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?

Last month was a bad month. Fear and paperwork. When I write things here I re-live them, and I wasn't quite able to write about them because I wasn't done living them. In many ways I'm not.

It snowed for three days after all that, maybe 18" of snow here: over my boots. My snowblower is in the shop so although I have been doing some shovelling and knocking snow off roofs a feeling of isolation remains. In this case it's soothing, peaceful: I'm insulated from everyone else, though I do keep shovelling the arc of the gate so it can open if I need to get out in an emergency. The roads have been terrible, and this morning the snow turned to rain so I can't imagine it's any better out there.

Shovelling and walking the daily chores in the deep snow are all my body has been able to do. It's such a relief after using myself up emailing to follow up with bizarre information and paperwork structures (to contact benefits, for instance, I call someone who transcribes the call, puts it into a ticket, sends the transcription to me to ok, then the ticket goes to the benefits people, who email me an answer which I can't reply to so if I want to reply I need to call with the ticket number, explain the whole thing to someone, who puts in another ticket...)

Enough of that. My difficulty navigating these systems does give me real fear -- for instance, the system that was supposed to give me stopgap money requires reports every 2 weeks, and I'd been keeping my eye on their online portal, turns out the online portal just keeps saying it's "in review" until I do my first report, there's no way of knowing online if I'm approved or not until after the report is done, so I missed my first several reports, several weeks of money, and had to reapply (which then means I need to go through the weeklong no-money-during-this-period after they process it, and before I get money from them).

Anyhow, I would not be here in my bed with my cats and dim snowy light coming in through the window without friends who just give me money to live. I might be in a shelter, but the shelters are only 12 hours at night, and I think a day or two of that and I would not be able to move anymore, so maybe the hospital? With a foreclosed house and that terrible stabbing feeling of letting down the creatures I love who rely on me.

None of that is why I started writing now, after so long. I started writing because Siri came in this morning and lay on me and fell asleep with my hand under his chin, then sprawled across me. He dreamed and his tail twitched and he growled in his sleep and then settled. He was curled right up against me, as if I was safe for him, and I am?

I pay money to keep hi alive and I do not resent it in the least. Given a choice between feeding him and giving him his meds and say, clothes that fit, or a mattress without holes from laying in it so much, there's no question for me. I've felt bad about or resented people before for requiring money, but not the cats.

My house is gothic arch shaped. It's perfect for winter: the snow either stays on the roof and insulates, or it slides down and covers the basement windows and insulates down there. Things are quieter and more still, muffled by the snow at point of impact and by the rampart of snow around my house.

I've always rejected the idea of money as love because it was too painful for me to think there were ways I was unable to love people, that I just didn't have much money so that would mean I couldn't love folks properly. Like, as they said, if I did love them I'd find a way to get money for that use.

But maybe I can start by thinking of money as community love. It's still too hard to think that I can't do for anyone what has been done for me in an interpersonal love sense. But for community? I can do other things, and not this one thing, and that's maybe ok.

Though realistically I can do basically nothing right now. I can shovel a little snow and eat crackers for dinner and pet some cats. I can write very little and I can't do any pottery, though maybe if paperwork stops then I can. I can't articulate the increasing fragmentation and polarization I'm seeing in meaningful ways.

Some days I can't even find what's beautiful. I was describing my situation to a counselor at one point and she said "oh, I'm glad you have pets" and, yes. This is the thing Siri brought to me: he showed up, he chose me, he comes and snuggles close to me in the morning with full trust, and between him and the others I can always access feeling loved. Humans are so far away these days, I'm grateful to have these other ones closer to me.

And honestly, since my cognition really started to go, and since there's been more distance with Tucker and Josh, I'm not sure where my comfort level is with people at all. I used to do it so easily.

Bits of rain out there, falling on the snow now. Each drop makes the ramparts a little more impassible: I should shovel my way out at least. Or I should properly rest, since yesterday did wipe me out pretty badly.

This piece of writing has no summary, no conclusion, no theme to brush past on my way out the door. It just ends as it began, with cats snoring, and winter light in the window.

Planting trees most days and I have planted roughly 130 apple trees this year over about a month and a half, most underplanted with daffodils and muscari and a couple crocus and various scylla (the crocus and apple trees are tasty so I'm hoping the other, toxic, bulbs will be some discouragement for voles, deer, etc).

The ground has frozen too hard to plant for a span of multiple days twice now-- it just thawed overnight after the most recent one. I've received my last bulbs, including peonies, yesterday. So the next two days I plant flowers, flowers that won't even be pretty for several years, flowers that don't feed anyone, but flowers that mark where people have lived when their houses are long gone.

It's almost time to turn indoors, to dyeing and sewing and pottery, but I do not want to go indoors. I want a sunporch, somewhere with windows, where I can be in the light from outside while I do these things.

Even more I want to taste the fruit of all these baby apples, to see which ones survive my climate (they all have an early hardy parent and a fancy parent, so like Wickson or Centennial or Trailman or somesuch and then something like Rubiyat or Roxbury Russet so nothing is guaranteed).

Winter felt early a couple weeks ago but we've settled generally into a skiff of snow overnight, melting by midafternoon, and I've been planting into that. The transition period will make the final freeze-up easier on me.

I really did never know how much I appreciated seasonality until I moved up here.

It's so neat, laying out the apple trees in rows and curves and aisles and nooks. Threshold is growing bones! I want to see. Three years, five years, I want to see what happens!

I also took my chances on a tiny webstore and got six varieties of sunchoke from a delightful human, several of which flowered for her. They stay on the landscape for a long time and I can't wait to eventually turn to helping them get seed.

You'll know I'm replaced by aliens if I ever get just the minimum diversity of a plant.

...I actually came on to say I've been listening to history podcasts (trying to catch the bits of prehistory, because there don't seem to be many besides Origin Stories for early human stuff) and it's really been reinforced that people just genocide groups of people all the time, so the combination of middle eastern stuff going on right now and disability-aimed-to-kill including forced incarceration of mentally ill folks here and an easily-accessible federal assisted suicide program with very poor access to disability supports... that's more or less normal.

It's humans being humans, like quail will scalp each other or roosters will kill each other or...

It feels better, knowing it's not personal? I mean, humans do all sorts of things.