mallorys_camera | Entries tagged with garden

Deep feeling of lassitude throughout yesterday, like my bones were made of rubber bands or something. I was tired, but there was no reason for me to be tired.

Naturally, I took this to mean I have some lethal disease. Maybe multiple myeloma—Ben had multiple myeloma, it was one of the two diagnoses that may have killed him (the other being liver cancer).

Ben's multiple myeloma announced itself in a weird way.

For months & months, he'd been limping around with sciatica, which is basically one of those wait-and-heal things. His "sciatica," though, just kept growing more & more painful until eventually he went to see a doctor for X-rays—and lo & behold, his left pelvis was fractured. But he didn't remember injuring it!

They ran a slew of tests and found the malignant plasma cells that had eaten away his bones.

Multiple myeloma is not an automatic death sentence if it's managed.

But, of course, Ben's multiple myeloma had never been managed.

Between diagnosis and death rattle, it was something like seven short weeks.

I've had that on-again, off-again ache in my right shoulder for many weeks now.

It's gotta be multiple myeloma, right?

###

Since I was dying, I decided to treat myself.

Cruised into New Paltz and had eggs Benedict at my favorite Main Street café. (Breakfast is actually my favorite meal to eat out.)

Bought books. This actually turned out to be a bust: There was an author, David Liss, whom Ben & I had both liked. He wrote serious historical novels (meaning neither Regency romances nor Forever Amber). So, I plucked his latest off the Used Books shelf, something called The Twelfth Enchantment, which turned out to be a rather clunkily written adult fantasy novel. Terrible! I guess this is something that happens to people who make their living writing; at a certain point, you run out of ideas and interest in beautifully crafted sentences and just write for word count since you have a contract to fulfill.

Spent a couple of hours weeding but did not have the stamina to climb Mt. Dirt and cart away buckets of soil. Plus I ran into Phil, and he told me, the soil was great—but you have to sift it. How the hell do you sift soil?

I guess I'll find out when I'm back from Ithaca next week.

Whatever else you can say about the Wallkill Valley, this one thing is true: It is heartstoppingly beautiful, particularly in the spring when all the greens are tender and fresh, and the breeze carries the scent of stone fruit blossoms.

This weekend was the Gardiner Art Studio tour. Gardiner is suburban New Paltz, and New Paltz is a hippie preserve, where the last hippies roam free, practicing the ancient arts of organic farming, artisanal cheese-making, and handcrafting hideous tie-dye teeshirts. Please to note that in our rapidly technologically mutating world, anything over 20 years old is "ancient," particularly, or should I say, especially moi.

The Gardiner Art Studios are not in Gardiner but scattered along the backcountry roads that crisscross the plateau just below the Shawangunk Ridge. So, the tour basically gave me an excuse to explore the countryside. It was a gorgeous day. A bit cool, so the air had a prismatic quality.

The art was nothing to write home about. But, hey! It was art. Its creators poured their hopes, dreams, & fears into it. I would have bought it all for vast sums of money if I could.

Watch on YouTube

I also spent time at the New Paltz Community Garden. There was a meeting for new gardeners. Technically, I'm not a new gardener. But after joining last year, I did nothing with my half plot after weeding out the five-foot tall nettles—first, there was a hot spell for two weeks where you would basically succumb to heat stroke after five minutes if you ventured forth there even at 6 in the morning, then the person in the other half of the plot planted a bunch of her own tomatoes there. I could have raised a stink about it—That's my land!—but figured, Why?

Also, Brian was dead. Which dampened my enthusiasm for just about everything.

Anyway, they gave me another half-plot this year. I'm on probation, though.

I will wander out there for a few hours today to finish the last of the heavy weeding and transport some dirt. The New Paltz Community Garden is right next to the Wallkill River; the Wallkill River floods periodically, displacing huge amounts of rich, river-bottom soil. The Community Garden elders arrange to have that soil collected in a huge mound, free for the having. It's kind of a hassle transporting it to your own garden site, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do, etc., etc., etc.

I also need to pack & prep for my trip to Ithaca. I'm going up tomorrow to hang out with RTT for a few days, which should be the Big Fun. Haven't seen him since November! He has some political pow-wows scheduled, and he's gonna take me with him, so I'll get to see him in action.

I note that RTT seems to have adopted Zohran Mamdani as his personal style icon.

Hmmmm...

Real reason I like gardening?

I like playing in dirt.

But it did dawn on me yesterday while I was driving past the gas station where I've been fueling up regularly for the past two years that now there's an even more compelling reason to garden. Namely, I like to eat.

Prices at this gas station, which have hovered at the $2.99/gallon mark plus or minus 20¢ for the entire time I've been using it, were up to $4.50/gallon yesterday. That's a 50% increase in six weeks. And naturally, those transportation costs are baked into every single thing you purchase.

You can defer purchasing most things, but you can't defer purchasing food.

It's fuckin' infuriating.

These people who voted for that addled clown in the White House are still not willing to admit they made a bad call. Their lives are collapsing around them, but hey! it was worth it to keep all those guys who want to be girls and girls who want to be guys from messing with the genitalia God gave them.

###

In other news, I managed to incorporate the comic bit with oversharing metamour into Section 1, though I have no idea whether it reads funny.

Also when I went down to the kitchen to make coffee this morning at 5 am—like I say, I'm an inveterate early riser—I saw a small University of Utah notebook on the kitchen island, and I opened it.

Editorial aside: You never want to leave a confidential document around me. I am Harriet the Spy, and I will read it!

I figured the notebook belonged to the oldest Spawn who left the University of Utah under mysterious circumstances.

Instead, it turned out to belong to Icky who has been using it as a kind of sporadic diary.

I do not care about clothes, Icky wrote. His handwriting is very spiky. Calligraphy on acid. I care about chemistry, connections, intellect.

I was shocked to see my own name: Patrizia oil story right over Scoring story.

Scoring?

And what possible Patrizia oil story could there be? I made Patrizia freeze for two weeks because I neglected to order heating oil?

The diary entries only occupied a handful of pages at the beginning of the notebook, but one of the last things he'd scribbled: Don't use when kids are in the house—

Oh.

OF COURSE.

Duh.

Icky has a cocaine habit.

Figures. Cocaine is the only drug he's ever admitted to enjoying—he doesn't do pot, he doesn't do alcohol—and he's signaled his enjoyment of it on several occasions by making non-sequitur eightball quips that were peculiar in context, to say the least.

As an alumnus of The Rolling Stone glam squad, he certainly has access. And he has the income to afford it.

Well, well, well.

Cocaine is only a fun drug for the first couple of snorts. It produces a very benificent high that turns you into the omniscient narrator.

That third snort—well. You do it hoping to regain that spectral perspective of that first snort. Only you get jumpy, and it doesn't.

I know! I'll do more, you think. Only those fouth, fifth, and sixth snorts don't work either, and pretty soon, you're desperate to crawl out of your skin—

I loathe cocaine.

Last time I was offered some, I rolled my eyes: "No fuckin' way."

Anyway, if Icky is a cokehead, that explains a lot.

On a sunny morning when I've slept decently, there's no such thing as existential angst. Sure, the world is going to hell. Hasn't the world always been going to hell? It's only the versions of hell that differ.

Anyway, today is a day when the sky is blue, and the Fitbit—a minor household god—tells me I logged seven hours of "fair" rest. (I have no idea how Fitbit differentiates between "poor," "fair," and "good.")

Yesterday, however, was not: I felt fuckin' awful, like a vegetarian zombie or something: Yes, I should eat someone, but I don't feel like it!

I made the money I needed to make and then took off on errands. Got lost in the strip mall sprawl that is commercial Middletown. (Farmland just 20 years ago.) Found myself in front of a gigantic Goodwill, which I took to be a sign from God. (And behold! Esau thrifted.)

Then real-life Mimi texted me. I had helped her with her tax return, and she wanted to know where her EIC-enhanced refund was. Like how the fuck would I know, girl?

The IRS maintains a website called, conveniently enough, Where's My Refund? I directed her there, adding, If you’re listed as owing money to the IRS, though, they’ll apply any refund toward that. Do you owe? Because I'd told her she should let me do her 2024 taxes at the same time I did her 2025 taxes since, of course, she hadn't filed those. But she wouldn't let me.

Turns out she owed money, and the IRS was withholding her refund until one of its few remaining human employees could find time to do the arithmetic.

Okay so I just shouldn't count on anything then. I give up! she texted.

Thing with real-life Mimi is that one can never be quite sure whether she's just being rhetorically melodramatic or her extreme emotional volatility is steering her in the direction of self-harm (which would be a cause for alarm).

I know she was counting on that tax money to fund her move from Brian's cabin where she has been staying rent-free for the last nine months. Real-life Flavia (who owns the deed to the place) has been the soul of generosity here, but behind the scenes, Flavia's BFF Betsy & I had been agonizing over New York State's squatter laws because it's never easy to predict what real-life Mimi is going to do, just when she's going to turn hostile.

Standing in front of the Middletown Goodwill (where I fully expected to harvest an entire summer wardrobe for the low, low price of under $100), I had the crazy notion that I would just give Mimi $1,000 to finance the move. After all, this is what Brian's ghost would want me to do, right?

It's the same feeling that prompted Flavia to let Mimi stay in the cabin: Brian loved her, Brian would have wanted her to be cared for.

But if Brian loved her and wanted her to be taken care of so much, he should have left her some money in his will, right?

I must channel my inner Mick Jagger!

It's just. I make so little money right now. I'm trying my best to make this work, she texted, and if someone else had said this to me, my heart would have gone out to them—poor gallant, valiant soul! Yes, times are incredibly tough, and there but for the grace of God etc, etc, etc. Who knew then there would ever come a time when we would all be old and limited?

But the thing is I don't actually like real-life Mimi.

You could start a GoFundMe, I texted.

What the hell! I'd kick in twenty bucks!

Or I could sell some of my ceramics, she texted back.

No-oo-ooo, don't do that! I thought. Because I'd feel compelled to buy some, and I hate your bloody ceramics.

###

In garden news, I weeded out 40 pounds or so of nettles day before yesterday. It was a cloudy, cold day, which, while excellent for avoiding sunstroke, is not the kind of day I enjoy gardening. However, work that must be done is work that must be done.

Shortly, I will wander back over to finish the job. Since it's sunny today (though decidedly cool), I should enjoy the work more.

###

In Work in Progress news, I thought of a comic scene that would work well inserted into the opening section of Chapter 7: Flavia, who scrupulously avoids introductions to Neal's other poly partners, somehow gets dragooned into going out to dinner with one (plus Neal). Polly Partner starts revealing awful sexual secrets: How Neal had to teach her how to have vaginal orgasms again after her episiotomy; how after a lusty bout of anal sex, she had several days of plopping small poops—did that happen to Flavia, too?

Only yesterday, I was in the throes of sleep-&-sunshine-deprived existential despair and could not write anything—which doubtless meant that I would never be able to write anything ever again, especially not comedy, which requires a light touch.

I'll give it another whirl today.

Two things I'm conscientious about on a daily basis: making money and exercising.

I had to sign an ADA for the latest revenue-generating scheme, and the gig has no security: It could end tomorrow or maybe even after dinner tonight! (True of freelance writing, too, of course.)

But the work itself is so entertaining, I sometimes have a hard time pulling myself away from it. My years and years of Photoshop expertise finally paying off! And also a certain facility for what one might call imagination-casting, I suppose. I can make the nut in four hours a day—but I can also make extra. Ya gotta cut hay while the sun shines! I tell myself. True dat, but it does eat into time allocated to the Work in Progress.

###

I've increased my exercise tolerance: I'm now tromping three miles a day and will shortly return to the gym again to start working on upper-body strength. This was the year I finally started looking old to myself. No idea whether that's a real change or morbid self-consciousness. (I mean, I'm 74, of course I should look old.) I'm not talking wrinkles or crepe neck; I'm talking about the way my eyes seem to sink into their suddenly gaunt sockets: My face looks positively skull-like. Of course, I lost about 10 lbs working for Schlock, and as is always the case, I didn't lose it in my belly (where frankly I could afford to lose it); I lost it in my face and arms.

And there's also my clothes. I take an impish, almost perverse pleasure in dressing like a bag lady. (God knows why. I have an excellent eye for fashion.) But in the wake of all that weight loss, my pants are actually sagging, I have a hard time keeping them up. I look like some sort of low-rent rap star wannabe, MC Patty TaxBwana! Good grooming is a significator of mental health— as without, so within—so I really need to spruce up my image.

###

This has been a bad time for farmers and gardeners in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley. About two weeks ago, during a brief run of 80° temps, all the fruit trees burst into blossom. Literally two days later, nighttime temperatures plummeted into the 20°s. The fruit blossoms' delicate pistils froze, which probably means that there won't be any apples, peaches, or cherries in the Hudson Valley this year. The celebratory marigolds and strawberries I planted died, too. Fortunately, I didn't plant very many of them.

It's still dropping into the 30°s at night here. Not frost, but difficult for tender seedlings. But by next week, we should be moving into night-time 40°s, and I'll plant some more. I sowed some peas along the fence two weeks ago—peas are hardy, cold-weather plants—but only a few of them sprouted. Peas and lettuce are the only things I grow from seeds. Usually, I buy baby plants from the nurseries—though this year, I scored a bunch of Roma tomato seedlings from a lady on Facebook.

In the meantime, I'm cleaning up my plot. Weeding, replacing the winter straw ground cover with wood chips. Nettles in particular seem to thrive in coolish weather, so it is a lot of work that involves much ferrying of laden wheelbarrels over long distances. (The New Paltz Community Garden is huge.) Ferrying laden wheelbarrels is hard on the back.

###

Dolores (not her real name), the lady who gifted me the seedlings, is a very nice lady struggling to maintain sobriety by posting on the New Paltz Page on Facebook 30 times a day, attempting to rally what she calls Community (with a capital C). She gives away seedlings, she gives away baked goods, she solicits donations on behalf of the battered cats who show up regularly at her door. She lives in what was once one of those old Dutch stone houses. Was there a fire? The house seems to have been extensively rebuilt, but that was a while ago. It has very low ceilings and very small rooms. I borrowed it to be Neal's house in the Work in Progress.

I could tell Dolores would be happy to hang out, but I don't want to hang out with her, I don't want to hang out with anyone. I've fully embraced my solitude; I no longer feel isolated. Talking to other people right now is an effort.

Night before last, I couldn't sleep. I lay all night in that strange hypnagogic state where you're completely aware of the external world beyond your closed eyelids, but the passage of time is very distorted.

I hadn't had any caffeine since 8 am the previous morning.

I hadn't had any alcohol.

I was anxious, but anxiety is the matrix in which all of us humans live nowadays. Being alive right now is anxiety-provoking! Nothing is going unusually wrong in my little life, & there was no Horrible Thing awaiting me the very next day that I wanted to avoid.

So, my sleeplessness was a great mystery.

When the first light broke around 6 am, I got up from my bed.

You will simply call them at 9 & tell them you can't come in today, I told myself.

I was amazed by how guilty this made me feel! I mean, it's not like I owe Schlock anything but my labor while my ass is in their chair.

But I did feel guilty! What a horrible failure you are, said the little voice in my head. What a perpetual disappointment to all & sundry.

###

This sleeplessness has happened before. Not often—but often enough so that I'm familiar with its manifestation. Usually it happens on nights when I'm anxious about performing the next day.

Thus, it happened during a trip to Baltimore a few years back with a person I didn't know very well at the time (but subsequently became a good friend). Thus, it happened in Ithaca last Thanksgiving when I was about to be trotted out on a round of holiday parties.

It's one of the banes of old age.

Old people just don't sleep very well.

###

Anyway, I managed to have a fairly productive day with my ass not in the chair.

In the morning, I polished off Remuneration for one client & got a modest assignment from another. If I'm diligent about husbanding resources, I may actually be in better financial shape this year than I was last.

In the afternoon, I scampered off to the New Paltz Community Garden & puttered. My plot is in surprisingly good shape. Whoever had it before me stayed on top of the weeds, and the soil in those raised boxes looks surprisingly good.

In the late afternoon, I dropped by the Gardiner Bakehouse and spent an hour or so nibbling chocolate chip cookies and reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which is the Big New Novel of the season.

I want to like Sonia and Sunny more than I actually like it. It has some surprisingly good insights:

An arranged marriage story, even one that ended six months later in divorce, felt true and false. True because it happened. False because it was feeding the West what it wanted to consume about the East. The audience made it false. Lifting this one story out of all the others made it false.

But I'm finding Kiran Desai's much-praised writing style a bit banal. Her metaphors are pretty word strings but they don't make much sense. And her non-Indian characters make no sense at all.

Claude sent me an email: Are keeping your garden this year . Hope you fine , spring is rite there . Lmk

Claude's spoken English is very good (though it preserves Gallic word order), but he never saw the slightest utility in learning how to write English.

It made me very sad to write back that no, I would not be coming back. I really love the Hyde Park Community Garden, it's just such a beautiful, serene place, and I really like all my fellow gardeners there:

But it's utterly insane to plan on driving across the bridge multiple times each week. The time sink, sure, but also, I don't like driving.

I still haven't decided where I want to move. Ithaca is attractive, but the problem with Ithaca is that just five miles outside the city limits, you're in Alabama except with snow. The Southern Tier is a Trumpy place & getting to anywhere else I might want to hang out (for which read New York City) is a real ordeal from there. Yes, RTT is there, and RTT loves me—but it's not as though RTT would want to hang out with me.

So, I'm also contemplating maybe moving back to Dutchess County. Where I know people. Where I'll be close to Metro-North train stations that can deposit me in Grand Central Station in just under two hours. My old friend Carl A has told me I can stay overnight in the guest room of his apartment on the upper West Side anytime. I should probably take him up on the offer.

Claude wrote me back: It’s sad that u leavin us but we ll keep u in mind for next year u decide to come back . I don’t ve a à person to replace u right now . Stay in touch

Yesterday morning, I went off for a plot showing at the New Paltz Community Garden.

I saw several lovely plots, but in the end I chose this one becawwwwwse the gardener before me had left me her hose! Plus, it has several upraised beds:

That's one thing I don't like about the New Paltz Community Garden: They make you water your garden with your own individually purchased hose. In fact, I dislike that so much that I argued the point with Phil, the extremely nice plot coordinator who was showing me around: "Hoses are not cheap! So by making that a requirement, you're essentially eliminating low-income gardeners who might really benefit from growing their own food."

Phil made a thoughtful face. "You're not wrong."

###

Afterwards, I had an hour and a half to kill, so I hung out at the Gardiner Bakehouse:

The Gardiner Bakehouse is the café part of a complex run by a local maker's guild. Wonderful coffee & excellent food. Pastries to die for! It's the last place Brian & I hung out in together; in fact, we actually had a date to do an open mike there Saturday night of the week he died.

I was so happy sitting there! Sipping coffee, people watching, dipping into my novel from time to time to read a few paragraphs.

This is how you need to live your life! I told myself. With ample access to the Gardiner Bakehouse. You need to move to New Paltz.

New Paltz, you see, is the last hippie enclave in the entire United States.

###

At Montgomery Schlock, I took on the task of doing taxes for an adorable kid who had started his own trucking business, but who had failed to draft a business plan or keep a single record of his business expenses.

After half an hour or so, I got up from my desk & toddled off to consult with the office manager.

"You can't do it?" she asked.

"Oh, I can do it," I said. "The question is whether I should do it, given the fact that I'm a first-year associate and this is going to require some intense forensic accounting. I'm not certified to do it, and that's going to raise some liability issues if the return is audited, which it almost certainly will be."

The office manager didn't seem to understand the difference between "can" and "should," which was mildly annoying but whatevs: I do not give a shit what these people understand or think so long as I get paid.

###

Back at the casa, I hunted down Icky. "The chickens... ?"

Icky looked grim. "Something got them. I found some feathers next to the coop. They got Little Nas—"

"Little Nas" is his name for Black Chicken.

Oh, my heart was broken. Black Chicken! Whom I'd taught to jump high and walk backwards when I first moved into this place. Whom I could have taken out on the road as a circus act, Patrizia and Her Performing Chicken.

I sat in the Patrizia-torium sobbing. Black Chicken! People are dying in Gaza! I reminded myself fiercely. It doesn't take much to see that the problems of one black chicken don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Half an hour later, Icky began calling my name. "Patrizia! Patrizia! Patrizia!"

I ran downstairs—

He was holding Black Chicken!!!

Black Chicken had survived!!!

"Where was she?"

"She was just standing there on the back porch when I opened the door—"

Clearly, something had tried to grab her: She was missing a whole bunch of feathers under her right wing. I visualized a fox's mouth.

But she had gotten away! I pictured her pecking furiously at the fox until he dropped her and then fluttering away to hide. Nobody's getting Black Chicken without a fight! Black Chicken is a survivor!!! Descendent of the mighty dinosaurs!

There are now three chickens left.

"You've got to build them some sort of run," I told Icky. "Free ranging is a nice concept, but it's simply not safe for them."

He is leaving to go back down to the city today, but I think he will build one next time he's up.

In the meantime, the chickens must be confined to their coop.

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Mallory's Camera

Entries tagged with garden

SIFTING? Soil?

Spring In the Valley

An Interesting Discovery

And Behold! Esau Thrifted

Solitude

Sleepless Night

Patrizia and Her Performing Chicken