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.

My mind was very quiet today.  Yesterday afternoon, I pushed through the last clean up at my garden.  Down came the frozen dahlias, the remnants of cosmos and zinnias, and full lily-pad vines of nasturtiums, still tender and blooming.  And this morning I cleared away the brick planter along the side of my building, where the cherry tomato was still rambling through the shrub rose, and the seed heads of the Starlight zinnias were spread across the dirt, undoubtedly helped by some eagerly nibbling, mousey assistant.  It was cold, and grey, and my nose was running.  A typical day in late October.

I did not miss my camera all day, but right at 8:00 tonight, I got that old feeling and needed to write something and see what the flowers had to show.  I don’t know if I will ever understand what the purpose of all these Sundays has been.  That’s not detachment or any fancy mindfulness state.  The things we make really just don’t owe us an explanation.

But I like the idea of getting out my knitting or sewing or glue and paper – and seeing what they have to tell me.

“For you, the seed for your next art work lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece.  Such imperfections (or mistakes if you are feeling particularly depressed about them today) are your guides – valuable, reliable, objective, non-judgemental guides – to the matters you need to reconsider or develop futher.”   David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear

Probably most people could have cleaned all the detritus out of my 10 x 10 plot in less than two hours.  You might even be thinking you could have done it.  And I say, yes.  You could.

But it’s taking me longer.  I’ve spent a couple of afternoons so far.  For one thing, I want to leave behind as many roots as I can.  They’ve done so much work for months and months, tunneling the dirt apart to find their water and minerals.  Their structure is part of the soil now, and I want them to stay.  That means cutting the plants back a bit at a time, till I can break them off at the soil line.

For another thing – for a lot of reasons I am not going to get into – I am using grocery bags to take the organic matter to the municipal collection site. So – you can picture me standing in the pathway, crushing handfuls of huge cosmo and zinnia stems into a pieces that will fit in a Trader Joe’s bag.  Because that’s what I’m doing.

I feel a little guilty for how good it feels to have something so big be finished for a while.  But the sun and the cold wind are a pretty good antidote for guilt.  So is crushing plant stems into small, bag sized pieces.

This is the first time in a very long time that  I’ve dipped back into work from a prior year.  Maybe it makes sense to lean a little bit on energy gathered a while ago, as this year’s garden returns to the essential components of light, water and earth.

The flowers are taking a little break, and so is the gardener (that’s me).

It’s already time to put the garden to bed, and there is still so much I don’t know:  how to get poppies and nigella to germinate, whether snapdragons will overwinter under straw, how many tulips I can really afford, and whether anyone will object if I plant a small variety of mock orange in the perennial bed.

I do know this:  two cherry tomato plants is two too many.  Next year: one Roma.  That’s it, I swear.

I like the thought of a growing curve.  I’ve been learning, yes – but it’s not certain that what I learned this year will apply in the next. We don’t know if we’ll have a historic drought or a warm, wet summer.  The hay I spread smothered the weeds in the scorching heat, but maybe next year it will damp-off the seedlings instead, in long, drawn out spring like we used to have.

But I did grow to love the dahlias that were not the colors or forms I had hoped – love them for their strange quirky petals and the haven they provided to so many bees I was sometimes scared to reach in and cut them. And I grew to believe there would be flowers waiting for me on Saturday, if I took care of the water and wrangled some rickety twine and stake supports they could lean on while they budded and leaved and rooted in the dirt.  And I’m growing to think I can do more next year, for no particular reason except to find out how we can grow further, the garden and me, into places yet to be discovered.