Tanja power

We have been busy from 8 am until just now. Many of the things we have done have been taxing. Others, less obviously so.

I found myself in the back corner of the veggie garden dealing with a situation. Every year, as fall turns to winter, I venture back to this corner to deal with the ongoing battle between our western neighbor’s blackberry and our Northern neighbor’s eucalyptus.

The blackberry is a rare, carnivorous variety that is impressively quick to grow and slow to relent. The Eucalyptus meanwhile is profligate, with branches hard as stone.

My feeling is that I owe nothing to either one of these plants and to their owners I owe courtesy and neighborly regard, but not much else. So I imagine running a giant scythe down the length of my fence, west and north, and I leave the severed eucalyptus and raspberry branches where they fall, between the potatoe towers and the asparagus bed.

And every spring, when I meander out to inspect the grounds and plant some seeds to show my confidence in the order of things, I discover that those branches and vines I cut in the fall are gone, evaporated, claimed back by nature, from whence they came, etc.

But not this year. This year they lay exactly where I’d let them fall. Unmoved.

So I got my clippers and a lawn debris bag and I cut the vines and branches into manageable lengths and bagged them up and dragged them away and left the area clean and ready for a new seasons, understanding, of course, that this is what Tanja had been doing for the last twenty years.

You could look at that and say, “I get it. Your wife’s been cleaning up after you for twenty years and now you miss it.”

That is true. But that isn’t all of it.

As I clipped this debris into the bag, I thought, “Yes, to be honest, I do battle with the Raspberry and the Eucalyptus, the Celandine, the dandy lion. And when my ardor has cooled and my rage has subsided to weakness, Tanja comes along and sweeps the corpses away. . . As I do for her, in those moments when she lacks whatever it is I happen to have.”

It’s lovely to get a glimpse of your connection to someone.

And just then, across the yard, I saw a figure by the stunted apple where all the hellebore grow. Twas Tanja dropped to her knees, weeding out the myriad maple sprouts and the insurgent celandine. It was like a hallucination, but there she was, at work.

It’s not surprising that she got tired quickly. Not surprising, but disappointing to Tanja, who is tired of recovering. She does not want to be weak in the arms and short of energy because she is afraid that this is it for her–that she will never be strong again.

Strange, after all those days when she was so upbeat and I was just trying to keep up, now it’s I who is certain that her recovery is on a strong trajectory, that her strength is coming back, that she is still very early in her healing journey.

But I’ve learned that there is only so much I can tell her. Sometimes, it really helps to get some outside perspective. So it seemed like serendipity when she brought the mail in tonight and said, “Oh look, I’ve got a letter from someone.”

That’s mysterious, I thought. Someone?

She sat at the dining room table and read it. I could see her smile.

“What’s it say?” I asked.

“Do you want to read it?”

“Very much.”

Twenty three days remain in the C Collar Countdown. The week begins again tomorrow. And all you need is love :)\