figure out what trees will work well where, and I love my husband for understanding that planting trees as soon as possible is a good idea, for earning the resources that allowed me to go out and buy eighteen trees in a month, and for not complaining too much when it means we will be eating beans from now until Christmas.
“”Work in your garden,” was what “they” said to me, when I finished cancer treatment and asked, “What do I do now.”
I know what they mean now when they talk about work being an offering of praise and thanksgiving.
Written on my driveway, in bright green chalk, is this:
Please clean up
your dog’s poop
in my yard
Next time I will use multicolor chalk, like this:
I have cancer. My immune system
is compromised. Cleaning up your
dog’s poop could kill me.
I love sidewalk chalk.
People have asked me whether I am out to promote the gay agenda. I’m not actually sure there is a gay agenda.
I do get hot under the collar when people make homophobic comments in front of me, because my brother is gay, and I think maybe 8% of my friends are gay, although I haven’t actually counted, and would I count really close friends or just people I say “hi” to? I could ask my facebook friends to self-identify … awkward. I write about gay rights because it’s an easy topic to discuss in a witty style. There’s a lot of fodder out there.
If I do have an agenda, it is to stand up for basic human and civil rights on behalf of the 12 million men, women, and children living, working, and paying taxes in this country without the protection afforded to the rest of us by the laws that govern our land. I am talking about people whose immigration status is uncertain: about illegal immigrants.
. . .
In an effort to process the enormity of what has happened to me, of what it means to get Really Bad Cancer and then survive it, I play an extremely dysfunctional game with myself. I play, “Would I switch places?” When I see or hear about someone whose luck is just terrible, who is the victim of a genuine tragedy, I ask myself, “Would I switch places with that person?”
Usually the answer is “Of course!” Unemployment? Foreclosure? Bankruptcy? Home invasion robbery that leaves you unharmed but scares the stuffing out of you and leaves you unable to sleep? Terrible car accident? Hurricane? Lightning? Smog? Absolutely. I’d switch places in a flash.
I was talking a few months ago with the nephew of a friend of mine, a kid whose parents brought him to this country as a small child to give him a better life. I’ve been helping him apply to college as an international student. He’s smart as a whip, nice, funny, a great athlete, and any college would be lucky to get him. He’s one of the 12 million with no viable path to citizenship, and he and I were talking about what it is like. He told me about the fear of his parents being deported, working in terribly unsafe conditions, about not having access to health care, about not being able to call the police or the fire department, about the fear that any small event could trigger the breakup of his family, that INS could come into his house at any moment, take away his parents, and send him to a country he has not lived in since before he could read or write.
Would I switch places? Not on your life.
When living with the fear of everything that can happen to you as an undocumented alien is worse than having “terminal” cancer, something is terribly wrong.
I love to spend time looking for lols on the internet. It is a holdover from when I was sick and I couldn’t do much else, plus, it’s the best of American pop culture, filtered and distilled.
Some things crack me up, like this map of Europe. And this response.
It’s funny, of course, because it is true. We do see each other that way. Why, I wonder?
It’s easier, for one. The enormity of processing the individuality of each individual is overwhelming, so we create boxes to put people in, because we, as people, aren’t smart enough not to. We box each other up into crates categorized by appearance, by dialect and accent, by size, by level of education, by faith, dress, and even by the music we listen to, and we do it to everyone we meet, and we get all huffy and hurt-feelings when anyone ever does it to us. I do it too, although I try not to.
Do I feel a sense of satisfaction when I see that, according to some map someone drew to be funny, the state I live in, Texas, gets singled out as somehow different from the rest of America? I think it’s funny. I also think that a lot of people who live in Texas identify very strongly with being Texan, certainly more so than, say, Florida or New Hampshire, other states I have lived in. Many Texans really, truly, and I am not making this up, do call non-Texans who live here “foreigners.” On the occasions when I have run into trouble fitting into the culture here, it’s usually because I’ll come out and say that “I don’t think Dallas, Texas is the be-all-and-end-all of places to live,” and many Texans react to this opinion as if I had said “I like to kill and eat puppies.” Texan pride often reminds me of living in Japan, where no bridge will ever span the chasm between Japanese and not-Japanese.
Certainly, shared experience creates a bond. I know that a lot of stuff does not need to be explained when I hang around with other people who are cancer survivors. Or other people who went to college in the Northeast. Or other people who are living in a family, like mine, that is a mixture of Latino and white culture. Or other people who are short. Or who wear plaid. Or writers. Or people who listen to classical music. Or people who play World of Warcraft. If I were to box myself in, think of myself primarily as belonging to a certain category, and associate primarily with people who fit into that category, I’d miss out on a lot.
Chris used to ask that when I told him what I was planning for dinner and it was something he couldn’t imagine. Once, I said, “One day, I’m going to make bad food so that question will have some meaning.”
I don’t cook from recipes. I read cookbooks and, Chris says, I have this computer in my brain that cross-references every cooking magazine or cookbook I have ever read with the ingredients in the refrigerator and pantry at any given time spits out a dinner plan. Every night. My first attempt at creating a blog was writing about food. When people I know hear that I am writing, they ask, “Oh, are you writing about cooking?” I’m a food person and a good cook — or at least I used to be.
Now, I’m not really sure what is in the fridge, apart from nameless beige leftovers and way too much cheese, assuming that there is such a thing as too much cheese.
I do try to make different things for my kids, but they really like chicken nuggets, so we eat them a lot, and as far as starch, they eat it all — oven roasted potatoes, rice, pasta, and bread. This morning we had farro for breakfast, and they liked that, but mostly their diet is shockingly like the one they tell us not to feed our kids, except that I’m fussy about the way things taste so the overall food quality is all right, I make a lot of things from scratch, and I do put vegetables and fruits on the table for every meal.
It’s a far cry from what Chris is used to, from the days before I had two kids and cancer, where five nights out of seven, I’d whip up something delicious and healthy.
I don’t know whether it is a time thing, a brain-shut-down thing at the end of the day, or a spiral of dysfunctionality when I let the kitchen get messy, but tonight, I made the old standby cheesy rice casserole, but I forgot to salt the rice and then I forgot to salt or pepper or even garlic powder the casserole and I didn’t put ham in it and somehow I did a bad job chopping the broccoli (!!) and I have to look at myself and say, “Chris asked for cheesy rice casserole and you made it badly.”
Chris doesn’t complain, but this time, he didn’t have to, and I’ll try to do better. I know other moms have problems like this, and it should be normal, and funny, and I should laugh about it, but I just freeze up, and I fail, and I can’t help but think that it’s harder for me than it should be.
I also know somewhere someone is reading this blog and thinking that Chris can cook his own dinner. I suggest that you walk a mile in his shoes before you pass judgement.
They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
I’m not French, nor do I live in France, and I am not Muslim, nor do I wear a burqa. This does not stop me from thinking that France’s new Anti-burqa law is pretty stupid, although I tepidly applaud the purported pro-woman’s rights sentiment that inspired it, according to people who say that the French are never bigoted [against Muslims]. It’s much too confusing for me. In fact, it’s all wrong and I have had nothing good to say about the whole mess.
Vive la France, indeed.
I know what I am doing for Halloween.
Dance with the Reaper 
