I Gave it a Try

Just finished reading Patrick Lane's There is a Season: A Memoir in a Garden. One of Canada's most famous poets of whom I had never heard, Lane has written an autobiography gorgeous and hideous in equal measure. He finds redemption and joy and peace in his garden, in its dead pregnant squirrels and slugs, its predatious--if that's a word--raccoons, (predictably) in its lovely plants--all as the restless ghost of his sadly abused mother prowls the underbrush on her hands and knees.

So I thought to myself, I thought: Well, out you go. You're in need of a little redemption, joy and peace at the moment. Out you go, then. Out into your own personal Eden. Go, reclaim your soul!

[Angel voices]

The following things happened:

1. I slipped on blue sidewalk chalk and stubbed my broken toe on a wood screw.
2. I shrieked an imaginative obscenity involving the Christ Child, His Blessed Mother and a shoe horn, and heard the neighbor say "There they go again, Alex."
3. I spilled coffee not only on myself but on the borrowed first-edition book I was carrying (yep, Lane's)
4. I burst into tears
5. I heard the neighbor say "What now?"
6. I heard my son say "Gramma, why's mummy crying on the patio?"
7. I heard my mother say "Mummy's going through a little change at the moment"
8. I yelled "I AM NOT MENOPAUSAL"
9. I heard a different set of neighbors, the ones with the Lexus, burst out laughing

Fucking garden.