Liz's Garden 1

As you can see, it's Spring here in Philadelphia!

Liz's Garden 2

Plants in Motion

This week, my summer Tolkien class met the Ents. By coincidence -- or not -- last weekend my sister told me about a science exhibit she and her family had seen about Plants in Motion. Plants are alive, after all: they just move much more slowly than we do. But move they do, and these videos prove it.

My sister said that the SlowLife Exhibit she saw included a video illustrating that flowers keep moving after they're cut, and move most violently just before they die.

Oh, dear. When I told Gary about this, he said, "I'll never bring you flowers again."

My class loved these videos, and I hope all of you will, too.

Tread gently on the grass, and thank your salad for feeding you.

Blessing the Garden

Here's my Mother's Day homily. It's not one of my favorites, but it does what it has to do. My primary goal when I preach on Mother's Day (which I've done a lot) is to reach out to people for whom the holiday's painful, to get past the Hallmark pieties that can be so grating to those of us who have complicated family relationships. And, really, who doesn't?

My relationship with my father was very difficult for decades, and I used to have a devil of a time finding a Father's Day card that reflected any recognizable form of what I felt for him. Hallmark just didn't sell cards that said, "I love you even though you're the reason I've been in therapy half my life." (A lot of the time, I went with blank cards.) It got much easier over the years, and finding a Mother's Day card was always a snap, but I know that for a lot of people, it's not.

And don't even get me started on the various insults, subtle and otherwise, Mother's Day dishes out to those of us who've chosen not to have kids. I am, of course, talking about the sentimental fluff-fest Mother's Day has become in contemporary America, not the rousing peace proclamation issued by Julia Ward Howe in 1870.

So, yeah, anyway. It's an annoying little holiday, but one that preachers ignore at their peril.

The readings are Acts 8:26-40, 1 John 4:7-21, and John 15:1-8.

*

About a month ago, I sat in on a workshop for medical students about to begin their residencies. The workshop facilitator asked them to draw a tree with their non-dominant hand; in other words, to draw with their left hand if they usually wrote with their right, or vice versa. Afterwards, we put the trees in a circle and admired them. There were short trees, tall trees, bushy trees, elegant willows, trees laden with fruit and trees whose branches sheltered birds. The facilitator lavishly praised each tree. Only afterwards did she say, very gently, “Have all of you noticed something? None of these trees have roots. They only exist from the ground up.”

She proceeded to remind the students that to get through the infamously brutal process of residency, they’ll need to remain grounded. “Remember your roots,” she told them. “Protect and nurture what feeds you, even when other people can’t see it.”

This past Thursday, I helped my friends Katharine and Pamela bless Katharine’s garden. Katharine scattered dried flowers on the soil around the plants, while Pamela sprinkled them with fertilizing ash and I gave them water. We made our way from potted shrubs, to bright blossoms, to the two saplings Katharine planted when her granddaughters were born, to the vegetable garden she’s just planted. Each plot of earth received the same blessing, even if no growth was visible. The vegetable garden looked like mere dirt, but Katharine has faith that in a few months, it will produce delicious food. She loves her vegetables even though she can’t see them yet.

To paraphrase -- very broadly! -- today’s lesson from 1 John, Katharine learned to love vegetables she can’t see by loving vegetables she can. And she learned to love vegetables in the first place because God first loved her, and all of us, by creating the fertile earth and the countless things that grow on it: carrots and eggplant and tomatoes, not to mention flowers and trees.

This is the progression described in the Epistle: God loves us into being, and we learn to love the people we know. If we’ve mastered that first lesson, we can then begin to love people we can’t see and don’t yet know, including God, and far-flung neighbors, and maybe future versions of ourselves, grown from humble sprouts into the fruitful branches Jesus admonishes us to be. None of this would be possible, though, if God hadn’t first loved us.

When I was researching this homily, I learned an interesting fact about vines. In the 19th century, a plague of insects called phylloxera decimated the vines used to grow wine grapes in Europe. American vines were immune to the pests, but the wine made from their grapes wasn’t nearly as good. Someone solved the problem by growing American vines and grafting the European plants onto them. The European vines produced excellent fruit, but only because the American roots remained untouched by the phylloxera.

“I am the vine and you are the branches,” Jesus tells us. “My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.” We are charged to bear good grapes, but we must also remember and honor our roots, the God who nourishes us even when others can’t see him, and without whom we would wither and die. Prone to countless pests and plagues, we need God to nourish us into fruitfulness. But God needs us to bear fruit.

Because today is Mother’s Day, it’s easy to think about these ideas in terms of parents and children. Parents, and other caring adults, love children into being. Unloved children all too often wither as adults; loved children are much more likely to become loving, fruitful people themselves. Most mothers love their children even before they’re born, and continue to love them when they’re out of physical sight. By the same token, if we have loving relationships with our mothers, we continue to love them long after we can no longer see them.

On Friday, I went to the Post Office to Express-Mail a Mother’s Day card to my mother in Philadelphia. “I always send cards late,” I told the clerk, “and I want this one to get there on time. This may be my mom’s last Mother’s Day, and I don’t want to regret a late card.”

I was embarrassed at paying the outrageous $17.50 Express Mail charge to send a measly greeting card, but the clerk nodded. “I understand completely,” she said. “This is my first Mother’s Day without my mother. I don’t need to send a card, though, because I think about her every day, whether it’s Mother’s Day or not.”

Another clerk, this time at the grocery store, told me that every Mother’s Day, she releases a balloon to float up to heaven. “I know mom’s in a better place,” she told me simply.

This can be a very painful day for people who have lost, or who have strained relationships, with mothers or children. Sometimes it feels as if those branches have been thrown away and withered. Faith that our dead loved ones are in a better place doesn’t change our yearning to have them with us here and now, where we can see and hear them. Sometimes the pain from broken relationships -- with loved ones who could see and speak to us, but don’t -- can be even more difficult. But we are an Easter people. We need to remember that God will always nourish us. We need to remember that seeds can sprout from seemingly barren ground.

And we need to remember that there are many ways to bear fruit. The famous verse from Galatians tells us that “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” On Mother’s Day, this may be especially reassuring to those of us who, either by choice or necessity, have no children. Galatians reminds us that we don’t need to have biological offspring to be fruitful and multiply. We don’t even need to be gardeners: a great comfort to me, since I’ve always had a black thumb.

Galatians doesn’t include hope or imagination on the list, but it seems to me that those gifts are Fruit of the Spirit too, and that the Ethiopian eunuch from Acts illustrates them admirably. Physically unable to have children, he is nonetheless a man of great faith. He invites a stranger, someone he has never seen before, into his chariot to guide him through the Scriptures. He questions what he reads, and when Philip explains the passage to him, the eunuch says, “Look, here is water! What is to stop me from being baptized?”

The eunuch moves gracefully from something he can see -- the water by the road -- to something he has only just imagined, his own baptism. He moves from what is real to what is possible, and then, in turn, makes that possibility fact, stopping the chariot so he can be baptized right there and then. He becomes one of Jesus’ branches, a grafted limb ready to produce wonderful fruit. The eunuch reminds us that questions can be a sacrament, the first step to making God visible in the world. We follow his example when we pay attention and take action.

“Look, here are my neighbors! What is to keep me from loving them?”

“Look, here is injustice! What is to keep me from correcting it?”

“Look, here is the Kingdom of God! What is to keep me from sharing it with the world?”

This Mother’s Day, may we bless all our gardens: those we can see and those we can only, as yet, imagine. And may we always remember, and rejoice in, the roots that ground and nourish us.

Amen.

Slogging

Grief's hard work. I'd known that intellectually, but I've still been floored by how exhausted and predictably-but-unpredictably weepy I've been. My crying jags have decreased from once an hour to four or five times a day, which is, I guess, going in the right direction. I've been gamely tackling chores, but much remains to be done (notably a mountain of grading, getting higher by the minute).

Yesterday, my friend Katharine picked me up to run errands. She told me that she and her friend Pamela -- among the few people here who've met and shared meals with Dad -- have been praying for him. Pamela told Katharine she'd sensed Dad moving confusedly among a crowd of people, and that when she pointed him towards the light, he said, "Thank you." I'm a little skeptical of that, but it's still comforting. (If I'd sensed it myself, I wouldn't be skeptical at all, of course.) They're the ladies with whom I often knit on Thursdays, and this Thursday we're going to do a sort of knitting vigil for Dad, including music and readings. I'm very touched that they suggested this idea, and I'm sure it will make me feel better.

Katharine took me to the funeral home, where I gave the funeral director information for the death certificate, to be picked up from the Health Department later this week. (This is all computerized these days.) I asked if I could see Dad, and the funeral director said yes, so Katharine and I spent several minutes with Dad's latest incarnation. He was very cold, of course, but still recognizably my father, and I had a good cry and kissed him, and Katharine cried too, and it helped with closure. The undertaker told me that Dad's remains have been accepted by the UNR Anatomical Donation program, despite the edema in his left arm which initially made them think they weren't going to take him. (Pamela told me that her 90-something grandmother was rejected from an Anatomical Donation Program for being too old. Jeez!)

From the funeral home we went to the nursing home, where I learned that I'm getting a full refund of the extra money I paid last week. That was good news. Then it was off to the bank, where I closed out Dad's account. We ran an errand of Katharine's, stopped for a yummy Austrian-food-and-pastry lunch, which I bought for us from the cash Dad had given me before he went into the hospital this last time, and then took a shopping break at a yarn store. From there, we went to Dad's old apartment to collect mail (I found a note that I could collect a parcel of mail at the post office today), and then to my and Gary's bank so I could open a separate account with Dad's small pool of funds, from which to pay his outstanding bills. I saw someone who looked familiar in the bank waiting room, and realized that it was the nurse who'd been with Dad when he died, and who'd wiped the tears off my face later. We talked for a few minutes before the account rep called me into her office.

From the bank, we went to the assisted-living facility to start packing up the newer place. I started crying the minute I walked in, of course, and was virtually useless while Katharine -- and, later, Gary, whom Katharine had picked up from home when he got back from his hike -- packed and cleaned and organized. I kept getting distracted by papers and sidetracked by photographs and sideswiped by grief, and around 5:00 I realized I was exhausted and announced that we were all going home. There's a lot more to do in the apartment, but Gary and I should be able to get it done this week.

Dad's file cabinet contains not only a wonderful assortment of family photos, but also the logs of his epic voyage, in a none-too-seaworthy thirty-foot wooden sloop, from Chicago to the Gulf Coast in 1989-90. Fran was with him on that adventure, and among Dad's DVDs, Gary found twenty-seven minutes of footage of the raising of the sailboat's mast in 1991. This effort involved many large young men, a lot of beer, and tons (literally) of arcane equipment. Dad lumbers through the footage like a slightly roly-poly whitehaired bear, and Fran runs around delivering cold drinks. Gripping cinema it's not, but Dad's years on that boat were the best time of his life, so Gary and I made a copy to send to Liz.

I meant to get to sleep early last night, but instead got to sleep late, slept badly, and was a zombie until about 2:00, when I went swimming for the first time since Friday. I'm still exhausted, though! Yesterday I notified the VA about Dad's death; today I canceled Dad's phone and called his oxygen company to pick up the concentrator -- they'll get back to me when they've received the official order from the VA -- and went to the P.O. to pick up the bundle of mail and put in two change-of-address forms (in the craziness, I'd never filed one for the first apartment) to have all remaining mail sent to my house. Anyone who calls Dad's phone number will get a message with my number, too, so I don't miss any of his calls.

Everyone was very kind when I told them that my father had just died. Many shared stories of their own recent bereavements.

Oh, this morning I also called the Anatomical Donation Program to find out where Dad's body is going, since the funeral director told me they'd be using it "soon," which doesn't fit with dissection by first-year medical students. The program coordinator told me that Dad's "remains" would be used in the next month, perhaps to train surgeons in new techniques or to teach flight nurses how to insert chest tubes. I wound up sobbing into the phone and blubbering, in one of the week's more surreal moments, "B-b-but I want him to be dissected by medical students! Because I teach narrative medicine at the medical school, and I want to go to the memorial service next year and hear what they've written about my Dad! Please, can't you make sure he's dissected by medical students?"

"We'll try," the woman told me, sounding slightly flustered, "but I can't promise anything."

I guess he'll be helping science no matter what, but I really do want him to be a first-year medical-school cadaver, in part because that way he'll be worked on longer and won't be cremated as soon. I'm not ready for his "remains" (oh, for heaven's sake, just say body or corpse, can't you?) to be burned up so soon. Weird and morbid, I know, but there you have it.

Oh, and here's another surreal moment. Before we entered the apartment yesterday, I wondered if Dad's poinsettia would be dead. The poinsettia was from church at Christmas: people donate them, and then they get given away, and our priest Sherry (the same one who came to be with us when Dad died) gave me this one and said, "I know you can't take it, because it's poisonous for your cats, but maybe your Dad would like it?" I accepted happily, because he loves red, and it's been on his windowsill ever since. I'd watered it once or twice, but was sure it must have died in the last few weeks, so I was delighted to see it still perky and red on the windowsill.

"Do you want a poinsettia?" I asked Katharine. "We can't take it, because of the cats."

"Sure," she said. But when she picked it up, an odd expression crossed her face. "Susan, this is a virtual poinsettia."

"What?"

"It's fake. It's not a real plant."

"It's fake?" Someone donated a fake poinsettia to church? Jeez! "But I've watered it a few times!"

Katharine and Gary started giggling, and so did I, and finally Katharine, snickering, carried the pseudo-poinsettia into the hall and deposited it on a knick-knack table. My. Amazing things they can do with synthetics these days. Evidently no one at church caught on either, which makes me feel slightly less foolish.

In the middle of all this other stuff, I've also been paying Dad's bills, answering condolence notes (both handwritten and electronic), talking to friends and relatives on the phone -- my sister and I have been talking every hour or two -- and crying a lot. My psychiatrist called today, and so did the people who run the study at Stanford (both the nurse and the doctor).

Various folks have asked about memorial plans. We aren't having a service in Reno, because hardly anyone here knew him. Liz and I will do something with his friends in Ocean Springs, MS this summer or (more likely) next. Dad wouldn't want anything even remotely formal, let alone anything in a church. We have talked about memorial contributions, though. I actually had the wits to ask Dad about this the day before he died. Liz and I haven't set up anything official yet -- registering or whatever one does in these cases -- but if you have money burning a hole in your pocket (really likely in this economy, I know) and want to give to a worthy cause, Dad was a big fan of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which works against hate groups and teaches tolerance.

And, as always, thanks for all of the incredibly moving comments people have been leaving on my posts. As I said when I last posted, I've decided not to respond to them individually, but they mean a lot to me.

Thank you.

Updates, Various

* I got great, moving comments on yesterday's post, and also on Saturday's. Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and if you haven't read the comments, please do!

* Lulu Lavender continues to be a problem plant. I last watered her over a week ago, but the soil's still moist. (How is this possible in Nevada?) Meanwhile, about 75% of her foliage is really droopy, but the other 25%, all on one side, is upright and healthy looking. I want to do something for the droopy bits -- although it may just be a matter of waiting for transplant-shock to wear off -- but I don't want to injure the section that's doing well. Any ideas?

* More mucking about with meds: I'm now on 10 mg/day of Lexapro, and we've discontinued the Effexor entirely. My doc thought the mild nausea I've been having might have been caused by the combination, but I'm still having it. Meanwhile, I'm gaining weight, despite working out almost every morning. Gary's excellent cooking is partly to blame here -- especially since he made a particularly yummy meal last night -- but I suspect the Lexapro is playing a role, since weight gain is a known side-effect. Since my general body type is "stick insect with pot belly," I'm managing to hide the flab with big shirts, but the pot belly's definitely expanding. Oh well. At least I'm happy. (And before someone asks: no, there's no possibility that I'm pregnant.)

* I've been having bizarre dreams. Two nights ago, I had a long, complicated dream about trying to learn to knit, which involved acquiring a very complex wooden frame. Last night, I dreamed that a giant scary robot was roaming through a fancy hotel and I was trying to avoid it. It wasn't actively dangerous -- more like a very large and metallic inquisitive puppy -- but it was scary. I haven't had a scary-robot dream since I was a kid. At the gym this morning, the woman on the elliptical next to me mentioned that she's been having weird dreams, too. Either we're both on Lexapro, or it's something in the water.

* I got a thank-you note from Rita Charon for making narrative medicine the theme of Grand Rounds! She said a lot of people had sent her the link. How cool is that?

* As expected, the Grand Rounds traffic boost has worn off, which means that I've devolved from Crawly Amphibian back down to Flippery Fish. I suspect I may descend another notch or two before too long. But the last shall be first, right?

* The UNR Police have sent out a campus bulletin that there were two bear sightings on campus early this morning. Yikes! Holy Marauding Mammals, Batman! The dry conditions have driven critters down from the mountains; last week, there was another bear sighting in a supermarket parking lot quite close to here. I hope the bear or bears on campus don't cause any trouble, and that the authorities manage to capture and relocate them instead of having to kill them.

And now I'm off to grade.

Lulu Update

Inez asked how Lulu's doing. Short answer: she's no better, but seems no worse. I think the shadier location is better for her; thanks for that tip, Beach Bum! (And happy belated birthday, Inez!)

Lulu was very dry this morning, so I watered her again. A sprig of flowers had fallen off; I carried it into the house and put it on the kitchen counter. All three cats immediately surrounded it, sniffing and chewing. This confirms my instinct that Lulu should stay outside!

And in other medical news, this week's Grand Rounds is up. I'm delighted to be included, especially in a fairly prominent spot, although I do wish Doc Emer had included an actual link to my post! But I've e-mailed him about this, and trust that the oversight will be corrected shortly.

Any Emergency Plant Doctors Out There?

Help! Lulu's leaves are weirdly limp and curled, although the soil's still moist. She was fine at lunchtime today!

Don't tell me I killed her in only one day! Aaaaagh!

Meet Lulu Lavender

We have a new member of the family.

Gary and I both have black thumbs. I've always killed any houseplant I owned, usually by anxious parenting in the form of too much water, and we haven't had any luck with our yards, either. We had grass in our tiny front yard for a while, but despite Gary's best efforts, it kept going patchy and brown, so we finally replaced it with rock (which makes more sense in this arid climate anyway). Our back yard was a wilderness of weeds when we bought the house, and right now, it's just dirt. Gary tears up all the cheatgrass every spring to create a fire-defense zone around the house, and we haven't tried to plant anything else. Conventional lawns take too much water, and we don't have the money for xeriscaping.

Various plants on our property are thriving: Lars, the giant juniper in the front yard; Sven, the pine tree on the other side of the driveway (which was waist high when we moved in nine years ago, and now towers well over our heads); a few stubborn tulips out back; a scraggly peavine in one corner of the backyard. But they do so well because we resolutely ignore them.

But I love lavender in almost any form. About the only non-bargain-basement bodycare product I use is a delicious (and expensive) body-butter cream from Ali'i Kula Lavender in Maui, and I'm always jealous of friends who have lavender growing on their property.

So yesterday, we went to Trader Joe's. They were selling potted lavender.

I smelled the lavender. I swooned. I dithered. It would be ridiculous for me to buy a plant; I'd just kill it. I smelled the lavender again, dithered some more, spoke to a helpful sales clerk who explained that I'd have to put the plant in the ground, or in a bigger pot -- oh, yikes! -- spoke to Gary, who said, "It's your responsibility; I'm not having anything to do with it" ("If you bring that puppy home from the pound, you have to walk it, do you hear me? Puppies are a lot of responsibility!" "But Daaa-aaad, it's so cute!"), and finally bought the lavender plant, whom I christened Lulu.

The clerk at Trader Joe's said that in-ground lavender doesn't always survive our winters, so when we got home, I found a helpful website on Growing Lavender in Containers and then dashed off to Home Depot to buy supplies.

According to the website, I shouldn't get Lulu too much larger a pot than she was already in, because lavender actually likes tight root spaces. Once I found the right size pot, though, I faced my next challenge: terra cotta? Plastic? One of the gorgeous ceramic pots?

I finally decided on plastic, because it had the most drainage holes, which the website said was important. If I bought Lulu a fancy pot and then she died, I'd feel extra awful. So this is Lulu's training pot, and I'll get her a nicer one next year, if she lasts that long.

Next: soil. Oy! Home Depot sells fifty million kinds of soil, and they all seem to come in forty-pound bags. Plus the website said that lavender likes "fluffy" soil, and I couldn't find any with that consistency on the label. I finally stumbled onto a side aisle with bags of organic potting soil I wouldn't need a forklift to move, and got one of those.

But the bag said that the soil already included plantfood, and the website had said that plantfood should be mixed with the soil during repotting. What to do? What to do? I couldn't find a clerk, but I found a kind fellow customer who told me that she always uses plantfood, but only half the manufacturer's recommendation.

So that solved that problem. The only thing left on the list was gravel for the bottom of the pot, to provide extra drainage. But gravel at Home Depot comes in forty-ton bags. The sales staff swore there were smaller ones, but couldn't find any; finally they just let me scoop up some loose gravel, for free, from a bag that had broken.

Home with my purchases, I set about repotting Lulu, a task I think I completed successfully, although I made a bit of a mess in the process. The plantfood directions said to put it on top of the soil, rather than mixing it in, but once Lulu was repotted, there wasn't much room to spread plant food. I got some in around the edges, though.

So we'll see how she does. The website said that lavender shouldn't be watered every day: "not too wet, but not too dried out, either." Oh, that's helpful. Could you be a little more imprecise? I'm going to aim for every third day, to try to avoid my usual overwatering trap.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to drinking my morning coffee out on the deck in the glorious smell of lavender. I'm not sure what I'll do with Lulu in the winter, especially if it snows; put her out on the covered front porch, probably, since if she were inside, she'd definitely meet speedy death-by-cat.

So wish me luck, everybody. I told Gary I felt like I'd brought home a new kitten; he rolled his eyes and said, "Well, at least you won't have to rush it down to Animal Emergency if it gets sick."

Hmmmm. I wonder if there are emergency plant doctors?