Tag: Nature

Pumpkin Patch

I have a pumpkin patch, though not through my own effort, desire, or design. My kids planted it this spring based on a Native American planting system termed The Three Sisters where corn, pole beans, and pumpkins are planted together. Corn, a heavy feeder, benefits from the beans which bring nitrogen into the soil. In turn, the corn stalks provide the perfect climbing frame for beans. Pumpkin plants, light feeders, provide shade to the corn and beans. These three foods, purportedly staples of native cultures that provided storable crops for winter, were planted thus to capitalize on symbiosis.

Growing in our garden this year, where we don’t have much else planted, the Three Sisters thrive. Cleverly planted in integrative harmony, each providing support, nourishment, and caring to the others, they seem very like a family. It’s been fun to watch them grow–particularly as this has not been an easy year for growing things not only in our region but all over the world. High heat is crippling much of the US and where it is not drought conditions there have been freak storms and flooding. One wishes there were a way to scoop up all that flood water up and deposit it on the hard-baked dirt, rutted with crevasses in the drought regions.

For plants to survive this kind of weather, they do rely on human intervention.

I looked out the window yesterday afternoon and my harmonic, happy plant family was wilted. The pumpkin patch looked downtrodden, drooping in the heat, and the edges of the corn leaves were dry and brittle. It was 95 degrees, not hot for us for July, but far hotter than I prefer. However, having seen the state of things, I knew I would never be able to sleep that night if I didn’t get out and water the garden.

It was hot, as I said, so I donned the only appropriate apparel, a bikini, and ventured out. I dragged the hose up the yard, waded deep into the wilted pumpkin leaves and turned the soaker on them. It made me feel better to be doing it. I imagined the cool sensation I always feel when suddenly relieved of unbearable heat, I imagined a desperate thirst being quenched by cold water.

There were pumpkins hiding everywhere amongst the foliage. I have no idea what we will do with them all, should they survive to be ripe and edible, but it was a joy just to see them; dark green globes with pale streaks of lighter green and just the beginning shading of orange in places. There were beans as well, climbing up the stalks and the first thickening of corn ears showed at various junctions.

I love to garden and haven’t been able to do much of it lately. It may have been that love-induced absorption in plant-life that prevented me from hearing the distant rumble and roll of the thunder. I first became aware of the storm when raindrops began to fall, warm as bathwater and the size of dimes. I thought about hanging up the soaker and heading indoors, but it was not clear from the partially over-cast sky how much rain would be falling. I opted to persevere, thinking too much water would probably be better than too little.

That is how my twelve-year-old daughter found me. The front door flung open as she popped her head out into the rain and shouted, “Mom! What are you doing?!”

As it would happen, that early rain had become a torrent. I looked up. The whole sky was dark, rain falling in sheets.

What was I doing?

I was watering the garden in my bikini in a down-pour.

Oh, well, at least the pumpkins are happy.

Nature Girl….Or Not….?

It’s made me wonder who I am, is what spring did.

As we go through life, we acquire ways of identifying ourselves, ways to relate our individual being to the world outside. If we have an affinity for music, we may labels ourselves musicians. If we’re drawn to drawing, we might say we’re graphic artists. If we are, inexplicably, excited by algebraic equations we could proclaim ourselves rocket scientists or mechanical engineers or at the very least math brainiacs. We have boundless external identifiers to choose from and it is the combination of natural inclination and environmental influence that leads us to conclusions about who we are and guide us into who we become.

Throughout my life, I have always thought of myself a ‘nature girl.’ If I made a list of my top ten personal identifiers and named them in order of dominance, ‘nature girl’ would be in the top three—right after ‘writer’ and before ‘dancer.’ An inherent curiosity combined with a childhood that included a horse ranch, a three hundred acre preparatory school, a thousand acre Ashram, and countless hours allowed to roam cultivated the nature girl within me. My favorite pastime was wandering through the woods or over fields with the birds and butterflies for company. I grew to love all of nature; rain, snow, sunshine, mountain tops, valleys, rivers, lakes, and streams. My love of the natural world also influenced my development as a person, I’m conscious of the environment and even my consumerism became naturally oriented, all my hair and cleaning products are biodegradable, my perfume is from natural essential oils, and even my diet is free from chemical influences.

This thing—nature—overwhelming and beautiful, inspiring and terrible, fascinating and dominating, became a part of who I believed myself to be.

Until recently.

Suddenly, without alteration of my inner self, without a mutation of my natural inclinations or a decline in my usual tastes, I cannot go outside! I have allergies, bad ones, thus the natural world I have long loved is now lost to me. If I should hope to refrain from being dreadfully ill, if I should hope to be able to continue to breathe—no longer can I roam the wilds.

It’s been a shock and has taken adjustment. You may imagine I would feel sad thinking on this—but as it happens I don’t anymore. Over the long course of our lives, we are constantly in flux, who we think of as ourselves today will be just a shadow come tomorrow. Change is the only certainty in this world but even through the course of change the essence of things remain. I am no longer able to go out into the wild to roam, but the fine seeds of that world were planted in my psyche and laid roots that extend beyond the physical. From the safety of my allergy-proof home, I remain a part of that brash wind, those groaning oaks, that amorous frog, and those earnest saplings, that optimistic grass, and the furious sunshine. I may no longer be able to justify the label ‘nature girl’ through my lifestyle but the way I see it is this:

You can take the girl out of the nature, but you can’t take the nature out of the girl.

And so, Nature Girl, I will remain—albeit an unusual one.

Juniper, Alder & Elm

Mine enemies have arrived, cloaked                                                                                        in the guise of friends. Reigning Gods

of the natural world, with swaying words                                                                          and the promise of all things good and youthful.

They steal me from myself. In bitter solitude,                                                                        I await their slow decline. Long months,

till their inevitable sleep gives me  life again.

Speaking of England….

Ah, life–never a dull moment with you.

Everyone says life can change in a flash. When it happens to you, you don’t really notice. Our car accident changed my life, but not in a way that directly makes sense. Or maybe it does—in a convoluted, everything-is-connected, things-happen-for-a-reason, philosophically-oriented sort of way.

It’s hard to find that thread at first. We hit a tree in late 2008 and now we’re moving to England. How are these two things connected? One could ask, and not immediately come up with an answer because it all started way back when I was twelve. Or thirteen. Something like that.

I have been sick forever. My symptoms have never changed, but those docs kept slapping diagnosises on me like they were the latest fashion jeans. I have been tested and diagnosed with a lot of things, and given treatments that never worked up until I got sick of doctors and stopped seeing them as they never did me any good anyway.

Then, we hit a tree. I had to see a doctor then. With very bad whiplash, it was the only sensible thing to do. Recovery from that included an initial round of muscle relaxers and heavy duty pain-killers, followed by the more “me-friendly” applications of yoga, chiropractic treatment, and exercise.

Come February, 2009, I was still feeling pretty bad. I caught a flu, nothing to worry about, just a cold and a cough that came on quite suddenly. I wasn’t going to see a doctor for it, but my youngest son was sick, too. I thought, as I’m going in, why not let them have a listen to me while I was there? It couldn’t hurt and my lungs did sound gurgley. This turned out to be one of those accidentally brilliant decisions. I had ‘silent lungs’ which, as an asthma sufferer will tell you, is not a good thing to have. It means a portion of your lungs have become so inflamed, the air has been trapped inside them, preventing good things from happening, such as getting enough oxygen. Silent lungs will get a doctor hustling. I had some kind of breathing treatment immediately, a scrip written for oral steroids and was given an albuterol inhaler. My son, as it happens, was perfectly fine.

Thus began my love affair with asthma. Do not get asthma if you can avoid it; it is not fun.

Though no doctor has ever said it, I think my asthma finally appeared out of the blue at forty years old due to the car accident. The spinal column is your nerve center, with all communication to and from that master planner, the brain, running through it, out to our extremities and vital organs and then back to the brain. It seems to me that the hit my upper back took from that tree could certainly trigger a condition that might have lurked in me for years. Once I got my inhaler and used it a few times, I realized I had been having asthma symptoms all my life, I just hadn’t realized that tight-chested, breathlessness was an asthma attack. It was a normal part of my world, and only with the inhaler did I realize it was correctable.

Asthma. One more diagnosis to add to my list. I wanted to know why I had asthma. I always want to know why. It doesn’t matter what it is, I want to know why it is. One type of asthma is allergy induced. At some point, I had been diagnosed with allergies to chemicals. I knew you could also be allergic to other things. In talking with my doctor, we opted to get me a thorough allergy panel and see if there was more going on than the chemical sensitivity.

If you could see me now, you would realize, I am laughing out loud. It’s funny, but in that very awful sort of way. I was tested for 70 allergens. I tested positive to 43. If you’ve read this blog before now, this won’t be news to you. As it turns out, allergies is what I’ve been suffering from forever—those same set of symptoms with multiple diagnosises turned out to be allergies plain and simple. Well, plain, maybe–but not so simple.

It’s hard to be that allergic. You feel as if everything is making you sick because, in fact, it is. Once I found out, I dutifully took two doses of antihistamines daily as prescribed. Everyone asked if they made me feel sleepy. Are you kidding? I have been fighting chronic fatigue since I was twelve years old; antihistamines finally gave me some of my energy back. I have often wondered if being so sick is why I simultaneously became focused on health. I eat a great diet. I work out. I practice stress-reduction techniques. I drink gallons of water, I limit my fat and sugar intake. My blood-work is beautiful. I realize now, I have to do all of that–just to feel reasonably well. I have fatigue so crippling at times, I feel as if I am dragging myself through quicksand and I can get sick in a minute, seemingly out of the blue. At any moment, on any given day, I can come across something that knocks me out. That is what being highly allergic is like. It’s like being repeatedly ambushed by the world. I would do anything to avoid being made sick. It’s just not easy to know what to do.

All of this leads us up to this Spring. I was taking antihistamines, I was feeling really good. Life was happy and I was happy in it. I planted a big garden. That same one I went on about in my last post. I enjoyed every moment of fresh air and planting until the pollen started to kick. Being out side in pollen is like having fine sand thrown in my eyes all day. I itched, I coughed and I relied on my antihistamines to protect me.

In my defense, I have only known I’ve had allergies for one year, so I’m not the smartest patient in understanding how to deal with them. Avoidance is, apparently, the best measure. I was not fully aware of this going into Spring. We had record pollen levels in VA and by April 15th, having overexposed myself to the blooming world, I was sick. I was Patagonia Dreamin’ because it hurt to breathe. It hurt to think, to move my eyes. My joints ached, my muscles cramped. I dragged through every day at work and collapsed once I got home. I had lost my beautiful life, once again, to ill health.

In trying to recover, I locked myself indoors, cried over the loss of my beautiful garden which I couldn’t tend, cried over the loss of my horses which I could no longer care for, and cried over the loss of the outside world, which I loved. After all the crying, I took a good, hard look at my life. I realized I needed to do things differently. Of course, I talked with doctors first. What that boiled down to was a recommendation I go on low-level steroids. With my sensitive nervous system, they might as well book me a white-walled room now. I’ve been on oral steroids; they are not good for my mental health.

On occasion, I tend to show slightly obsessive tendencies, particularly when I have a problem to sort out. Understanding pollen was my problem, I became obsessed with learning about pollen and how to avoid it. It turns out, there is pollen everywhere. With the exception of Siberia are the top and bottom of the globe, pollen a part of the natural world I love so well. But, this is not the end of the story. There are places that have better pollen profiles. Cool, rainy climates, with shorter growing seasons mean that pollen exposure is minimized. Mountainous regions also have this same affect. Can anyone say…Patagonia? I can’t really move to southern Argentina. It’s not practical, but there is a place I can move that looks much better from a pollen perspective. Can anyone say…England?

Lucky for me, I married a Brit.

We’re moving. Once the house sells, we’re going to a place less plagued by pollen levels and I will, hopefully, for the first time in my life, breath a little easier and itch a little less.

Cheerio, peeps! Onward, ho!, to Britain!

Garden Ahoy!

Each year as frost gives way to budding grass, and the stark shells of the trees get fleshed out with foliage; we begin to plan the garden. It’s a favorite late-winter past-time, a ritual my husband and I have re-played for years.

In our early life together, we had big dreams. Back then, we didn’t merely wish to grow a couple of vegetables, a few herbs and shrubs. We wanted to live off-the-grid, to be self-sufficient. At 19 and 24, as we ourselves were just starting to grow, we read everything we could find about passive solar heating, grey-water septic systems, composting toilets. We read how to build pole-and-beam straw bale houses, earth bermed houses, and tire-rammed earthships aligned to face the south so the long, angled windows running across the front would let the most light in during the winter months to grow indoor vegetables and the least light in during the summer-time to keep the place cool. In between planning and dreaming, life moved on. We worked our day-jobs, and one baby, then two and then two and two more came along. Somewhere on that journey, the dream slipped away, lost to the reality of raising six children.

But, the love for gardening never budged. Each year, as February drew to a close, we would haul out the seed catalogs and plan out our garden. Many years, that was as far as we got and the dream of the dirt patch of veggies remained a dream as every Saturday was given over the Soccer games and grocery shopping, clothes shopping, and trips to the mall. We let go because we had to; stretched as thin as we were, even one more thing would have been one more thing too many.

Even though we didn’t have a physical garden, the love for it remained, dormant like a seed over winter, waiting for the right conditions to spring forth.

Once in a while, extreme stress is the greatest catalyst for change. Raising six kids is not easy. It is constant hard work. Rewarding, yes, but close to all-consuming. Anyone who has worked at that kind of pace knows, eventually, the foundation begins to crack. You can only give up everything you love to do for so long. As the stress builds up, it wears you down and like a small animal trapped in a hole, you begin to look for ways out of the rut. In our attempt to survive the pressures of our lives, we remembered gardening. We recalled plotting out the land, ordering seeds, and those long hours spent in the early spring sun. It had been years since we’d had a proper garden, but last year, we decided to plant again.

Last winter, we plotted, last spring we planted. We were still over-worked, over-tired, over-stressed, but when we stepped out into the yard, things were growing and we were eating them. Fresh basil and tomatoes off the vine, two kinds of squash, more pole beans than we knew what to do with. We had cucumbers, kale and collards, a few brave carrots and beats, and a spattering of spring mix as our earliest crop of the season.

It was inspiring to see things grow, to feel the cool of the earth and the warm sun shining. It was encouraging to see we actually had time, if we made the effort, that we could take at least a little of that long ago dream and weave it into the lives we led now. Our garden was a success!

This February we began, even more inspired.

As of this day, May 14, 2010 we have planted: spring mix, carrots, kale, collards, spinach, tomatoes, bell and jalapeno peppers, three kinds of squash, corn, potatoes, watermelon, peas, beats, turnips, radishes, onions, sunflowers, cauliflower, basil, oregano, cilantro, chamomile, rosemary, strawberries, and probably a few other things I’m forgetting. We’ve been eating fresh greens and radishes for a couple of weeks now and everything else is coming on well.

I don’t think either of us are seriously considering a life off the grid at the moment—at least not before the kids leave home. These days, our garden is haven, a sanctuary of peace and contentment. It is a chance to remember our dreams. Moving through life, so many things fall to the side, pushed away by responsibility. Doing this one thing, simply for the love of doing it, makes our lives better. There’s simplicity in gardening: when weeding, we weed, when tilling, we till. There is nothing else beyond these simple tasks, nothing to worry over or plan for, there’s just the dirt, the green things growing and the bright sun overhead.

Spring = Depression

No season is waited for with such longing as is Spring. Shaking off the cold of winter, the entire world bursts forth. Trees pollinate, plants propagate, and all variety of animals bring their own fierce joy to the season by mating. Baby everything’s are born, flowers, calves, sheep, horses. After that quiet dead of winter, all is renewed, alive, awake and ready to play. All, that is, except the allergy sufferer.

I found out I had allergies last year after developing asthma; prior to that my mysterious ill-health wore many cloaks: IBS, CFS, MCS, MDI, Fibromyalgia. Because I have a-typical symptoms, not the classic rhinitis, no one was looking at my collection of symptoms as being related to allergies. It took asthma to connect the dots. My lack of ability to breathe had to come from somewhere. We looked around and found, through allergy testing, that I am allergic. I am not violently allergic to any one thing, for which I am grateful. Instead, I am low-level allergic to many things; 43 things out of the 70 tested for, to be exact. After a lifetime of mystery illness, suddenly I have a name: allergies. I have indoor allergies, outdoor allergies, pet allergies, allergies to mold, food allergies, and early, mid and late season allergies to trees, weeds, and grasses. In short, the entire blooming world is making me feel sick! Faced with those kinds of odds, late last year, I began a regime of anti-histamines. Anti-histamines are wonderful. I no longer itch twenty times a day; I do not have repeated violent bouts of abdominal pain, my knees are not swelling, my joints don’t ache and, best of all, I can breathe.

My anti-histamines brought me relief over the winter months, while closed up with dogs and dust-mites, and so I headed into Spring with optimism and good cheer, believing I would manage to skip by, unscathed, through pollen season and into the heady summer.

I did not know then what I know now. The uncomfortable physical symptoms that had plagued me all of my grown life are not the greatest burden of an allergy sufferer. My anti-histamines, gallant though they are, cannot completely quell the itching, swelling, sneezing, wheezing, coughing, and aching joints that accompany my allergic reactions to the most pollinated spring in known memory. They did a pretty good job of it. Had it been only for those, I would not complain. But, allergies have an undertow, a hidden foe that lives beneath the radar, a shadow condition that no one talks about and that is Allergy-Induced Depression.

I have always hated the Spring. Each April, as the world around me bursts forth in plant life and song, I want to crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head and sleep and until I somehow feel well enough to be alive. Over time, I came to accept this aberration of my mood unique to spring. I identified this time of year as one where I, in contrast to all else around me, wanted to go into hibernation while everything else was coming out. What I did not fully realize until this very Spring was the reason behind my desire to hibernate. My anti-histamines do a very nice job of keeping the other symptoms at bay; they do nothing for the lead-headed, mind-numbed, slowed-way-down, utterly exhausted feelings arising from allergy-induced depression. I know it is not my life. I love my husband, my children, my community, and my place of employment. I have a multitude of good things going on I wish to continue. My life is not to blame. The problem is in my brain, my broken brain, like a clock that has seasonally stopped ticking, even now, I cannot say when my brain will begin to tick again.

Seasons of Snow and Rain

It’s funny, the circles life makes. At exactly this time last year, I was longing for snow. I remember that feeling, how I watched the weather forecast and the sky, hoping.

This winter, without hoping, without bone-deep longing, snow fell all over the place. Our first snow came before Christmas. A most inconvenient time, it didn’t even slow us down. We still had shopping to do, parties to plan and attend. That snow came and went with just a whisper of its passing left on my psyche.

It snowed again. That time, I got out, left my house and walked amid the scent and silence of freshly fallen snow. I loved it.

Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Last winter, we slipped off the barest minimum of ice and hit a tree head-on. In the wake of that event, I had whiplash—which I still deal with—and a biting fear of slick and icy roads. Anytime our vehicle seemed to skid sideways, my hands gripped the seat, my heart began to pound.

This winter, I have experienced a lot of seat-gripping, heart-pounding while riding and driving. This winter, we’ve had more snow that I can ever recall. I’ve been forced to traverse roads once determined impassable. I’ve driven on ice, snow, and inches of deep slush. I’ve slipped over road-ways to get to the store, to work, and to the gas station for fuel for the generator. I’ve shoveled, pushed and prayed more than one vehicle out onto the roads then shook in my boots to drive on them.

For a while, anyway.

Desensitization does appear to be a genuine and effective way of overcoming one’s fear. As the days wore on and the snow became a permanent VA fixture, I got used to the terror of driving. I got so now I don’t even blink at an icy patch, don’t even flinch if I slip-skid off to the left or veer completely side-ways. I’ve adjusted to my new, snowy landscape and Eskimo style of living.

You may imagine, then—as the old saying goes—the familiarity of the snow would breed contempt, that I like nearly everyone I know would grow tired of sloshing through snow drifts and dealing with all those unpleasant side-effects of this weather: no electricity, no phone, every day a long hike up a steep drive. You would imagine these would mar or at least somewhat diminish my affection for snow.

I remain enamored, delightfully enchanted whenever it begins to fall. I wrap up in running pants, under armor, long sleeved knitted shirt, wool socks pulled over my pants, carhart overalls, a long-sleeved wool top, my coat, my hat, then my boots and out I go into the crisp, cold air. I breathe deeply, drinking it in and stand amazed by the fairy world I behold. I can’t help that my eyes love to look on a snow-coated landscape. I can’t help that my lungs love to breathe cold air. Every single thing about snow makes me happy: crystallized tree-tops, the crunch of my boots in the diamond strewn fields, the stillness with just the occasional bird chirping and flitting from limb to limb, the dark of the trees, stark against this white backdrop, the contrast of color, the bright scent of pine, and the rattling of frozen things clanking together, the impossible brightness of the sunlight reflected. I feel alive when I’m out there. My heart hums to this landscape and I spin and let the snowflakes fall, cold kisses on my unturned face.

No matter the hardships—this year there were plenty—no matter the early terror of driving or the lingering environmental burden brought on by this weather, I have found, as much as I ever did before, that I completely love the snow.

Today, with the pitter-pattering of rain, that early herald of Spring, the snow I love, that I once prayed and longed for, washes all away.

That is way of the seasons: nothing remains forever, no matter how much we may love it, everything goes when it’s time.