Grandma's Garden Farewells

Today was the last day of school.  

I gave the kindergarten teachers their end of year, for their personal libraries, gift book.  They each had Caps for Sale; this year they received The Lorax.  One is moving back home to raise her baby-due-in-December closer to her family.  That was a hard goodbye for me.

She's the one on the left. The one on the right left last year.  They were joyous.

The kindergarteners were acting like the first graders they will be.  They waited politely until I arrived at the garden gate, they lined up without prompting to take a turn or three on the umbrella's handle, and they dove right into the storage bin to find what I'd hidden away.  A little mischief is welcomed; invading my personal space demands a conversation.  

I settled them down with white paper plates and markers, then proceeded to give away the painted ceramic pots to any and all who wanted them.  My usual friends stopped by to talk about their summer plans and to hug me.  The hugs were the most important part of the visits.

Some are moving away.  Omaha, Nebraska felt very far to the Garden Leader whose family was relocating.  

Some are going next door to middle school, often without their best friends who've been switched to another school amidst the District's round of school closures.  

There were tears.  There were reassurances - I won't let you feel lonely! I'll defend you! There was excitement about starting a new chapter.  Miss Stella is thrilled that she will exist in a world with scholars taller than she.  

I signed yearbooks and t-shirts and sweaters I'm not sure were parentally approved for Sharpie signatures.  Every plant in the garden has been adopted and is not living in a new home.  Only the tomato bush and the mandarin orange tree remain, both with ripening fruits.  

It's a good thing summer school runs through June.  

And Then There's This

Yesterday's post was full of joy.  Allow me this moment to rant.

*****

If one more person says he's more likely to get hit by a bus than die from what ails him,  I am afraid that violence may ensue.  

As one lovely (really, a kind and decent soul) human followed up with this: After all, you've had more opportunities to be hit by a bus than someone who is 30.  

Hey, we know we're old.  We aren't feeling young-ish right now.  We don't need the reminder.

It's comforting to be told that you don't need to rush to a lawyer and put your affairs in order, but, as another kind and decent soul said after looking at the two of us, that's because you probably already have that taken care of.

If that is to be our fate, then we'll go out as G'ma wished for herself - to be hit by a bus run by a solvent municipality.  I promise to be laughing all the way to the pavement.

Feeling the Love

This is just some of the love coming our way.  

I had forgotten how good it felt to read letters and cards from friends and strangers and strangers who became friends (I'm thinking of you,  Lolly) after my perforation.  The mail carrier has something to put in our mailbox that isn't trying to sell me something. 

Funny, sincere, thoughtful, personal missives arrive almost every day.  It's not only texts and emails from our circle.  We're surrounded by love at the treatment facilities, too.

It's everybody we encounter, from the valet parking ladies with the sparkling smiles and reminders to wait in the shade; through the scheduler who called late in the day to say he wouldn't have the information until the morning, but he didn't want me to go to sleep thinking he'd forgotten about me; to the clinicians and technicians and the people behind desks who smile if I should happen to catch their eye.  

It makes everything a lot easier.

We have one plan.  We are preparing to plan for a second, contemporaneous plan.  While serious, there are relatively benign yet effective plans to treat what ails him.  

I'm not jinxing anything by typing any more, and I'm closing the comments because I feel your love without them.

What I will say that Victor Wembayana is a very tall, very talented, young man, and watching a closely contested, double overtime, playoff game is a fine way to raise one's spirits.

Fauna in the Neighborhood

Two brothers purchased the 12.5 acres across the street, saving us from staring at 152 one and two story, cookie cutter, single family homes.  They have landscaped what was untended overgrowth into a lovely, liveable space.  There are two houses behind the old, rusted, fancy gate with its ironworked mural, the gate that clanked for years until they arrived and dealt with it.

They cleaned up the low lying plants and tree branches that swept the ground, and in doing so removed habitat that had lain undisturbed for the two decades we've lived here.  We would see coyote parents and their young carefully crossing the road, Dad blocking passage and alert for any danger, Mom bringing up the rear of the pup parade, on a regular basis.  

Not so much any more.

There were lots of bunnies munching on my rosemary and lantana and crepe myrtle before the electic saws and power blowers got to work, clearing out their habitat.  My plants are uneaten, and that's a good thing.  But I miss the critters twitching their noses on the rocks outside my window.

The javelina are still roaming the countryside, leaving their footprints behind in the rocky ground cover.  The lizards of all shapes and sizes and colors are everywhere, as are the bats and the wrens and the mourning doves.  

The hawks ride the air currents looking for snacks.  The giant, hooting owl lives in the eucalyptus tree next door.  He's surprised many a visitor with his I'm-right-next-to-you-and-I'm-very-loud notifications of his existence.

And the newest fauna I've discovered is our currrent next door neighbor, an anesthesiologist.  I met her husband, a contractor, a year ago.  It's taken that long for them to renovate and move in and for us to become acquainted.  

For every thing there is a season.... that feels apropos right now.

Garden Leaders

They come in all shapes and sizes, from kindergarten through fifth grade.  They show up and learn and help and sometimes they find treasures.  

One of them found a ripe tomato hidden under the leaves, resting on the soil, just begging to be sliced and eaten and shared with friends.  

They organized the loading of the painted pots onto the playground monitor's three tiered cart (oops.... she thought it was lost and gone forever) and gathered friends to navigate it over the bumpy grass, up and over the edge of the paved walk, up to the door near the staff mailboxes.

I chose the three in the front, who joined me in putting a pot in each cubby, right on top of the cards with flowers on one side and A snapdragon for you from Grandma's Gardeners sticker on the other.

It was a lovely way to spend a sunny morning.  

It's impossible to be sad while being hugged by little ones; I get so much more than I give.  

How Is He Still In Charge?

Taking a break from the medical scene, I'm going to let myself rant a bit about FFOTUS.

The man slurs his words so badly that there is no way to understand the ends of most sentences.  MSM is finally showing photos of him sleeping in meetings on the nightly news.  They aren't pointing out the fact that the Commander in Chief is taking a nap while surrounded by visitors, cabinet members, and Congress people.  I suppose they are relying on the viewer to make the connection.

Cowards, one and all.

His plan for his boring war is No Plan, I have no plan, no plan at all.  Meanwhile, he and Hegseth are pursuing Mark Kelly (once again) for pointing out that we've depleted our military stock to a danger point.  No, Mr. Secretary, that wasn't classified information.  You said it in a hearing. 

I'm not too worried about my senior Senator.  He has $25million in the bank and more coming in every day.  But Jon Ossoff, Sherrod Brown, the governorship of California --- they all have me worried.

Redistricting while elections are being held is absurd.... unless you are a Republican legislator who wants to curry favor with FFOTUS.  The voters in Virginia made their wishes known only to have a court tell them NO.  My County Clerk sent a Important Message urging everyone to check their voter resgistration status asap.   

There was a woman in a 45-47 decorated ball cap sitting at the counter when I picked up our lunch today.  I was tempted to approach her and ask her WHY???? but I kept my cool.  The thing is, I was really interested in her why.  Is she seeing the world through a different lens than I am?  

I drove home thinking about my latest act of political rebellion:

I'm leaving my mark.  It is all I can do.

Home, At Last

Yesterday was a whirlwind of pokes and examinations and consultations and then his Ticket To Ride (seriously, that's in the header of the order for transportation) arrived and, after a stop at the pharmacy for 6 prescritions) Sam wheeled him out to the car.

It was 102 degrees.  My car had been sitting in the sun for 6 hours.  The air conditioning did its best, but standing up was a challenge for my sweetie.  We got home and put him into his own bed - ahhhhhhhhhh - and filled his nightstand with Diet Coke and iced tea and Smart water and graham crackers.  

He'd have ensconced himself on the living room couch if the television had been working, but for some unknown reason it refused to connect to the cable box.  I have to say it felt like the world was conspiring against us.  Or, as the Golden Gopher put it, if he didn't have bad luck he'd have no luck at all.

It took me an hour to make a chart with the names, doses, times and what it's for.  6am, 10am, noon, 2pm, 6pm, 10pm, and midnight are the times for the regularly scheduled drugs.  Should he need the oxycodone, that's a whole other timeline.  We napped through the noon dose and hoped that his body wouldn't notice that we were an hour late.

We're managing several diagnoses at the same time.  Everyone wants to be sure we understand all the directions and parameters and contraindications; as long as I'm taking notes to review later I'm doing fine.  

Now we're trying to reschedule the appointments we missed while he was hospitalized.  This is harder than one might imagine; one phone was busy from 8am until I called the main switchboard at 3pm and the lovely receptionist somehow managed to get me through.  I'm waiting for the doctor to talk to the scheduler who will call us back on one of the three phone numbers on file.

Sigh.

We've spent the day wondering how those without our particular set of skills and free time manage any of this.  I'm grateful for good insurance (even with that there's a $2000 co-pay for one drug) and money in the bank and family and friends who support us emotionally from near and far.  

And we're only just getting started.  

Chin up. Shoulders back. Smile pasted on my face.  We'll get through this together... and by that I am including all of you who've left loving comments on The Burrow.  Please understand if I'm too tired respond as I usually do.  

Onward and upward, as Daddooooo would say when life struck another blow.

Perhaps Today

Infections are nasty things.  

Lightheadedness and white blood count and creatinine and pain.... we spent another weekend in the hospital, coming close and then failing to being discharged.

This morning we'll give it another try.  

There will be posts about FFOTUS's boring war , he of the attention span of a toddler.  There will be a garden post or two, along with an end of the school year retrospective.

But now, I must dress and go, once again, to sit by his bedside and wait for others to make decisions about our actions.  To say that this is disconcerting would be the understatement of the 21st century.

Thanks for hangin in here with me.

And Still...

Some numbers go up, some go down. Mostly they go in the direction of health,  but that's usually followed by something else to worry about. 

The physicians are alarmingly young. The only grey hair to be found is on the patients. 

The staff is an interesting collection of Americans from all over the globe, all respecting the particular hierarchy of their niche.  Techs defer to nurses.  Fellows defer to Attendings. We've only been visited by one student, and that only after her supervisor asked our permission. 

That's all I can think of.  Hospitals are exhausting, even for visitors. 

Well....

We're still here.  He's feeling better but there are still meds to be given via an IV so we are literally tethered to the institution. 

Home tomorrow, we hope.  I'll have more to say then. 

We'll Talk Tomorrow

TBG and I are spending some quality time in the Emergency Room.  It will all be fine,  but writing will have to wait   It's hard to write with all the beeps and pokes and questions. 

Thanks for understanding. 

It's May

 As Guinevere sings in Camelot, it's a month when everything goes blissfully astray.

There are two and a half weeks of school left.  There's not much learning still going on, although the teachers are making a valiant effort to educate while their students are counting down the days until summer vacation.

The Amphi High School seniors held their Grad Walk on Friday.  Dressed in caps and gowns, they marched through the first floor and the playground, high fiving and smiling.... at least the ones without earbuds.  

Standing next to Miss Stella, currently the tallest 5th grader, I mentioned that she probably might not be the tallest student in Middle School next year, and that she certainly wouldn't be the tallest student in high school.  We don't know what they are feeding those kids, but they were BIG.

Attendance in the garden always slows down in May.  I don't know why.  The tomato plants and the mandarin orange tree have many green blobs (they don't look much better than that) which are taking their own sweet time ripening.  Apparently, they are not clued in to the school calendar.

One Garden Leader, talking to no one in particular, opined that the garden was her favorite place in the whole school.  No one fights.  You can plant.  And you can be quiet.

It seems that, for this year at least, my work here is done.

A Delightful Surprise

The BEYOND! t-shirts were a big hit as smocks in Grandma's Garden last week.  So that others could use them, I asked the scholars to take them off before they left. 

Two girls ran away, laughing, with their smocks over their t-shirts.  

I didn't notice that, but the other scholars did.  I looked out over the playgroound for the miscreants, to no avail.  I shrugged it off.  They've been sitting in my garage for 15 years; I have 2 huge boxes still there; the girls were laughing and that's always my goal; and I couldn't remember who they wtere, anyway.

A few minutes later, they came back, slightly abashed.  T  They couldn't return the smocks; they had removed their original t-shirts. Nudity is not encouraged on our campus.  I reminded them that they had misbehaved and that I was not thrilled with them..... but they could keep the BEYOND! shirts.

There were doctors and surgery and more doctors this week, so Thursday was my first day back in the garden.  While I was setting up the day's project, the two naughty third graders suddenly appeared before me.  

We're sorry we took the shirts, Grandma.  We're really sorry.

They came on their own.  They were properly abashed.  Their faces were really sorry, as they met me eye to eye, confident and diffident at the same time.  

I almost cried.  Instead, I told them that I was proud of them.  Everyone makes mistakes and does dumb things and I know that I did  (pause for a painful memory or two to flash across my brain) and the fact that they took responsibility for their actions and came back to repair the damage impressed me a whole lot more than their absconding (yes, I said absconding) with the t-shirts had depressed me.  

No, they didn't want to stay and paint. We shook hands and they went on their way.

It was a good day in Grandma's Garden.