At long last

Meet Tessa.

Of the four irises we picked out on our visit to the farm almost two years ago to the day, the tawny gold one bloomed last Thursday afternoon. She waited through a year in a planter on a too-shady apartment balcony and a long fall and winter in the ground at our new house. Finally, finally. Welcome to the world, pretty one.


(Yes, before we started fostering kitties, we named our plants.)

I'm so glad we didn't miss this moment. We'd planned a last-minute weekend trip down to Portland to see the same friends we were visiting when we went to the iris farm in 2008, and I had a feeling this iris would bloom while we were away. And then once it did open, I wasn't sure I'd get a decent picture because the weather was uncooperative -- up through last Friday afternoon, it rained pretty steadily. But just after I loaded up the car, the showers slowed and some sun sneaked through. So I slipped to the front of the house and snapped some quick shots.

A lucky interval, those five minutes. I'll take them.

A quiet night

D is out for a coworker's birthday celebration this evening. So right now, it's just me and my thoughts and the soft weight of one of the foster kitties against the backs of my knees. Both of our guests got adopted last week, and the new parents plan to pick them up tomorrow. I'm glad -- it happens to be convenient that the cats are going, given our uncertain travel plans, but it's also wonderful to know they'll be in loving hands, even if I'm losing their companionship.

Speaking of company, I'm grateful for the kind words so many of you have left here in the last few days. I know the blogosphere's been extra busy of late, so it means even more that you've stopped by. Thank you -- I can't say it enough.

This week and most of the last has been a lot of going through the motions -- waiting and trying not to think about the inevitable. My mother's family has decided to transfer my grandmother to palliative care, which means there will be no more trips to the hospital. We've had word that my grandmother is still eating, but only minuscule amounts from a syringe, not unlike the kind we've had to use to force-feed sick cats. Swallowing is a challenge.

I've managed to keep working on my thesis, in spite of everything. Just a few fresh pages that have ultimately been whittled down -- my editing eye seems to take over two days out of three. It is slow, but not as slow as I imagine time must feel when it's measured in drops of food.

There's plenty else I'm sure I could do. There are still two curtains that need hemming, and there's laundry. We've got trips, planned ones, coming up very soon, and I ought to take care of the end-of-month bills. And -- wasn't there more? I can't remember. None of it feels important.

But I'll do them, these things and whatever else I happen to think of. Like the sometimes mechanical act of sitting down before this screen, laying fingers on the keys, hoping habit will lead me through the slowdowns of thought that are also inevitable. I'm hoping the mundane will make time feel less present.

Or, like writing, allow me to slip out of the present for a little while.

Hold, hope, repeat

I was finishing the hem on one of the curtains when my phone rang last Friday, a call from Canada. I've known in my heart for at least a year that such a call might come at any point. But I hadn't thought about what I'd do when it did come. At least, not recently.

It was my grandmother, my aunt said. She was in the hospital, some kind of infection -- a lung, her bladder, her kidneys. It wasn't looking good. Was my mother around?

I told her she wasn't -- Troubadour Mom was actually visiting Almost Dr. Sis -- and gave my aunt their cell phone numbers.

That's where it got complicated.

Some time later that night, while D and I were grocery shopping, the calls started coming in -- Troubadour Dad (also visiting my sister) and Almost Dr. Sis, trying to figure out what exactly my aunt had told me about my grandmother's condition, updating me on my mother's plans to fly to Toronto right away. Was I planning to go?

I didn't know.

"Of course you should go," said one voice in my ear as I stood immobilized in front of the meat counter. "You want to be there."

"But are you really up for this?" said another, the one I've been trying to listen to more. "Can you handle it?"

"Well," I said to them both, "what does it entail?"

It was never clear for three days afterward. More calls, back and forth, trying to assess how serious my grandmother's condition was, whether there were imminent end-of-life decisions on the line. She was fighting the infection but unable to eat, or so it seemed. Not having an answer, I held tickets to get me to Canada on a red-eye every night of this week, since I couldn't get updates on the situation until the end of each day. If this was indeed the end, I did want to be there, to bear witness -- my grandmother was unlikely to recognize me or respond to much, given her condition, so being there for her was sadly not the primary reason to go.

But being there would also mean getting drawn into family politics, volatile and difficult to navigate (in crisis or at any other time), and the associated pressure to look after others first before myself, as I'd always been taught. This, in a larger sense, is what I've been trying to disentangle myself from for so long: the familial forces that make any decision to act in my own interest so hard. The forces that have made me fearful of being a nuisance with my own needs, fearful of being hurt because I put those needs out there only to have them struck down. Stay or go, speak or keep silent, and for whom?

Last night, my grandmother was released to go back to her nursing home. Yes, she rallied and survived, to our relief. She still can't eat much, which is of great concern -- dehydration and the dangers that come with it will keep looming unless she's monitored closely, and the staff in her residence are spread thin. What concerns me more, though, is this battle of my own, selfish as it may sound. I didn't go because I couldn't bring myself to face my fears. It was too soon after I'd finally identified what those fears were.

But it kills me now that I was and still am in my own way, at such a crucial moment. I'm better than this. Or at least, I want so much to be.

Waiting

I knew today was off to a slow start when we realized we'd put dirty dishes in among the clean ones in the dishwasher.

Not that it takes much effort to add more detergent and run the machine again. It's the drying that frustrates me. The whole thing is set to perform that convenient little function so I don't have to towel everything off, but inevitably, when the door opens, all the plastics (mostly food packaging we've saved from the garbage for storing leftovers -- margarine and yogurt tubs, peanut butter jars) are still beaded with moisture, dripping onto everything else. So you have to let it all air dry. I try to run the machine right after dinner and then pull the racks out before bedtime so that this can happen overnight. Hence my frustration this morning when I realized I'd have to wait through another evaporation cycle before I could deal with the dirty items crowding the sink and counter.

It's a linear process, which is something that's also true of writing for me. Sunday night, I sent the intro chapter of my thesis to my advisor, the chapter I'd been working on since January. Somewhere in the midst of my February trip, I'd revised that chapter based on her feedback and had sent it to her again. Knowing I needed to keep moving things along (especially since I was still hoping to graduate this spring), I started on the next chapter, or what I thought that would be, based on the context created by the first. The narrator's quest, as my advisor likes to call it, was established in my mind and on those initial pages.

Two weeks later, I got the revision back -- with more questions about what I'd changed than my advisor had had about the original version. The quest? More muddied than it was clarified, she said. In the end, we agreed that much of what I'd added needed to come back out. Which also meant that the next chapter I'd been working on, which referenced key parts of those additions, no longer made any sense.

So I'm sitting here, awaiting news of the revision of the revision while trying to write a new second chapter. I know I should keep going with what's beginning to emerge on the page, should trust that this time I've finally figured out and explained what the quest is. But I'm feeling skittish. Afraid that some time in the near future, I'll get my first chapter draft back with requests for yet another full-scale rewrite.

Meanwhile, my ideas are crowding my brain, in need of processing. I just want to be able to set them, clean and dry, in the places they belong.

Is that so much to ask?