A cold July

It's 9:30 a.m. on July 18. The room is dark and chilly. Just a few minutes ago I could swear I saw some sun. Sigh. Be glad. It is not raining. I did say it is July, didn't I? For over two weeks now it has been raining, gray and cool nearly every day. A patch of bright sun makes me rush to the balcony to sit knowing it will not last. I yank off my tee shirt and pull up my pant legs to expose as much skin as possible for the few moments of pleasure and vitamin D. I know it won't last. It doesn't.

The rain keeps everything a brilliant green and beats my potted flowers into submission. I watch my succulent jade plant standing in a water-filled tray and know she doesn't like wet feet. I go out on to my bedroom balcony to try a one-handed rescue with only limited success. Bill will have to help get the tray gone from this large and heavy specimen.

My gardening is greatly limited this summer by my still casted , but healing arm. This week the full cast gave way to something called a Munser/Munster/Monster cast which allows me at last to bend the elbow but still restricts side motion of the forearm--a telling sign of just how badly I had trashed the wrist. (Each person who mentions the cast pronounces it differently, but the well over six foot technician doing the cast says it is named after the person who designed it. He tells me it is his favorite kind to make because it is a challenge--"let me know if the saw burns going around the curves." Saw? This is a going on cast, not a coming off one.)

This cast looks ordinary white instead of the patriotic red,white and blue of the last one (I'm sporting number four); however, it holds a secret revealed only in darkness when it glows brightly all around. It reminds me of a movie of a forgotten name but a long-remembered scene in which two people go for a romp in bed in a totally darkened room. The woman asks if he is wearing protection.

"No."
"Well, go get it."

He leaves the bed, rummages around and you hear the opening of the little package, a crackle, a pop, and he turns to walk back to the bed--something you know only because you see a brilliant blue glowing "stick" wobbling through the air as he gets confused in the darkness and fumbles to return to his now questionably ardent lover.

Of course, this has nothing to do with gardening and wet Julys.

In spite of my handicap and the now fading belief that we may move at any moment I want some flowers blooming in my yard. Bill helps me select and plant some ornamental sweet potatoe vines in dark purple and bright green, some purple lobelia, some white something and does all the lifting to get them potted. I act as scooper of very small amounts of dirt and director of placement. "A little more to the left, please." "Oops, my little Deruta, Italy, born terracotta lamb has lost an ear. Can you glue it back on?" Arrangement complete, my gardening is done for the season.

Requiring no effort at all is the amazing moss supported in nearly my entire yard. Rainey Julys appeal greatly to this impossible-to-mow plant. The yard is surrounded by enormously tall, swaying pines with a foreground of mixed deciduous trees including a somewhat deformed but lovely birch. Shade rules three-quarters of the turf, creating moss about four inches deep and making it a perfect place for the little voles to burrow around looking for whatever it is they eat. Walking on the moss is akin to stepping on green foam rubber. I wonder if I step on a vole.

I have house guests this weekend and they are finally waking up. It is time for me to supervise the making of breakfast.

A new way

My first blog entry. I have mixed emotions about this process. Not exactly clear where I'll go with it, but I think it is all a part of being on the brink of something life changing. I have been working very hard for nearly 43 years in a job that pretty much defines me as a person; a job that consumes far more of my life than it was ever intended to; than I ever should have allowed. A job that in recent years and months has caused me to make the word "overwhelming" a frequent part of my vocabulary.

"I feel overwhelmed."
"The workload is overwhelming."
"The stress is overwhelming me."
"The hours overwhelm my personal life and I get nothing done for myself."

I need to make a change--the kind that terrifies me because of its immensity. I need to retire, to move, to slow down, to find a new way of knowing and seeing myself. I remember the last time I sought a new way of seeing myself. It was tough, painful, scary and lonesome in the early '90's when I turned my life upside down by moving alone to Germany. It turned out to be an enormously positive and rewarding experience. Today's search for a new way will take me back home to Virginia as a retiree; older, wiser, less frightened and not alone. A wonderful man I met in Germany is now part of that rewarding experience, giving me courage to step out into the unknown along with him because he has been living that same life of stress and other's expectations.

Sometimes the way forward is strewn with pitfalls. Earlier this month while working a project in Italy for my public relations job, one of those pitfalls shoved me right over on my face into the asphalt outside an hotel as our group headed to dinner for the last night in a beachside town near Pisa. While my face went unmarked, my left wrist broke and my knees took a beating. Several friends and co-workers went without dinner to stand beside me in the busy emergency room to which a well-worn Italian ambulance delivered me. Several hours later I had been X rayed, bones set (think injured cowboy, leather strap in teeth and straight whiskey pouring down my throat, none of which I had), and casted in enough solid plaster to make the nearby Leaning Tower stand a bit straighter--something I now was having a hard time doing. I knew my immediate future was taking a new way quite different from what I had been imagining.

After a fitful night under the care of a well-qualified, mother-of-seven friend of mine, I was helped into public presentation in the breakfast room where I answered questions from my co-workers and strangers not on scene for my spectacle. Most of us would reconvene shortly at the nearby Pisa airport, our project completed, heading home. Some of us would find that return difficult.

Placed in a wheelchair in hopes of getting priority boarding, I was, instead refused even the right to board due to my recent injury. Too dangerous for me they said. After exhausting the rental car options at the "aeroporto," myself and two others were taken back to the military installation on which we had been working for days. There, the funny and warm rental car manager who had been enjoying a rash of great business from our project, provided us with a BMW and wished us a safe trip. Thirteen hours later, we rolled into my driveway at 1:30 a.m., Sunday, June 7, exhausted and ready to be home.