The last big thing is over.  As of May 2, I have a zig-zag scar framing my forehead and eyebrow to remember my Mohs procedure by.  The countdown goes in a positive direction from here on – two weeks til the surface stitches dissolve, and I can stop covering half my head with tape and gauze.  Three months until the underlying sutures are completely gone, their job fully done.  One year until the skin settles back to normal and the raised line recedes into something less noticeable.  All completely normal and utterly miraculous.

I’m not sure how to make room for my gardening life in my new place.  There’s a lot of carpet here – even in the bathroom.  Growing seedlings and schlepping flowers involves spilling dirt and splashing water.  That presents a challenge for keeping the carpet clean.

But it’s a nice problem to have.  And meanwhile:  Tulips and crabapple branches.

There’s no question that the first tulips of the year in the first window light of a new home are for my sweet April loves, Barbara and Patsy, presented by in the old Delftware pitcher saved by Grace, and finding sunshine between the raindrops.

With spring always in your hearts, dear birthday girls – sending lots and lots of love!

Well, there are tales to tell – another night.

How the cherry branches came to flutter around the window, the snow that favored us with a visit to celebrate the mercurial skies of April, and where our new window will be.  It’s more than enough for one night’s work and I need to reserve some energy for packing and doing dishes and packing some more.

But I didn’t miss our birthdays, darling.  This bounty is for us – brought home as budding twigs, ready to take a little warmth and turn it into Spring.  Nothing more is needed – just the light, the warmth, and time.  We have all three, my dearest dear.  And further Springs to come.

All my love, honey.  Happy Birthday.

Is it really a new year tomorrow? Yes, yes it is.

So, peonies to celebrate and bring us all the softest hopes of spring until we get there for real.

And now I’ll take my sleepy self to bed, and enjoy the last of 2023 snuggled and dreaming, and let Earth witness the start of her next turn around our star in the quiet winter night – and begin a dreaming of Her own.

Before I knew I would get a beautiful Christmas arrangement delivered from my dear and darling cousin, I bought lavender roses to keep my promise to make roses a Christmas tradition.  And their icy purple edges do fit the bill for a different Christmas from the one I didn’t want.  Because there were a few very sad days last week – and some mornings that I woke up crying, and cried in the car until I got to work, and then on the way home.

It’s the things I say to myself, even more than what happened.  Even if what happened is an unqualified failure – it doesn’t cause the same pain as price I was taught I had to pay.  And to be fair, the price my teachers both paid – and so on, counting backwards through generations of faces none of us ever knew.  Faces who loom behind the two absolutely human being who raised me, and who raised them, and who raised the ones before and before and before.  From the Pogrom to the Famine, someone whose long lost name we have never heard – paid.

In any case, it dawned on me that – as sad as I might feel – there was no reason I couldn’t enjoy some lavender roses, or Christmas Day.  And when the flowers got here from my cousin, that cinched it.

So you come on over here and be sad with me if you need to.  And let’s enjoy Christmas together.

Roses and evergreens are the unlikeliest friends, aren’t they?  I had forgotten what a pleasure these grower’s roses were last December.  Full petticoats on thin, soft stems – like miniature versions of lush garden roses, spinning their romantic dreams with a nod and a wink.  I think I’ll invite them for Christmas again this year, and see what they have to say for themselves.  I might take their pictures – if we all feel like it that day.

I have the Crud – not the Vid, thankfully.  So, we will not be thinking too hard about the week this evening, lest it make my nose runny and my eyes water.  I have had quite enough of that the past three days.  Except to note I lighted my new, $5 artificial tree (it was 75% off at the thrift store last January ) with hand-me down lights from my Berkman cousin.  And left a bunch of vintage Christmas geegaws lying around, so we might call that “decorated,” and be done.  Just kidding.  I have so many geegaws for Christmas.  There’s plenty more where those came from.

But mostly tonight, let’s just enjoy a visit with Roses Past, and maybe entertain an inkling of Roses Yet to Come.

It so happens these hydrangea were flowers on a Sunday two years ago, in a different image, but still.  Decembers do look and feel alike, as winter begins to spread and do her work.  Not all somber tones to be sure, but muted like soft music, before the stalks and branches and lingering leaves are inevitably hushed in drifting snow.

Two years ago I did not know how I would ever pay this rent or come to terms with the disrepair and dirty surfaces in this building, or the screaming toddler downstairs.  I did know that nothing could make up for the shock and disruption of what I had lost – my home and my person – except the big, south facing windows.  Where I could have as many flowers as I needed – whether I could afford them or not – in all the light the day would offer.  And where I could look for something in the flowers that I could not otherwise learn.

The only forward thinking I usually do is worry.  You know – where you anxiously think about how it will be when something bad happens in the future, and imagine your present life as if that future already happened.

So I did not imagine this future, two years hence.  Accommodated to the things my landlords are too indifferent to maintain.  Disturbed and irritated by the terrible vehemence of a screaming three year old.  And simply watching the light pass in the big, south facing windows – relieved that I don’t need to find any thing other than pleasure in its transiting changes, to make today worthwhile.

It was a hard week.

The night before Thanksgiving, I found myself nodding and smiling and saying bright, cheery congratulations to someone who’s been telling me for a decade that he loved me -as he introduced me to his new girlfriend, who just bought his business, and described their Thanksgiving plans  to me – drive north to meet her parents.

Nodding and smiling just so I could get out of there as fast as I could.  You know how that feels.  When there’s no air in your lungs and the only thing keeping you standing is the primeval grit of the Ancestors intoning, “Show no weakness.  Show no weakness.”

Because the place where this happened has been precious to me for so much longer than his endearments and sweet come-hithering.  One of the places that I really felt was mine.  Where I was participant, not a guest.  Where Brenna the flirt and the sassy-pants and, god help me, Brenna the beautiful was seen, and welcomed and exactly the right girl for the job.  A place I trusted – which really is not easy for me. A place where I felt the happiest I ever have.

And that’s what broke my heart, one last time.  Not him and his dumb new girlfriend.  I wish them luck, I truly do.  They’ll need it, if I know even half the story.

But I didn’t know I had already been in my place for the last time ever.

My little Brigadoon is vanished – and it doesn’t matter if I go back again or not.  There’s only 4 walls now, where I have to behave myself, and really, I can do that anywhere.

I would have waved good-bye.

I sheltered next to the open driver’s door, engine running. The wind blew rain into the car, covering the seat and steering wheel with cold, wet drops. As I clipped the brilliant orange branches of a quince somehow surviving in the rock-covered median, I made a mental note to keep a towel in the car for the next time I steal parking-lot flowers in the rain in Wisconsin April.

The more I have a little break from the camera, the more I realize how much work I was doing – and how important it is to let the tide of that inner demand ebb away for a little while. So, last Sunday I ate the most delicious baked potato with my friends, who also make sure I get to see Season 1 of “Only Murders in the Building.” Because otherwise I would not have seen Jane Lynch as Steve Martin’s stunt double. And that would be absolutely tragic.

So I’m grateful for spring’s ornery weather, and the recollection of impossibly coral petals, that willingly bloom in the rock-covered edges of places where nothing ornamental belongs. And for the long nights that draw us together, waiting for the oven to turn potatoes into tender delights – while the branches take their rest.

Bulbs are planted – except I might try to buy just a few more this week.  Straw is laid in dense flakes in the paths, and layered softly over the beds, so the rain will get in and the snow will melt through.  I weeded the new plot, and that’s the minimum it needed.  The clocks changed, and I was late for breakfast with my cousin.  Because.  I still can’t get that change straight.

It’s time to look forward and inward.  I find it easy to get those two confused.  Looking inward to try to change the past.  Looking forward to see the same thing happening again.

The garden is a helpful check on that confusion.  The seeds and the bulbs and the bees and the other creatures are very clear about time, and when things happen.  From them, I’m learning I can dream away, crowding the beds with more flowers than I can possibly raise, and not mind at all that I won’t know how things will really turn out.  And I can take a break, and let things be – because there’s nothing I can do to change the garden as it sleeps.