Black Sheeped

What happened last Friday or Saturday or Thursday was this: we took out the dogs, and there was a five-gallon ice cream bucket on our back patio/deck, overflowing with pears.  Our neighbor, who has been asking us if we want pears from her pear tree for weeks (and we keep saying no, because Jut hates them and honestly, I know that if I had more than a few they’d sit around until they were rotting), and she had picked some and brought them over for us.  Which is so nice, and she’s been getting more forgetful lately.  But I looked around and realized she’d been on our patio, and everything looked disasterish.  Two half-dead ferns, leaves, the fencing material we’ve had for almost a year, weeds.  Inside the garage, things were way worse.  I hadn’t cleaned things up from the flooding in June (a lot of stuff just got thrown in the garage to get it out of the way), and Cab’s shed hair was coating everything.  The bushes in front needed trimmed, the weeds had overtaken everything, I hadn’t watered in weeks and weeks.  Spiderwebs from busy spiders around our front stoop, flecking paint from the hail.

I had plans for the summer.  1) Build the fence.  2) Power-wash the deck/railing in front.  3) Stain the deck.  4) Re-paint the railing.  5) Fill the front flower bed with flowers.  6) Paint the trim around the front door.  7) Fix the back door.  8) Find a new home for the washer and dryer that are still camped out in our garage.  9) Do some things with block to make the yard look more tidy.

Sunday morning, I woke up early and trimmed the bushes, did some weeding, took down two broken wind chimes.  Jut helped me move the fence stuff off the patio, and trimmed the tree branches that were taking over the clothes line.  I swept the spider webs away, we cleaned the garage.  I viciously trimmed down the ferns and watered everything.  We went to breakfast, and a store was having a sale on summer stuff.  We got two Adirondack chairs and a patio bench/table thing, and saved roughly 180 bucks.  Jut put the chairs together, and arranged them on the deck.

As I was desperately weeding, I thought about all the time that had passed.  I thought about my summer plans, I thought about buying the plants in the spring.  The lilies of the valley are still shredded, they look the same.  They struggle to stay alive, but the remaining flaps of their leaves are tired.  They remind me of the hail, they remind me of the early summer sadness.  They remind me that things can change, and that it takes a long time to recover.

I felt angry at myself, that I let so much time pass, that I hadn’t fed the birds.  That is when I realized how bad I’ve been feeling.  It’s amazing it takes a moment of realization, because: of COURSE I’d been feeling bad.  Of course things hadn’t been normal.  I’ve struggled with depression many times, but this was the first time a depression started from a tangible cause.  Some of the aspects were the same, but some were horribly different.  The normal depression doesn’t have the ache, the rawness that this kind did.  Normal depression isn’t something that I’d shoved aside, over and over.  The cycle has been this: I think about Alex, I start to feel bad, I feel really bad, I feel guilty, I shove it aside.  Things feel sort of normal for a while.  Repeat.

I know other things contributed.  The flooding, the stress, my insane hormones, my normal every-day struggle with anxiety, feeling sick, blah blah blah.

I had my realization, and that means that things will get better.  If only because maybe for two minutes I  stopped feeling guilty about not staining the deck.

Right now the badness feels physical.  It is a tightness in the back of my throat, right back where words first begin.  It is a choking, and I don’t know if it’s Alex or normal anxiety/depression or guilt about the passage of time or all three, with other things muddled up too, like bleeding and work and working through other things.

This weekend we are not going anywhere.  Everyone I know here has plans, is going to visit family or go camping.  My family is having a get-together, and we are not attending.  I feel that I need the time to do some things, because we have three whole days to do things that I want to do before winter.  I feel I need to talk a lot to my husband, and write some letters, and maybe just try to get my mind to be quiet for a while.  I feel that the three days are important for us to have, alone, and I am trying not to feel guilty about it.

The birds always come back.

What are you doing this weekend?