Greenstorm's Journal

Despite everything, this summer is truly a glorious one.

The last three summers have been drought and wildfire smoke, and before that the heat dome. 2020 I spent in a state of basically complete panic that was probably a combination of PDA and work from home interacting, along with the ambient covid panic. I can't remember 2019's summer offhand but I think I changed jobs at that time; 2018 was a wildfire evacuation. I moved into this house in 2017 at the end of summer and that was the last summer like this, with birds and the smell of clover everywhere. Threshold loved me as much then as it does now, part of my body, a fully enveloping love like finally having real skin or gravity.

This year I've only closed the windows for wildfire smoke a couple days. We've had actual rain, the kind of rain patters I remember from before the drought: little wandering thunderstorms bringing cloudbursts and sometimes thunder as they pirouette across the landscape. There's no heat dome; outside it drops to about 10C at night and when I wake up the house is cool; during the day the sun can be a little hot between rainstorms but long cool mornings and the endless stretch of near-solstice evening give lots of time for moving around.

There are more bugs than I've ever seen and my body feeds noseeums and blackflies as well as mosquitoes when I go out in the evening. I leave the fan running in the bedroom, facing out the window, and a window on the north side of the house open downstairs; it pulls the cool air in but also disrupts the mosquitoes and any who get into the house can't fly against the air current. I picked that trick up from an Ologies bug episode, where the entomologist said the best way to keep mosquitoes off a patio was to put a fan at ankle level. They're bad fliers, he said, and like to be low, so they can't fight the air current enough to bite. I love that kind of elegant solution. When I came in from the garden two days ago in the evening my face was covered in blood, half from swatted mosquitoes and half from blackfly bites.

The garden rolls out like a carpet and then fills in like details on an oil painting. I'm putting in paths and trees and trellises, a little at a time, and yesterday I picked up a bunch of perennial flowers and they're waiting in the wheelbarrow to go up and in. I've put in a kolomikta kiwi trellis. I've put in a strawberry bed with six kinds of strawberries. I've put in baby lindens and silver maples and elms and ash and oak and hazel. In one tomato and pepper bed the hazel, cherries, and haskap are there, no bigger than the other little pepper plants and spaced in between them to line a path that does not yet exist, to a spot that is still weeds but will later be a portal.

I have somehow become a person with elderly animals -- not elderly in the way they act, but at ten years old they start to get yearly bloodwork at their vet visit to make sure everything's ok. Whiskey, Hazard, and Siri fall into that category and today is Avallu's birthday; he's 9. Yesterday Whiskey followed me out to the garden and followed me as I wheelbarrowed woodchips from down here to up in the back garden a couple times, then got the zoomies and ran along the path very fast, bounced off the wheelbarrow I was pushing, and kept going. He does not feel elderly.

Anything could happen during the rest of the summer. It's windier than it has been, with tornadoes surprisingly nearby, and the wind strips moisture quickly. We're only saved by the little wandering rainstorms that come regularly. There is a lot of fire elsewhere and strange heat anomalies and floods. Politically we've lost the idea of human life as important and human well-being and rights are so far out of functional equations as to be laughable. There are many wars, even if we don't call them that anymore, and no one with resources is interested in holding back the tide of disease. Systems infrastructure frays and I suspect one day we will wish we had our current access the things that right now we think of as irritating because they are becoming inconvenient: border access, medical systems, air travel, relatively free telecommunications, year round fresh foods, so many things.

This won't be the last glorious summer like this but it might be mine. Even if it isn't I draw a line here: I love being alive, I love inhabiting my life, I very very very much want to know what happens next, but this summer would be enough.

Cool wind and the scent of overnight rain through the window. Warm covers and a cat sleeping on the bed while others wait for breakfast. Thai black rice, coconut milk, and sugar in the rice cooker with apricots waiting. Aspens rustling outside silkily. A pile of woodchips waiting for their wheelbarrow, steaming slightly as they compost. Wiggly dogs and the sound of roosters in the distance and beyond that robins and sparrows. Nearly clean sheets and parsley, mint, and tomatoes from the garden waiting to be turned into tabouli downstairs. Reading again! by audiobook, the closest I can ever have to revisiting my childhood home. A nephew? Even a few people in the world who really want me alive.

It's very good to be here.

I think the solstice interregnum isn't a success, exactly. I'd been hoping to take a week off from the outer world. Instead I talked to both mom and Josh yesterday -- I normally have something like 2 phone calls per month, not 2 in a day! -- did a bunch of insurance and gun license renewal paperwork, and as one would expect after all that basically collapsed. Pretty much zero garden, and then this morning I had to run in to pick up some mail (neither couriers nor the postal service deliver to houses here, so when the dog food I order comes in, the dollar store which is the depot for courier services holds it and calls me to come pick it up).

I came home, made lunch, and fell hard asleep. Little Bear curled up on my legs and slept with me. It was the kind of sleep that feels like a hard cleansing rain to the mind, and where it takes a long time to remember how to move my limbs.

I want to go outside and do more gardening but I still feel exhausted and weak. It really is incredible how doing that mind work -- paperwork, socializing -- leaves me literally bedbound but if I can garden without any of it then I remain functional. I wish I knew the mechanism.

I've decided to attend a local(ish) SCA event in early July. It's in the big town nearby, a weekend's camping event. I can drive in and out as I choose, decide whether to stay the night or not and when to come back. I imagine I'll be able to sit or lie in the grass a lot. It's outdoors, which is obviously a lot comfier for covid. My local SCA friend has invited me to make some garb up this week, she does a ton of period sewing, so I'll bring some linen and maybe some wool and see if I can get my head around fabric craft again. I have actually been considering hand-sewing or hand-finishing some linen things for awhile; it's more straightforward than a sewing machine and much slower, so I may be able to handle it. Or, it might trigger the same issues as reading, and it wont' work. We will eventually see.

In the meantime I have fajita filling in the fridge and some wraps, a bunch of fruit, and I'm trying to work up the energy to walk back outside. The world is intruding into my thoughts again. When I try writing about it, it sounds terrible, but eventually I'll capture what I'm trying to say maybe.

Yesterday was outside a lot. I went out in the morning and pulled wheelbarrowsfull of thistles and finished planting my shade garden (hostas! alchemilla! er, the what's-it-called with little purple or pink flowers that under the doctrine of signatures treats lungs and goes in a shady place and has silver spots on the leaves!). Then a deep nap, sunscreen, and more outside play. I even managed to get out for a third time as the sun was setting and stood in the centre of my circle where the elm is growing, hissing and muttering to the setting sun until I had its location. All the cats accompanied me except Whiskey.

I read an entire audiobook yesterday: Mysterious Affair At Styles, an old friend, as are all poirot and marple stories. I hadn't realized just how much of a difference it makes being able to access that familiar-- you know, from my preteens to early twenties I spent much much more time with books than people. Agatha Christie's gently satirical, aware humour is a parent's voice to me, and I hadn't been able to read in flow state since roughly 2016. It brings a piece of myself back to me. So strange that I'd always had difficulty understanding and interpreting verbal language as compared to written, and now my mind is slowed so much and whatever it is that broke in my mind was so pervasive that listening is easier than reading.

There are so many things in my life that are, not unpredictable, but the complete opposite of what would have been believed about me in the beginning. Yet here I am, more myself than ever. Especially more now that I can visit my old book-friends. I'm still listening only to fiction I'd read at least a dozen times before or science fact where I have a framework pre-existing to hang the info on, and I rewind and reread freqently. I'm curious about reading unfamiliar fiction. I'll learn about that in the fullness of time.

In the meantime I can;t access all my old book friends since they're not all audiobooked, but I haven't run to the end of what I can access yet. I do miss specific voices and people, but I do have some. So.

I made a lovely supper last night, put on clean sheets, and went to sleep after midnight, after the sunset.

This morning I woke at 6am with wildfire smoke coming in the window with the light. I got up, closed everything up, turned on the filters, and went back to sleep. I'm very glad the air was clear yesterday but I very much want to plant oaks today. Theoretically we're provided with a smoke forecast so I could try to plan my day around less smoke.

The tomatoes want trellising. The blackcurrants want in the ground. Things want mulch and more weeding. Eggplants need into their final pots in the greenhouse. Things will grow, ripen, and then fade and die. The seasons keep turning. I'm within them. It's good.

I've been pushing myself harder than I should to get the garden in. We've had weather that goes back and forth between too hot and dust-dry to work the soil and rain (that clay soil really needs to only be touched at the right time), mostly courtesy of these very intense drying winds we had for the last two or three weeks. I don't want to complain too much about it -- basically the prairies are all on fire right now, with tens of thousands of evacuees -- but it has impacted the pace at which I can put things out there.

Something is happening with the garden out there. I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's what I've always wanted from a garden. I'm putting in permanent paths, originally because I can't remember anymore where things are supposed to be if they're invisible. I'm putting in more bones, hazels lining the paths and shaping edges of things with trees. I'm putting in perennial flowers this year? Echinacea and sedum and daylilies and that sort of thing.

And then of course the tomatoes are going in, I now have at least one of each variety in the soil. The sweet peppers are in, the hot peppers will go in today hopefully.

It's becoming something recogniseable. Not an ad-hoc this or that, but places within the larger place, an entity that swirls through time forwards as well as back into its history. I love it here.

I was chatting with someone online the other day and realized I've somehow come into the crone stage of life unexpectedly. I never would have thought I'd take issue with interacting with humans as much as I do now, but here we are. I don't share values with anyone anymore. It's possible this is still the remains of the breakup with Tucker and the way that's playing out, but I don't think so. Maybe something about how the bad things in the world are getting closer and the way folks react to that. I'd write about that more but I've finally learned discipline around keeping away from emotional things now that I'm unwell: every feeling indulged is minutes to hours I lose from later in the day doing other things, eating or gardening or rescuing a gosling with lost parents and finding it a foster (yesterday's task).

Maybe that's why I have trouble handling people right now. There's anger sitting next to that feeling of being dismissed and I don't really want to work through it until the garden is in for the year. That does sound pretty classic breakup, no?

I'm very very happy with my selection of tomatoes and peppers this year. I didn't get everything I wanted in the ground -- woad and weld but not coreopsis for dyeing, no flax, and the squash and corn are going in late. I did get some juglans in the ground, though, and I have a fun selection of blackcurrants to put in the wet part of the back field this year, and some swamp white oaks for around them.

I'm getting a sense of how much land I can handle in annual crops in my current state, and perennializing the harder-to-handle parts, I guess.

I follow a couple of accounts in gaza of kids who remind me of me when I was that age, doing things they love as best they can. One of them is a gardener who has cats, he shows us every time he gets a new tomato or squash on the plant as the flower fades. I know one of them will eventually turn up dead, or rather, the feed will go dark and I'll have to assume that's happened. There's no way out for the folks there.

And now LA is rising up against-- well. That's just happening now, calling in the military. And I think, what would it be like to have a society that rises up to put itself in harm's way for you (I mean, at the same time as the rest of the society is putting you in harm, to be fair) instead of thinking it's too hard and letting it happen?

Dark thoughts interwoven with gardening as we move solsticewards.

It rained yesterday, and the night before that. It's been a good soaking rain, the kind we rarely get these days. This is the May long weekend and the previous couple long weekends folks have cancelled their quad parties in the bush because it's been so dry that sparks or the heat of the vehicle could start fires (I still do not know what a "poker ride" is, though I have suspicions). This year things may have been cancelled for rain, though we definitely had sunny periods, but the spate of fires that comes immediately after this weekend seems unlikely to materialize.

The ground had been almost too try to till in my clay soil, even a month or two before last frost date. I had been picking away at it, a hundred or two hundred square feet at a time, and had done a first pass on the pig winter field (which needs a better name) and the upper field, and was just starting on the back field that has snowmelt running down over it for weeks when the snow first disappears. This will make my second pass much easier.

I'd got some pre-started brassica greens in the ground, then the other day put out the broccoli and kale, and yesterday planted some peas finally. We're still dipping below zero some nights -- never the nights when it rains -- and there are tiny delicate skims of ice on the water in containers on those mornings if I get out there early enough.

Yesterday before the rain I planted three heartnut and three buartnut by the fence in the back field to see if the juglone they produce (when they're a little bigger) will suppress the aspen from coming across the fence from the neighbour's place.

When Josh was here we drove into Alberta and picked up some excellent hardy plums and apples, which we planted. The apples are leafed out now, they went into the orchard (mostly on siberian rootstock) and the plums look to be following suit shortly.

Those bulbs I planted last fall have been coming up -- no peonies yet, but squill, daffodils, muscari, etc. They aren't so much coming up en masse, as makes sense for the first year, but there's a nice long season of them. A couple test daffodils in the orchard have not yet been eaten by geese, which is excellent news.

Many of the bulbs were planted in little clumps around the baby apple seedlings I put in last fall. Not all of those survived but many did.

I'm hauling my peppers and tomatoes onto the deck everyday for hardening off, and festooning the livingroom with them every night. Yesterday when I brought them in the were wet with rainwater.

I also put some beaked hazel in, and an order of hardy roses from corn hill. I have a bundle of hazelbert waiting to go in as well, but those last dead spruce trees from the winter field were felled right onto the spot I want them to go and apparently chainsawing destroys my body.

Wheelbarrowing in moderation and tilling seem ok for the hour of activity per day though, so I've been doing those, bringing up the chicken compost to the fields. The tiller is so good because it's rear tine so it pulls itself along and I have the handles to lean on as I walk behind. I'm being as kind to it as I know how, checking the fluids regularly, but haven't yet brought myself to change the oil. It's still starting well.

The front yard has been mostly fenced off from the geese, except for a trio who keep getting out, laying an egg in the dog house which Thea then eats or cherishes, and asking to be let back in at the gate. They are keeping my grass down somewhat so that's fine.

I hired the neighbour a couple down to chop up the fallen south fenceline aspens and burn the tops for me. He did an excellent job, was great company, and I now feel more comfortable about the fuel load by my house and more comfortable in the neighbourhood. I need to cover that south bank with compost and chips and plant into it -- I already put two little leaf lindens but want to add some elm, ash, and oak plus a shrub layer of some kind, likely usask cherries and currants. that's the same slope my clove currant is thriving on and my haskaps do well on too, and it gets more heat than anything else in the area. Maybe some wild plum or plum seedlings to?

A semilocal (Edmonton) vocational high school was doing a scionwood sale as a fundraiser so I ordered some sticks of apple and plum. Its in the fridge (I have a (small) seed fridge now given me by a friend) while I figure out rootstocks. A friend locally has a bunch of apple suckers, someone else in a cold climate has been successfully grafting apple onto *wild saskatoons*, someone was having a sale on wild plums, I have some plums that the tops died off and they're just mustang rootstock, plus there's topworking on existing plum trees. So I have some options, I'm just limited to an hour or, if I'm lucky, two, per day.

The whole thing makes me happy but it makes be even more of a recluse because leaving the house takes up two days worth of activity and I would rather be gardening. Pottery is on hold. Disability paperwork is mostly settled. Most other things can wait.

A hundred tomato varieties-ish this year. Normally I would list them out for you (and myself in posterity) but making lists is hard and I'd rather be gardening. There are roughly three categories: "early hardy reds" "fancy trial tomatoes" and "my own crosses in F2 and F3".

Eightyish hot pepper varieties too, spanning all the major species except chinense. I do love those plants, they grow so differently from tomatoes. They'd rather err on the side of dry than wet. They flower and leaf so prettily. A colorado and the mystery athens peppers overwintered in the house and are doing great now too.

I also picked up a kaffir lime for indoors, which makes my house smell truly amazing, and some baby figlets are on order, because um. I guess I'm letting myself do what I want.

Yesterday I planted runner beans, marigolds, nasturtiums, woad, and chickpeas indoors to go out when the seedlings are big enough to make a visible row in the garden (difficulty of a bit weedy garden is that direct seeding plants I'm not intimately familiar with takes a lot of concentration to ID, not that I can;t ID nasturtium and runner beans). Runner beans are supposed to be happier in slightly cooler weather than standard phasesolus and I feel able to provide them support this year.

There are several projects that need doing, fencing and deconstructing excess pig buildings and making a woodshed and putting in some proper gates, but those can all be done later.

I really should take down the hedging cedars right up against my front balcony for fire reasons but I like the screen they provide from the road. The hope is to put a solarium there instead, with some sort of adhesive glass frosted stuff in the road direction, but that's a long ways away.

There's big stuff going on in the world, many people dying and many more deciding that some group or another needs to die. It's abhorrent. It's happening locally and internationally. I read about it more than I want, and I garden because I'd rather be doing that than reading. I can't tell you how lucky I feel to have this garden, better than I ever believed I could have in my whole life, and these cats and dogs and geese ranging around with their own individualities making up a community I can tolerate and that always wants me to be alive. They even take joy in my physical existence, which is so good for my heart.

Writing this feels superficial, but words have power, and so: I wish this for everyone in the world. A safe home, a loving community that feels joy in their existence. Safety. Life. Enough food of the kind that makes them stop sometimes and just say "this is so good". I wish this for everyone. Please.

This morning I'm thinking about how I resent the prevalence of "climate grief" rhetoric probably because my grief and regret emotions have always been called wrong -- I don't know if I feel them the same as other people, but I don't express them in the way I'm supposed to, so I'm told I don't have them or don't care.

I mean, I have a lot to talk about (and ask!) around the idea of a "stable ecosystem" and the implications of grief around ecosystem change too, but I suspect my initial spike of irritation/oh no not this again is related to feeling shut out of having my emotions around other people.

That was probably too much cognitive for the day, time to go find a cat.

Into the city for another MRI. I'm claustrophobic, so I need to take drugs when I do them, so I can't drive afterwards. So: hotel.

The timing is such that Josh is coming up today, the MRI was ysterday, so I managed to find a ride into town and will be going home with him.

That meant I could end up in the hotel with no parking, which was literally a block away from the candlelight Coldplay string quartet concert I'd been thinking about coming in for last year, but had then decided too much was going on. Right day, too.

Between chores yesterday morning, getting to the hospital (a few blocks), wandering lost in the hospital for a full 20 minutes trying to figure out where to go, coming home, and walking to the concert I covered 8km yesterday. The concert was an hour, and by the end (I wasn't checking my watch) I had ust about decided I needed to stand up and walk out because I was at the edge of my ability with sitting so long, then they announced the last song. So that was amazing.

The hotel mattress is excellent, I did get rest in between everything, and my body hasn't tanked yet. Maybe it can wait till Josh is gone?

I definitely needed to get out of my little box a bit. I also need to make my little box nicer, which hopefully Josh can help with. It's got piles and dirty floors and everything askew. I'm hoping to enlist him to remove all my clothes older than 5 months or so (saving t-shirts and jeans legs for projects), figure out organization for some of my shelves, and do a gigantic dump/thrift store dropoff run.

Plus I think the cats need a bunch more Places, like wall steps and boxes in corners etc. They're socially unstable right now and that isn't ideal; with more cat-habitat I believe the situation will be better.

Not fully convinced I'm not becoming allergic to the woodsmoke from my chimney, which is problematic, though for a heating system I probably do eventually need something that's not splitting, stacking, and carrying several tons of wood each winter. Not sure I can be convinced to get rid of the woodstove as a backup, though, since every other heat source needs some kind of electricity, even the pellet hoppers and blowers. I say that as if I have money to install alternatives.

Been talking to Tucker some and there are hard bits but also we're both better at compassion for each other now. I'm very happy about how it's going, and very curious about how his practicum with my former employer (different person, different ministry, but still) will go. I steered him to this guy, who seems pretty good and reasonable, so my fingers are crossed.

The light is racing back after solstice. You can see outside by 8am and even after 5pm now. It's so good.

Today is the first day in a bit I've felt like there could be any good in the world ever again. I can't quite put my finger on it yet, but it seems like it could be possible? This morning was well above freezing, misty out, and Solly came up to me when she saw I was outside. She's grown up so much in the last year and a half, picking up that maremma solemnity and stoicism I never would have imagined from her as a puppy.

I make a point of giving her some pets and ear scritches whenever I see her, so she knows she doesn't have to do anything fancy for attention, and she's stopped jumping. Today she was being good and I had enough self-awareness to notice and get down there with her and give her a ton of love and we just sort of leaned into each other and snuggled for a good long time.

The garden club is having their seed swap March 15, and I think they asked me to start a bunch of seeds for them so I can do a demonstration on separating seedling tomatoes again this year. I should double check that. People realyly like getting to go home with free baby plants, and it's a nice trick to know you can start them all close together and then split them apart a little later, to save space under lights in the beginning.

I still feel like I'm carrying around a huge weight. I hate that the way to reject a dynamic I don't like is to-- ugh, I don't know. Enough about that sort of thing right now.

This weekend Josh comes up. I don't even remember what we were going to do, maybe smoke salmon and something about changing the outside light bulbs that need a ladder? The last few days I haven't been able to keep food in my body or move much so I haven't got the house ready for a visitor. I think the cats peed on something, I have a trial cat litter that was supposed to be natural but smells like porta potty fluid that I need to empty entirely and replace, there are garbage bags of cat litter and cat cans waiting to go to the dump (I wish there was a way to do these cats with less waste but also not too much actual weight, the wet food that keeps them healthy is truly awful for garbage), sheets need to be cleaned, vacuum broke and floors blah blah blah, need to bring more wood in, I don't even know.

It's been a long time since my body was this bad and it's had me thinking about what I really would need to live here, assuming that I can't always pace things (relationship thing and disability police requiring a ton more documentation happened both in the same few days). I probably need a non-wood-burning way of heating the house even in winter, whether that's some sort of electric furnace/heat pump or a gas fireplace downstairs or whatever. Something that doesn't require a couple armloads of wood a day anyhow. Ideally something that if my head is fuzzy I can walk away from and it doesn't damage it. Today I forgot to close the catalyst bypass and the chimney got a lot of flame up it -- it's kept clean enough that it didn't catch fire, and it was nowhere near the heat the catalyst pumps out, but it was a lot of oxygen and flame in a way that would have caught anything that was in there. I smelled the heat and went and closed it up and checked the chimney from the outside, no harm done, but still.

Josh is here for a couple days, which contains a doctor's appointment where I need to get a ton of paperwork done (imagine being able to actually talk about medical stuff with the doctor!) and then next weekend I'm assisting with the wheel throwing class at the pottery studio.

Body aside, which it never is, I'm glad I have committed to more in-studio people-type clay stuff. I need to keep bits of community going. You know where you see people do cool stuff and they think stuff you're doing is cool and you exist in the same space? I'll maybe need to find a place in the building to set up a cot and rest between bits.

My cat was just sleeping beside me and woke up with a cry. He looked around sharply and it took a minute for him to relax and accept pets. It seemed pretty clear he'd woken from a bad dream. I wonder how he processes that?

My poem-a-day is going well. I want energy to plan my garden, but I don't have it. My enthusiasm is admittedly a little dim right now too, though I imagine it'll come back with time. I still haven't done my one-week internet-free pottery retreat I'd planned to do this winter.

Those are things I can look forward to. There are things.

Solstice has gone unremarked. The fire kept itself and I have been keeping it poorly, as a chore and not a ceremony. I have not been building my life. I have not been keeping myself kindled. I have been waiting.

My words have fallen silent and they still feel silent. When I speak it needs to matter to someone, at least to myself. I haven't been choosing the words that matter. I've been choosing the words that are easier, or letting someone else choose my words.

The things that matter I keep to myself. I don't think there's a lot that matters but it does. I don't have the kind of sustained talking relationship with anyone right now where I can discuss these things in context.

***

My brother is going to have a kid, the first in our immediate family in that generation

I'm beginning to have doubts about my competency to manage some of my own care

I've stopped taking a proactive approach to my own life and that's impacted a lot by unpredictable disability paperwork requirements that I can't get around

I've been sidelined yet again in a poly relationship situation without an honest "hey, I'm changing my priorities" talk -- the "yet again" is the damaging part

Animals may be the casualty of my financial/disability situation, since I can't figure out what or how else to cut things

I have complex feelings and logistics about staying at Threshold if I can't keep the animals

It takes about as long to recover from pottery as it does to forget the shapes of clay under my fingers

***

Writing a poem a day until Imbolc would be the equivalent of keeping the solstice fire through the dark. I barely managed that. Should I try this?