Wednesday ~
A buck visited Dominick in the tent early this morning, when the dog stirred, waking Dominick in time to see the stately antlers silhouetted in the crepuscular light and the smudge of his wet nose on the outside flap of the tent.
Later in the morning, my mother and I drive Dominick to his At Home in the Woods camp, where he’ll make a medicine wheel, carve a throwing stick (just in case he wants to take out a few rabbits in the yard), and start to build a shelter with his clan, the Poison Ivies. Luke is already off to his basketball camp at NMH, where he’ll spend the morning enjoying the height he’s gained this summer and the full recovery he’s managed to orchestrate for his ruptured tendon, before heading to the golf course to prepare for tomorrow’s tournament.
My mother drives out to Wellesley with me for my summer fun: a midday appointment with Dr. Pitts. Despite the nearly four hours spent driving there and back, the appointment is brief. Standing in the paper johnnie, I try to relax my shoulders as she examines her work. One week out, and despite a few residual traces of the usual surgical trauma—some swelling on the left side, a bright red blood blister under my arm from being wrapped so tight, and three small cuts, the beginning of an incision, perhaps, around the nipple on the right side (did Dr. Pitts change her mind about the lift at the last minute?)—everything looks good. Dr. Pitts is pleased with the positioning. She smiles. I thank her for leaving my right girl as is. She’s done the right thing, and I am grateful. Clearly, she has listened well and gotten to know me. Not all docs do that.
I ask her about the strange feeling of concavity that I’ve noticed under the implant, which suddenly appears when I lie flat, and the implant moves a bit with gravity, as it's supposed to, revealing a ridge that my fingers find and follow, a sunken cavity, or hidden atoll. She explains how the implant is supposed to move as real breast tissue does, but that underneath, there will always be the outline of the pocket that the expander created, and that the implant is doing its best to fill, while still being able to move about. I realize that my new girl has big shoes to fill! And that I will always carry with me this feeling of having been scraped out, hollowed—the loss of the breast unbidden and memorialized by its absence, and by the presence of this new, earnest girl.
She leaves me with final instructions: continue to take it easy, protect the implant site, don’t stretch either arm overhead for another week, refrain from lifting with either side or partaking of summer fun for another three weeks, and soon, soon! the risk of bleeding or repositioning will be gone and I’ll be able to live life a little more fully again. As well versed as I am about my current restrictions, I’ve been curious about whether having an implant will restrict any future activities…jumping out of airplanes, playing rugby, breathing fire…but Dr. Pitts assuages my fears. After all, think of all the women out there with implants. Do anything you want to do.
Thursday ~
It’s been one of those mornings. I shudder to think of how much gas I’ve already blown, caravanning the boys and myself to camp, tournament, and PT appointment, respectively. Now, I’m home again, home again, jiggety jig, watching my mother take on the daunting task of weeding the gardens, bless her heart. A little common yellowthroat, its beak open in pathetic little panting breaths, its eyes starting to glaze over, has fallen into the straw mulch, wing injured, able only to hop for a bit and make intermittent, pitiful chirps. We decide there’s nothing for us to do, so for now, I tell Daisy, quite emphatically, that he’s a baby, that he’s got a boo-boo, and that she’s got to be gentle and leave it. She gets it. Her eyes widen in empathy as she backs away from the little bugger and retreats to the softer grass, where she awaits a rock, patch of crabgrass, or something, anything but the little baby bird with the boo-boo, that she can catch in her mouth and chew and use to whip up her usual frenzy of spit and froth.
I’ve noticed—despite the strawberries, or maybe because of—there seems to be a lull in the action, this final week of June. The riotous display of just a few weeks ago—wonderfully jarring in its relative intensity—when Life itself burst through the dull dead ache of winter and blanketed the earth with greens and the colors of spiraling hope and vigor, seems to have exhausted itself. After cycling through the inaugural blossoms of spring, from the earliest, shy, solitary dew drops and trout lilies, to the more recent explosive clusters of all-out revelry, new growth now seems suspended. The Korean lilacs have dropped their pinkish purple festoons, and stand now in need of a good pruning, while the creeping phlox appear bare and overgrown without their earlier display of sprightly pink flowers. The irises stand upright—for now—their seed heads bald and bare, stripped of their crowns of purple jewels. And the ephemerally bold beauty of the peonies has faded, their straggly heads, once held high in pink pompous splendor, now bow abashedly low to the ground, petals browned and torn. Like party girls at the end of a long night, make up smudged into dark under eye circles and hair disheveled, they’ve quite lost their grandeur, and are, quite simply, in need of a swift dead heading. I’m reminded of that Jayhawks song, Save it for a Rainy Day:
Pretty little hairdo
Don't do what it used to
Can't disguise the living
All the miles that you've been through…
Soon the gardens will again be boisterous with color, the phlox and bee balm and lilies will burst forth in pinks and purples and oranges, a floral fireworks display just in time for the 4th. But for now, as the quiet, lovely flowers of the astilbe start to take their place in shade and sun, and the lilies strain with their flash-in-the-pan promise, the bees, butterflies, dragonflies and hummingbirds must be content to visit the blossoms cascading over the whiskey barrel planter, the hanging basket, and other potted annuals for their nectar—and the stand of milkweed that has suddenly flowered in spheres of delicate, light pink petals in the center of the otherwise quiet perennial garden.
Milkweed is not something most people have in their perennial gardens, I know, but there it began to grow, and I left it, knowing that while it might not be what most people want growing in their gardens, it may be just what we need. After all, this oft-overlooked weed provides the elegant monarch butterfly with everything it needs to survive and complete their remarkable migration to Mexico, from serving as a host site for its eggs and food for its developing larvae, to being responsible for the awesome system of self-defense (obtained from the toxins in the milkweed leaves) that renders the caterpillars, and therefore the butterflies, poisonous to eat, and thus safe from predators. In the fall, after the flowers have developed into seed pods, the milkweed begins to dry, opening up its clutch purse to release the perfectly layered parachutes of downy fluff into the wind currents of seed dispersal. I’ve always loved to collect the pods and watch the tiny brown seeds jump into the wind like paratroopers, white silky chutes trailing behind them. The seeds have been collected by Native Americans, who insulated their moccasins with the soft fuzz, as well as school children during WWII for use in military life jackets. More recently, milkweed has been used as an indicator of ground-level ozone air pollution (sounds like a homeschool project to me).
Like the milkweed, with its hidden talents and unexpected, unconventional beauty this time of year, my new girl—scarred, nipple-less, swollen—might not compare to the bodacious ta-tas out there, but she might be just what I need. And like the gardens that spiral through cycles of life, death, renewal, and rebirth, she too awaits her next bloom. A new nipple in another two months. And two months after that, a tattoo of color to restore the pink to nipple and areola. Soon, I’ll be able to wear a bra again, but for now, it’s just me and my girls, bared in all our flat-chested glory, and ironically, more symmetrical now than we were before my mastectomy, when my left breast, long ago declared the favorite side by both my boys, carried a little more heft and bounce than the right.
One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds. ~John Burroughs, Pepacton, 1881
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fortune of the Republic, 1878
A weed is but an unloved flower. ~ Ella Wilcox, 1855 - 1919
Friday ~
River fog envelopes our little pocket of land this morning, making it hard for the sun to burn through. I head down to the vegetable garden, and find what I am looking for: the little yellowthroat, stiff on its side, eyes pecked out, tiny legs sticking out of the straw mulch. Alas. I scoop him up and toss him into the edge of the woods, where someone will make a meal out of him.
I notice that there’s a trail of disruption (not quite destruction) running along one side of the garden, where the straw has been displaced, and sent to lay scattered atop the edge of the lawn. It looks as if something large has sped through, its hooves or paws or feet skidding through the straw before dashing into the more forgiving grass. Daisy chasing a ball? Dominick’s buck?
The first tomatoes are coming in, along with broccoli, summer squash and zucchini. We’ve been enjoying salad greens and herbs, and soon there will be beans, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, watermelon, and later, pumpkins, winter squash, sunflowers, and a bounty of pesto to make. The swiss chard, which only a week ago was looking chewed up and hideous next to the stately, reliable kale, appears to be making a comeback, its jewel-toned stems nearly luminescent in the pale streams of sunshine that have just started to spill into our leafy vale.
And the weeds? Well, the weeds are doing quite well, thank you. Don’t they always? Because just when the garden starts to really produce, with all that good growing energy infusing everything within the confines of the garden, the crabgrass, clover and jewel weed, as well as the plants that are there through intention, with light and warmth and nutrients, that’s the time when the weeds come out with a vengeance. It’s a ridiculous and futile task to try to beat them down and assert any kind of control over them, but we take it on nonetheless, because it’s what we do, and we lose the battle, each and every time, but somehow, we feel better for the effort.
Much like the piles of clutter inside my house and head that I still need to get to after this half-year of crawling (and weeding, and everything else) at half-speed, the weeds taunt me ceaselessly, and I slip back into my sense of overwhelm, and wonder when I’ll ever get things straightened out.
We can in fact only define a weed, mutatis mutandis, in terms of the well-known definition of dirt - as matter out of place. What we call a weed is in fact merely a plant growing where we do not want it. ~E.J. Salisbury, The Living Garden, 1935
But the first lily came out today, unfolding its speckled orange flower to the gradual appearance of the morning sun. And I know that everything takes time, and sometimes things move too fast, and sometimes they move too slowly, and all we’re left with is this moment, this here and now, to appreciate and enjoy and live in. The lily will be dead by morning, another in its place. Those day lilies may not have staying power, but they sure do know how to pack a lot of punch into their short little lives.
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