Some of the things that have been preoccupying my days:
Where can I get new swan plants from? The caterpillars have stripped them all but bare, but monarch butterflies are still homing in with their powerful survival instinct, so there’ll be more caterpillars, more chrysalises. Is our swan plant what the rest of the world calls milkweed?
Should I be pinching out the laterals of my tomatoes like I did in the old days with varieties that were the same as the ones dad grew? Or are these new varieties meant to bush out all haywire like this? Doesn’t matter much anyway because the birds are eating the tomatoes as fast as they ripen.
Now I’ve harvested the first 40kg or so of honey, I’ve put the wet frames back on the hives for the bees to clean up. Unlike every other time I get into the hives, I want to come back tomorrow and take off clean, dry, empty frames of comb, not weighty cells of nectar. How do the bees know that’s what’s expected of them? Should I stand by the hives and yell like Trump with the lawnmower boy?
How can we encourage Connie, the dog, to walk more? It’s not just a lazy old labrador question. In October, we woke up one morning to find Connie hobbling around the backyard like she had run a marathon the day before. Her back legs were barely functioning. I tried to take her for a walk. We didn’t get past the front gate.
By the end of the day her front legs were similarly immobile. She was stuck – a happy enough looking dog inside a body that had stopped working. Several vets and a lot of money later, the diagnosis was polyradiculoneuritis. You might know it as coonhound paralysis, but you probably won’t. It’s an auto-immune response which, in North America, can afflict dogs after they’ve had a run-in with a raccoon. I’m not sure if the name refers to coonhounds or raccoons. Connie’s not a coonhound, and she hasn’t met any raccoons, but the symptoms matched perfectly.
The vets said it was probably a response to something she had eaten, or something random in the environment. The outlook? Most dogs recover; it could take weeks or it could take months. Some owners give up along the way.
Erika at work predicted Connie would walk by Christmas. Erika seemed to be good with animals, and she talked about love and hope and acupuncture. Whatever, her prediction gave us more hope than she realised.
Connie didn’t quite walk by Christmas, but she did make amazing improvements in the wobbling and stumbling department. By New Year she was putting a few steps together. Now we can take her to the park over the road. But sometimes still she has to be carried home. Strangers stop and offer to help. “You look like you’re having trouble.” Thanks, but you try walking down the street smiling with a sack of potatoes in your arms.
Anyway, as long as there’s a discernible amount of progress from day to day, week to week, we remain encouraged.
Another concern – how to run in the kind of temperatures we only get around here a few days a decade. Well, it seems like that.
There are other preoccupations, like work. But you get the drift. We’re living in a bubble of summer. We tell ourselves a lot how lucky we are.
But turn on the news, or go online, and “lucky” doesn’t really begin to seem sufficient.
COVID rampages on. New death tolls, the new more virulent strain, a fresh round of border restrictions and lockdowns – it’s impossible to reconcile with our almost normal life.
I woke the other morning with some lines by John Ashbery trying to form in my head:
Each detail was startlingly clear, as though seen through a magnifying glass,
Or would have been to an ideal observer, namely yourself—
For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar
The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption,
Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way,
For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful …
Well, that’s what the words were when I looked them up. Ashbery doesn’t write in quotes so much as rivers of words, and sometimes the light refracts up from the river in memorable ways. Before those lines, there’s a bit about flaws built into even the most ideal scene to avoid the monotony of perfection.
Something about all that is echoing with me now. I don’t know what it means.
Of course our summer idyll won’t last. That’s life. But I’m worried it’s inevitable we’ll be plunged back into the awful reality most of the world is still living.