News seasons. New Beginnings.

  narcissi bulbs 
  Originally uploaded by emira

Last weekend, in the pouring rain, I tried to put my I'm-a-rugged-west-coaster / it's-better-than-working face on and plant my fall bulbs. I managed to get them all planted and did a none-too-shabby job of cleaning up the flower beds, before I gave up and went in for a long hot bath and some tea. By the time I was done I had that kind of wet cold where water is actually seeping up your jeans, and your wool sweater wears twice what it did when you started. My gloves were also so slippery with mud that I couldn't get them off my hands (too slippery to hold onto!) and I actually considered for more than half a second (officially too long) the option of grabbing a very, very muddy glove in my teeth to pry it off my cold fingers. I ended up using my feet. Whining and winging aside, I did actually kind of enjoy my time out in the garden for a number of reasons beyond that perverse feeling of having accomplished something despite my strong will to go inside and snuggle. Mostly, I have to admit my internal rhythms seem forever tied to the school year more than the calendar year and fall seems to bring with it a sense of renewed possibilities. As I was out there digging wee bulb holes and trying to envision what everything will look like next spring, I couldn't help but get hopeful for the chance at a little renewal (the metaphor was right there for me to grab onto afterall), cuz frankly I could use it right about now.

I found myself thinking a lot about last  year at this time. (As an aside, this is one of the things I like most about having this house: I'm pretty committed to staying here for a while. Having been a renter for my entire adult life to date, I haven't often stayed in one place long enough to really experience many years in one place. This experience of settling into one place is giving me a chance to observe the changes as seasons pass and in particular with the garden to see how incrementally progress can be made.) In thinking about last year at this time -- what the garden looked like, what the house looked like, what projects were yet to be imagined, what projects were only half completed -- I  had a renewed sense of what the next year could possibly bring. And, while its a tired cliche to say that time goes by too quickly, it really does feel like the days whip on past with more on my mental "to-do" list than on the "done" list. And while life feels particularly hectic and rat-racey lately, thinking back to last year I realized plenty has been done, even if we still haven't painted the outside of the house.

In thinking about last year at this time, I also couldn't help but think about how trying last Fall was. At the end of last summer Martin's dad passed away, and while it does no one any good to try to put various personal tragedies on a scale of bad to worse, at the time, after a really challenging summer I thought that surely we'd been through enough for a while and things were going to take a turn for the better. And then: they didn't. More trauma came to some very dear friends shortly after, which really hit home for me, and then, come the end of the fall season last year, it hit me head on. As I say, trying to measure scales of tragedy is a useless endeavour, but I can say that by the time last winter came around I had little left in me to deal with what came my way. You see last fall, after the ups and downs we had just been through Martin and I decided to start trying to have a baby. And... well you know where this is going. Last December I lost a baby. And frankly, things haven't really got much better since then. It's not all been about baby-making, there's been plenty of other stuff thrown in there to make the ride awfully rocky, but certainly for me, this has been a constant refrain.

I really wasn't comfortable talking about it then. And I'm not totally sure how comfortable I am talking about it now. This may be the last time I mention it here. I can't quite say. I can say, however, that not talking about it hasn't helped in anyway (and that includes several close friends in real life as well as this space), so in the words of my brilliant friend Inga: I've decided to try something different to see how that goes for a while. I'm not sharing it here to ask for pity. Exactly the opposite. One of the primary reasons I've been so private about it is that I'm not very good with pity. At all. But rather because my ability to still keep blogging about our home life  has become increasingly curtailed by this unspoken fact. Each time I think about sharing something going on over here, I can't help but feel like the most prevalent thing in my mind is not the new shelf we put up but the fact that after nearly a year of trying and one miscarriage we're still not knocked up over here. Silly? Certainly. But true.

I've seriously considered shutting this blog down many times over the past year, and perhaps that will prove to be the best option. But, through all the struggles, as I've moved away from regularly posting here, one thing has become really clear to me: I've really missed it. Missed the (dare I say) community that this blog exposed me to. The creative folks out there doing awesome and beautiful things with their homes and lives. Many of them are people I've actually connected to in real life and I'm so thrilled to have those folks in my world. So, here I am. Trying something different to see if that works. I'm hoping this will be the last of the big squashy "feelings" posts for a while and that we can get back to the usual programming of domestic musings, garden life, cat chronicles and renovation trials. I hope that over the radio silence a few of you stuck around, and I hope you'll understand if it still takes me a while to get back to myself. It sure would be nice if by the time those bulbs come up in the spring, things feel a little less fraut over here, afterall it would finish my metaphor off so nicely don't ya think?