Mano a Mano in the Garden

On Wednesday I went out to do some yard work, with one goal being to prune the end of our forsythia that is hanging over the sidewalk. The roots are on our property, as is most of the plant, but it separates our yard from the yard of the neighbor who hates to harm the slightest living thing, so I was hoping to complete the task and quietly depart for another sector before he realized I was doing it.

Unfortunately, a friend arrived to visit him, and when he came out to greet his friend, he saw what I was up to and rushed over in a frenzy. I went and stood by the utility pole on the lawn extension that marks the property line and said firmly, “This is where the property line is. I am not going to touch anything on your side.”

But it turned out it was more than just the forsythia. He yelled, “If you have something to say to me, you say it to me directly!” He said that he had gotten a letter from Digby, our well-regarded local tree guy (not quite the actual name). Apparently a complaint from someone had caused Digby to write him a letter, and he assumed it was I who had complained. I asked what the letter had said, and he yelled, “This is not your business!” I assured him that I had not complained about him to anyone and he stormed off, clearly unconvinced. I had no idea gardening was going to be some sort of blood sport. How thrilling!

I went inside and texted Digby to see what was going on, and he said that someone had written a letter to my neighbor taking him to task for vegetation that was encroaching into a neighboring yard and that whoever did this had signed Digby’s name to the letter, which he was not pleased about.

Besides this not being a great way to communicate and not fair to Digby, it is truly perplexing: Only four yards abut my neighbor’s: Mine, that of a brand-new neighbor who seems very nice, that behind a house which is unoccupied, and that which belongs to an elderly lady who has lived on this block for decades and who seems like a genteel sort. But also, if something is hanging into your yard, just cut it off! And also, why would Digby the tree guy care about drooping vegetation?

I had meant to spend four hours in the yard that day, but it ended up being six and three-quarters hours, and I left quite a swath of destruction, if I may say so myself. A lot of things have wild grape vines on them, the pulling loose of which is very satisfying. I am going to need a tall grabber thing, and I’m also about two weeks from needing a chainsaw. What with one thing leading to another, I found that I had created a substantial hole in the greenery in one area that went pretty much all the way to my irate neighbor’s porch; oops. My sister had lately pointed out a weed tree that is now a full-grown tree. She said it would be nice to remove it, but it was far back in a thicket of whatever. Well, not any more. You can now walk right up to that tree and lean against its trunk if you want. We could ask Digby to cut it down, but I don’t have any problem with it, actually.

The forsythia is no longer hanging over the sidewalk, but I can’t say it’s a very graceful pruning job. I’d like to think my father would be proud of my zealous if unskilled efforts. I don’t recall any actual bickering about this, but I’m under the impression that my mother sometimes thought that perhaps there had been a bit too much pruning on the part of the other party. But what are you supposed to do? There is only so much planting one can do, whereas weeding, pruning and clipping are forever. I am finding weeding to be positively addictive.

That afternoon, I randomly dug up, cut down, tore off and pruned various things here and there on the theory that if a plant wishes to survive, it had better actively be blossoming when I come along with my implements. I was starting in on some things with big leaves that I suspected of possibly being in cahoots with the burdock when I spotted my brand-new neighbor who seems very nice, whose name is also Digby. My sister said it is rather amazing for one person’s circle of acquaintances to include two Digbys.

I asked Digby what the thing was that I had just half dug up. She said it was a hosta. I asked if it would bloom, and she said it would. She pointed out some nearby in her yard that were getting ready to bloom. I apologetically patted the soil back in place as best I could and told Digby I would not further disturb any hosta.

That evening, as I had dinner on the deck, I took a photo of a thing nearby and looked it up: a hosta of some other kind! I took a photo of another thing, and, astoundingly, that was yet another sort of hosta. I wonder how on earth people gardened before the internet existed. I have also started to use the Merlin app for bird identification.

I texted my neighbor before bedtime to say that I was sorry that someone had communicated with him in such a disrespectful and dishonest way. I reiterated that it wasn’t me and said I consider us to have a good relationship, such that we could talk about anything that might be bothering either of us. I received a brief note of thanks. (Not, let the record reflect, an apology for yelling at me and for the false accusation, but it was good that he responded at all, and in a positive manner.)

There are several beds in the yard, two mostly just dirt thanks to myself, and four or five completely choked with weeds and, I guess, non-weeds? One large bed in particular I know has a lot of different kinds of flowers in it, but with little blooming at the moment, I have decided to pause before I accidentally make a lot of nice things disappear. I am waiting for book on weeds of the Upper Midwest to arrive, and have lately obtained two lethal-looking tools for weeding in crevices.

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend at Seva, and in the late afternoon, I had another phone conversation with my financial advisor. I mentioned that I’m completely stuck trying to decide where to live. He said with certainty, “Michigan is where you want to be.” I was incredulous. I hadn’t even bothered trying to get anyone else to tell me the answer to this conundrum because I knew nobody would do it, so I couldn’t believe the answer was being offered just like that. I asked, “It is??”

He said it is, because it’s “quieter” and has “lower expenses.” He said I’d be a “top-tier retiree” in Michigan. That may be, but I am not sure I want to be a retiree at all yet. Nonetheless, I decided that I would go ahead and buy the house, but spend two-thirds of my time in San Francisco and one-third here until I get sick of one or the other, or of flying back and forth, or of paying for flying back and forth, an expense currently borne by the estate. However, when I woke up today, this struck me as a ridiculously complicated idea. (Also, my poor cats. On their own fifty percent of the time for more than four years now.)

I had lunch today with a friend at Ricewood. One of her sons is a horticulturalist specializing in native plants. I asked if he’d be able to look at my flower bed and point which things are weeds and she said he definitely could. I asked her to put us in touch.

This afternoon the pest guy was due to come over about the debris on the living room floor, which the internet said was termites, though it also said it was carpenter ants, and also that it was just ants. For sure there are hundreds of sturdy-looking though not-too-large ants walking up and down outside the front door, though I have never seen one inside.

While I waited for the pest guy, I cut vegetation from the other day into pieces that would fit into lawn and leaf bags, and I tried out my new weeding tool on the cracks in the driveway. It worked superbly. If there is anything more satisfying than plucking weeds out of the cracks in one’s driveway, I can’t think what it is. A week ago, my driveway had hundreds of weeds sprouting out of the cracks; it is now pristine.

The pest guy arrived, bringing piles of good news. I do not have to worry about the woodchuck that lives next to my deck. I wasn’t actually worried, but I had become worried that maybe I should be worried. The pest guy said the woodchuck will not breach the cinder blocks the house is made of and that they only do something about a woodchuck if the woodchuck is destroying the garden and the homeowner is upset.

The guy who did our home inspection a while back noted the presence of carpenter ants, but the pest guy said all decks have carpenter ants hanging around, and that if they were actually nesting in the deck, there would be piles of sawdust, which there aren’t.

I showed him a hole near the front door I have seen a bee or two going into, and he said just to keep an eye on it. He said plugging the hole is not a good idea, because the bees may dig their way out—into the interior of the house. 

He looked at the frass on the living room floor and said it is not falling from the visible crack in the ceiling. He said the crack is likely due to settling of the house. I asked if he would patch it from the attic side if it were his house or just the room side. He said just the room side. Holy moly! Every time this young man opened his mouth, he saved us more money.

As for the producers of the frass, he said it is just ants, not termites and not carpenter ants. He pointed out a couple of actual dead ants. He put a couple of baits in the area, and he sprayed the ant trail outside; he said it is absolutely the ants seen outside the front door that are kicking solid excreta onto the living room floor. He said we are now covered for any kind of ant until the end of the calendar year. He said the ants that produced the frass should be dead in three weeks and the baits can then be discarded, but to call them if I see ants or frass after that. He said he deals with three or four cases of termites per year, and three or four cases of just ants per day. In return for this cornucopia of glad tidings, the estate gave him $395. 

I was extremely relieved that nothing turned out to be something it was going to cost a fortune to address. 

Loose Crud

Yesterday evening I noticed some debris on the living room floor and swept it up. It looked sort of like coarsely ground black pepper. I was astounded to see quite a bit more of the same in the same spot this morning. My sister said it seems to her that she has often seen something or other in that spot. Due above is a crack in the wall, and above that, a crack in the ceiling, neither very large. My sister said maybe the roof work or the A/C installation shook loose crud that is in the attic, or maybe the operation of the new heat pump is doing that. She said it would not be a bad idea to rule out some kind of destructive pest, so I scheduled an appointment for this Friday, and then I felt a little disheartened: Yet another thing that needs fixing that will cost X amount of money?

My sister went on to say she thought we should take a look at it from the attic so we would have a better idea if what the pest person says makes sense. That was even more disheartening; a wave of vertigo set in, or vestibular migraine, or whatever it is: A foggy, disoriented feeling in the brain.

This was going to require either climbing up into the attic via the wobbly fold-down stairs in the garage and crawling all the way across two rooms in the exceedingly foul air and hoping to be able to locate the crack, or using a ladder to get up onto a ledge near the living room ceiling. Neither sounded that great (ladders and vertigo maybe not being things that go well together), but I indicated that I was on board. (I mean, what was I going to do? Sit on the couch while my sister crawled around in the attic?)

The day picked up greatly after that. I had a nice breakfast and after debating whether it’s allowed (by whom?) to skip taking a walk if it’s a gardening day, went out to do yard work. Being a perfectionist, I would prefer to both take a walk and do yard work, but besides the time factor, it is mainly a question of energy and allocation thereof. I skipped the walk.

The main goal today was to dig up burdock, which has giant not-very-winsome leaves and gets huge extremely fast. It has very substantial roots (which I guess can be cut up and used to brew health-giving tea). Getting it out of the ground required the use of an actual shovel. I often had to jump up and down on both sides of the shovel, and I had to temporarily relocate several heavy rocks. It was extremely satisfying each time I heard the POP! of the roots giving way. One time it was such a loud crack, I thought for a moment that I had snapped the wooden handle of the shovel.

There used to three arbor vitae in the back yard which I had not seen for some time. I couldn’t imagine what had happened to them. Along with tackling the burdock, I did other bits of pruning and weeding and pulling vines off things. My next door neighbor does not believe in harming the merest blade of grass, so I was chucking to myself picturing him sitting on his couch with a worried look on his face hearing the chop-chop-chopping and my demented shrieks of pleasure when about 20 feet of vine pulled free. “OH YEAH!!!”

And guess what was behind all of those vines? Three nearly dead arbor vitae, separated from the edge of the grass by several feet of various kinds of greenery, whereas they used to be right at the edge of the grass.

It occurred to me that gardening is a perfect pursuit for someone who loves getting rid of things, as I do. There will always be something else that can be cut off or pulled up or dug out or dragged away.

My sister stopped by in the late afternoon, but we ended up neither climbing a tall ladder in the living room nor, thank god, crawling through the attic. The house will be painted soon and the painter can fix the little cracks from the room side. The cracks may or may not get fixed from the attic side. We set up a shorter ladder and my sister held the vacuum cleaner off the floor so that I could vacuum off the spider webs and crud near the cracks. I was able to reach all the way to the ceiling with her help. I’ll see how things are tomorrow. 

I was talking to my sister about something needing to be fixed every five minutes, part of the reason I actively never wanted to own a house, not to mention not wanting to clean a house. She said that that is kind of how it is, yes, but one thing I have going for me is that I am likely to be proactive about problems. A lot of things did not get addressed year after year when my father owned this house, and this is because he could do and / or fix everything. He could do electrical work, he could do plumbing, he could do any kind of mechanical thing, he could fix broken things, he could fabricate needed items out of metal or wood. Therefore, when a thing needed attention, he put it on his list of things to do. 

I, however, cannot fix or do anything, and so am forced to call someone, and this I do right away because I cannot stand to have tasks hanging over my head, so my sister is probably quite right.

It was very satisfying to look out the kitchen sink window this evening and not see burdock.

Basically Never

Much of the time in these months since my mother died, coming up on nine of them, and once I got past the initial phase of trying to think my way to a decision about moving to Michigan or not (the brute force method), I have felt that either choice will be fine and I have occasionally also remembered that these aren’t the only two choices on earth; there are probably 50 things I could do that would be fine. It’s a nice feeling.

But every once in a while, I snap over into the shadow side of that, in which it seems that either choice will be terrible. This is what happened in the past week, and it was awful, and I am glad it has faded away again, which happened after I accepted the fact that I was going to be beset with anxiety every minute for the rest of my life and simply tried to notice where I was feeling it in my body. I did not feel that anxiety at all today.

My mind is an unreliable friend, refusing to stick with any given story for very long. The noise of my neighbors in their apartments in the building I live in in San Francisco and the shouts of the soccer players in the park outside the window—is that annoying or is it nice to have those sounds of life nearby? (One practical consideration: If I fell and yelled for help in San Francisco, someone would hear me. In Ypsilanti, the mailman would have to smell rotting dead flesh before anyone realized something was wrong.)

The profound quiet in my bedroom in Ypsilanti: Is that peaceful and restorative or is it desolate and lonely?

The mental list of what I’d have to do to relocate is long and daunting:

Prepare the house to receive cats, in terms of supplies. Two litter boxes, two water bowls, two food bowls, two “moats” for the water bowls (square metal baking pans with water and a couple of drops of dishwashing liquid in them, to keep ants out of the drinking water), bags of cat litter, two poop scoopers, bags of dry food, cans of wet food, two forms of gabapentin (capsules for Marvin, tablets for Duckworth), two forms of Prozac (ditto), two or more flavors of Pill Pockets (no salmon for Marvin, any kind for Duckworth), psyllium (so as not to have overly firm poop), FortiFlora (so as not to have overly wet poop), and Nulo lickable treats (for the occasional medication crisis).

Prepare the house to receive cats, in terms of some minor renovations and one kind of major one: building a “cat lock” outside the front door—a new outer wall with a door in it so that if the cats got out the front door, they wouldn’t be entirely outside.

Quit my job. That’s a hard one.

Liberate sufficient assets to pay my sisters for their shares of the house.

Have a legal document drawn up re financial arrangement with sisters.

Find someone to help move the cats.

Move the cats. My giant worry.

Move my stuff. My second most giant worry. The internet says not to use a moving service. Everyone likes PODS. I guess you’re supposed to rent blankets from U-Haul, and then hire some people to wrap up your furniture and put it in the POD. I guess you’d have to apply for a permit to reserve a parking place or two on the street for the POD. Then I guess you’d have to hire some other people to unload the POD at the far end of the move.

Then I’d have to terminate my health care in California, find the same in Michigan, get Michigan ID, and find a doctor, a vet who is on board with all the cats’ medication, a chiropractor, and someone to cut my hair.

Plus there are all sorts of little things to be done in the house, like hooking up my drinking water filter.

It seems like a lot. I read not long ago that if something seems daunting, it’s because we haven’t broken it into small enough pieces. I guess I could do these things. I guess I might not be the first person ever to move across the country.

My idea about the clock worked wonderfully this morning. In case you already forgot my excellent idea, it was to use the alarm on a little freestanding clock instead of the alarm on my iPhone, which makes it all too easy to pick my phone up from the bedside table and look at it for hours if I can’t sleep. I thought maybe the alarm would be loud and jarring, but it was a quiet little peep-peep-peep that becomes louder if it is not shut off. Usually I turn off the alarm on my phone and then, since the phone is now in my hand, check my email, check my text messages, and often do Wordle right away and send the results to my Wordle buddy, inspired by her almost always already having sent me her results.

It was great to have the phone not reachable and therefore not to do all of those things right away.

After breakfast, I took a walk, and then I went to a birthday for an extremely cute little relative of mine who turned one today. It was a gorgeous day. The party was in Rockwood, MI, which entailed driving through Flat Rock. It took about 40 minutes. 

When I pulled up in my car, with license plate MTLHEAD, I was astounded to see that RCK HATER was parked in front of me! (Though could that possibly somehow be a reference to the name of the town or the neighboring town?)

It was a very nice party, with delicious pizza and tables set up under a big tent in the driveway. There were maybe 40 people there, including about 12 one-year-olds. The honoree is the first grandchild of my cousin. My cousin was there, and my uncle and his wife, and my cousin’s two sons and their wives.

I walked around and introduced myself to several people. I realized that, thanks to my cousin’s sons both having gotten married, and one couple having gone so far as to have this very cute baby, it greatly expands my pool of relations, however complicated it becomes to draw the connections: This is my cousin’s son’s wife’s grandmother! She is not actually “my” anything, and yet, most delightfully, she now belongs to me in some way.

I am continuing to practice in the style of Sayadaw U Tejaniya. I brought one of his books along and usually read a bit each day. I read something yesterday about a yogi saying she could not believe what she realized after just 15 or 20 minutes of continuous mindfulness. Not ferocious focus with gritted teeth, which would be ineffective and also tiring, but just remaining tuned in. Just the awareness needed to know “I see a tree” or “I’m holding this book.” Yet how challenging it is to maintain that for even ten seconds, for me, anyway. I can’t do it when doing formal sitting meditation, let alone at any other time, but I was kind of inspired by that 15- or 20-minutes thing, so every time I asked myself today, “What is awareness doing right now?”, which I ask myself quite frequently, I then tried to stay tuned in, but basically never did. 

Very Bad Thing

Sure enough, yesterday evening I could not sleep. I lay awake until 4 a.m. and then finally did the Very Bad Thing: I picked up my phone and lay in my camping cot scrolling and scrolling until 7:30 a.m., and then sort of slept for 90 minutes, and then texted the friend I was supposed to have brunch with today and asked if we could reschedule. Then I slept until about 1:30 p.m.

The New York Times alters their content just often enough that one can scroll like that for hours and keep finding something new to read. Oddly, somewhere along in there, I came upon a first-person account by a woman who had had to decide whether to live somewhere more bucolic, which required leaving the job she loved, or whether to stay in the city. She and her family did actually move to the quieter place, after which buyer’s remorse almost wrecked her marriage, she wrote. She specifically mentioned the importance of having regular contact with random people as being salubrious for mental health. Aha! I thought. That settles it.

However, they went on to move back to the city, and finally back to the other place, by which time the writer had learned that encountering lots of weak connections was not actually essential to her mental health. She quotes Thoreau: “There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.”

When I got up this afternoon, I had the meal I refer to as breakfast, whatever time it may occur, and then I went out in the car to pick up a package and to go back to the grocery store, because I forgot to bring my empty water jugs yesterday. It was a stunningly lovely afternoon, with puffy white clouds against a brilliant blue sky.

I remembered something my sister once said, which is that I could buy the house and then sell the house. This is true.

After I got back from my errands, I went for walk. It was wonderful out, but the main thing I could feel was the persistent knot of worry in my stomach. I guess it’s time to abandon the idea that I’m a person in decent mental health. Based on my (nonexistent) training in clinical psychology, I would have to say I am awash in anxiety and depression, as I so often see in the charts of patients.

It is still my working hypothesis that I will depart from Michigan for the last time in mid-August, and that this is a pleasant vacation, and I have told my sister this, as I think it’s only fair to allow time for things to sink in and for any related process to occur.

I am periodically reminding myself that one day this whole horrible thing will be in the past. It feels literally harder than the illnesses and deaths of my parents.

I did a good thing this early evening, which was to have dinner without looking at my phone. For years, I ate without reading, but things got fuzzy during my parents’ illnesses. It takes me a long time to eat a salad, like an hour. Since my parents nearly always had the TV on (MSNBC), I decided it would be fine to eat my salad while watching TV rather than to go into another room and sit there by myself for so long.

I still eat breakfast without reading, but I look at my phone during dinner. (Lunch isn’t; if I had lunch, I would hardly be able to do anything other than prepare, eat, and clean up after meals.)

I thought it would be very difficult to sit on the deck for so long just eating (boring!), but it turned out to be delightful. The colors and smells and tastes and the feeling of the breeze and the sounds of Lloyd and his sister playing in their back yard were so vivid that it immediately seemed way more enjoyable than reading while eating. My compromise was to make a cup of tea for after dinner and look at the news while having my tea.

Tonight, I plan to put my phone across the room and use the alarm on a little freestanding clock.  

Will Not Be Fine

Three days ago, it was my firm decision that I would return to San Francisco full time and continue with my life, though two days prior to that, I had decided to buy the house in Ypsilanti and enjoy life as a Lady Gardener. Part of the reason I firmly decided not to buy the house after all is the idea that it’s better for my physical and cognitive health to have two days a week of getting to work and home again by bicycle built in, along with a weekly bike ride to the grocery store and schlepping my provisions home in panniers; most medical or dental appointments also involve a bike ride.

The reason I think I would have a less active lifestyle in Ypsilanti is that I’d have to make a point of moving, and I might get out of the mood from time to time.

I also see lots and lots of people in San Francisco, at least the two days a week that I work. I am pretty sure this is essential for my mental health as long as it’s balanced out by plenty of alone time.

Or am I wrong that continuing with my work would be salubrious? Maybe it is simply a source of dementia-causing stress. This thing of feeling like I’m dying by 1 or 2 pm every workday worries me.

Basically, I’m worried that either ceasing to work or continuing to will lead to dementia.

After my firm decision three days ago to return to San Francisco, I observed that I nonetheless seemed to be proceeding as if I will be buying a house, or something, in that I’m marshaling financial resources.

Yesterday it occurred to me that maybe what I need to do is to take two months off work while I’m in San Francisco to see if I feel equally crappy if I don’t work. I’m not sure what it would prove if I did feel just as lousy or if I felt better, but in trying to identify which two months to take off, things became so complicated, what with canceling / rescheduling / booking this and that that I again decided just to leave Ypsilanti for the last time in mid-August, as currently scheduled, and then I immediately felt heartbroken, as I do every time I decide not to buy the house.

Whereas every time I decide to buy the house, I feel anxious.

It has been my intuition from the first iteration of that not-buying-the-house sorrow that it doesn’t mean I’m supposed to buy the house. It’s grief because this chapter will close, in a way. (Though it will never close in that my mother will never be undead.)

I discussed the matter with my Zen teacher, saying that I know that whichever I do, it will be fine. He said that actually, there is no guarantee it will be fine. Things will fall apart, but whatever happens, we can meet it. He suggested that I inquire of myself what the exhaustion is telling me, and also what identity I have latched onto.

But at this point, I can’t figure out what anything means. Does it just mean what it seems to mean? Or the opposite? Or both? Or neither? Have I latched onto the identity of San Francisco Chaplain, or that of Michigander?

Maybe the exhaustion is telling me I’m done being a chaplain. Maybe it’s telling me I’ve had enough of flying back and forth. I spoke with our Healing Harpist yesterday and she said that maybe making a decision sooner rather than later would be good, as it would end flying, which in itself is tiring.

Somewhere along in the past several days, I had a perfect day: I did my morning stretches, had breakfast, got ready to go out, went for a walk, did some reading and writing for work, had dinner, did my evening exercises, washed my face and brushed my teeth, meditated, and went to sleep. In San Francisco, there is virtually never a day where morning stretches, taking a walk and evening exercises all occur. One falls, or two or three of those fall by the wayside every single day. And yet the day in Michigan when I did all three seemed oddly vacant: It’s nighttime already? Is that all there is going to be to my life? It seemed kind of empty and lonely.

Often at the end of a day in San Francisco, it seems as if breakfast happened a million years ago.

Last night I was so sick and tired of the whole thing that at bedtime I (probably not whole-heartedly) offered the hope that I might die peacefully and painlessly in my sleep. I didn’t set an alarm and found this morning that I had slept for 12 hours, which sounds good except that sleeping absolutely enough makes it impossible to get to sleep the following night and then the whole schedule goes completely off the rails.

I remembered yesterday’s decision not to buy the house and cried and cried. I think the decision to buy the house is a form of bargaining, of trying to forestall a terrible grief (not that there has not been a spectacular amount of that). It is the grief of not having anyone, specifically my mother, to take care of any more. Though my father had cancer and went through treatment for cancer and went on hospice and died, he didn’t really ever need that much taking care of. I drove him to his chemotherapy and radiation appointments and sat there with him during them, but the truth is that he could easily have driven himself and also could have sat there on his own without the slightest distress. One month before he died, he drove himself to the grocery store without incident. One day before he died, his phone rang and he almost but not quite succeeded in answering it, while smiling at his own haplessness. He noticed that I was videoing and pointed at me as if to say, “Oh, you.” It is the most charming little video.

(When he was in the hospital once due to side effects from chemo, I asked if it was good that I was there. He thought for a moment and politely said, “Neutral.”)

But my mother had dementia and needed every kind of help eventually. Taking care of her house lets me feel I am somehow still taking care of her. I don’t want to not be taking care of her because then it would mean she was dead, which I could not endure and hope I never fully understand has already happened. 

Roundup Roundup

I thought the empty house might inspire me to want to own it: Look at all this space where I could put my stuff! But it’s actually just making it look like it’s meant for someone else. For one thing, I hardly have any stuff. My table would replace the dining room table here that my sister wants; my bed would replace the camping cot. My two filing cabinets could go in the office. I’d still have three completely empty rooms, plus a huge empty basement, plus a largely empty garage, and it’s not like it would make sense to go buy a lot of stuff at age 64 that someone else will soonish have to get rid of.

I’m worried that a less active lifestyle might hasten dementia, and I’m also worried that four years of intense stress and lack of sleep have set the stage for me to end up with dementia. I would be delighted, relatively speaking, to get a cancer diagnosis (I don’t mean today, just to be clear); I fear ending up with dementia, because I don’t have a me to take charge of everything.

Today I staged all of the household hazardous waste in the garage, putting it in plastic bins that hopefully won’t be too heavy for me and my sister to move into the truck I realize we are going to have to rent. Twenty-six bins, two big red plastic gasoline containers, and three fire extinguishers, one from 1979. I joked that since the estate is paying for it, maybe instead of getting a U-Haul, we should spring for a limousine and liveried driver. We would of course want the champagne fountain and an ice sculpture of Pete Hegseth. (It’s also a joke to say “the estate” is paying for something. That just means we three heiresses are sharing the cost.)

I was dispirited to see how much Roundup we have. I think of my parents as being people who would avoid chemicals, but they weren’t. My mother drank hundreds of gallons of diet soda, even thought it says right on the bottles and cans what’s in it; her wish to lose weight (lose weight, lose weight … ) trumped any other consideration.

They are not sure what causes Parkinson’s disease, but certain toxins are thought to play a role. I thought I had read that about half of people with Parkinson’s will get dementia, but now I see something from UCSF that says 80% of people with PD will eventually have dementia. “The average time from the onset of movement problems to the development of dementia is approximately 10 years.”

So I don’t know about that. It’s hard to distinguish Lewy body dementia, which can come with Parkinson’s-like movement problems, from Parkinson’s dementia. One thought is that you can tell them apart by whether cognitive or motor symptoms arose first, but I noticed the personality changes first, whereas my sister noticed motor problems first. Certainly movement problems did not precede personality / cognitive changes by 10 years, so maybe our mother had Lewy body dementia.

Carrying bin after bin up from the basement, with my tricky knee and aching shoulder, I was just glad not to fall backward down the stairs with five gallons of Roundup sloshing over me. 

In the Name of Mulch

I arrived in Michigan Monday evening expecting the house to be completely empty; I expected to feel very sad about this: All my mother’s sewing stuff, all my father’s workshop stuff, all my parents’ gardening stuff and much else: gone. One estate sale person I spoke with said more than once, “Everything sells.” So I was rather perplexed to find the house surprisingly full of stuff, every room. And beyond perplexed to find my bathroom filthy, with poop smeared along several inches of the underside of the toilet seat.

I texted our estate sale lady to inquire what had gone wrong. I started by pointing out that I had marked that room not to enter, but ended on a breezier note, not wanting to be a jerk: “Anyway, if that can get a thorough cleaning on Wednesday, that would be good.”

The estate sale lady was so upset to hear about this that I almost felt sorry I had even mentioned it. She said she had made every effort to keep that bathroom off limits, but that one visitor had snuck in there. I replied that if one person had managed to make that kind of mess, that was pretty impressive. I assured her that it was not the end of the world and that she should not give it another thought. (I also ended up cleaning the bathroom myself, as the alternative was to walk clear to the other end of the house.) 

This house has a dark central hallway that starts near the dining room and living room and ends at my bathroom, passing three bedrooms and the linen closet en route. It’s not a giant house, but because of that hallway, you do feel like you’re going on a trek. Sometimes my father would be in the TV room and I would ask him a question whose answer required a trip to the office and he would say something like, “Doopty doopty doop” as he traversed the hallway.

Originally, the plan had been that the estate sale would be on a Saturday, which it was, and then normally nothing happens on Sunday, in case the family wants to gather in the post-sale house and reminisce and take, after all, anything that might be remaining. The final cleaning is normally on Monday, but it turned out that ours would not be until Tuesday for some reason, and then that got changed to Wednesday.

I was disappointed about this, as my initial thought was that it would be ideal if the cleaning happened before I arrived Monday evening. When I found the house with so much stuff still in it, I initially couldn’t figure out what to do with all the items I’d stuffed into my bedroom, and the kitchen was also completely unusable, with items for sale covering every flat surface. In a fit of pique, I announced to myself that I guess I’d just have to sleep in the car, and I actually went outside and got in the car, first trying the driver’s seat fully reclined (not comfortable) and then the back seat (really not comfortable). I felt a little vulnerable out there just several feet from the sidewalk, and decided I would feel pretty foolish if I were to be raped and murdered while doing such a stupid thing as to sleep in a car when there was a house several feet away, so I went back inside and moved things from my bedroom to the office and sank into my camping cot (that which I sleep on here) and felt extra grateful to be sleeping indoors, in a bed. This is a thing I give thanks for nearly every night.

On Tuesday I went out to lunch at Knight’s and did some reading for work; I kept falling asleep. It was hot and humid that day, ditto on Wednesday, the day the estate sale lady came with her crew to do the cleanout. It turned out to be good that I was there because there were several questions that arose, though it was also hard to see so much identifiable stuff walking out the door. Part of the point of having an estate sale was not to have to see that. I found myself snatching things off the tops of piles that someone was carrying by just because I recognized them, even though that could be said of nearly everything in the house.

I told the crew that if there was anything they personally wanted, at this point they should by all means take it. It turned out that one fellow scraps metal; he took a bunch of metal away, including lots and lots of nails. Another fellow is a worm farmer. He took a wooden frame maybe a foot and a half by two and a half feet that enclosed coarse metal grating. I thought it might have been the top of the cage of a long-ago pet; my sister said maybe our mother used it for sifting dirt pursuant to finding rocks, one of her many, many interests. Whatever it had been used for in the past, it was something the worm farmer thought he could use, and he also took our massive 1933 dictionary. I joked that he’ll be saying a lot of interesting things by the time he gets done reading the whole thing.

Among our holdings were two shoeboxes of rocks collected by our mother, each with a note saying what it was and where and when it had been found. She had also made, no doubt for classes she took, two posterboard displays with many rocks glued to them. I had long ago resigned myself to those ending up in the trash, but it turned out that the fellow who scraps metal also collects rocks, and he took all of those things. So that’s why it was on the whole good that I was there on Wednesday. Otherwise, I would have pictured all those rocks and all those nails and maybe even the giant dictionary in the trash.

The estate sale lady said she actually never puts a rock in the trash; she takes them home and tosses them near her own pond. Her crew works for other estate sale companies besides hers. When she asked them if it’s true that she puts less in the trash than other companies do, her crew confirmed that this is so. This was what made me and my sister choose her. We liked the idea of things going out into the world to be enjoyed or used by others, and we hated the idea of having a massive Dumpster backed up to the house.

My mother left behind her journals, along with strict instructions not to read them. The New York Times’ Ethicist said in answer to a question about something like this that the living have a compelling interest in reading such documents and that it is not unethical to do so even if the deceased prefer not, which surprised me. The main reason I’m not going to read my mother’s journals is that I don’t even have time to read my own old journals, but every now and then, I read a couple of pages. Written well before she got dementia, they bring her vividly back to life. I will always keep them.

Toward the end of my last visit here, I read a couple of pages and found myself quite surprised and even a little upset by certain revelations. How little we really know about others. In retrospect, I think maybe I was a bit angry with her or maybe with my father, or maybe just generally roiled up, but I decided it was time to move on with my life and thus to let go of a couple items I had meant to keep, which were kitchen utensils that anyone in our family would recognize: a slotted spoon and a ladle.

Later I really lamented having let those go, but it turned out that this lamentation was needless, as those items were among the many things still here when I arrived this time, and they are now safely in a kitchen drawer.

My sister inherited all of our father’s tools, which we interpreted to mean everything in his basement workshop. She invited me to pick out a sentimental item, and I chose a hammer with a slender wooden handle meant for a use I am ignorant of. I could tell my father had used it a lot. It felt nice in my hand. But I didn’t specifically remember it, so did it really count as a sentimental item? I decided it didn’t and left it with the things to be sold, and now I really regret that. I didn’t remember it, but I liked it, and now it’s gone.

Wednesday, cleanout day, was miserably hot and humid. In the afternoon, I went out for lunch at Ricewood and then to Arbor Farms for groceries. When I got home, the place was really and truly darn near empty, just as I had mistakenly thought it would be Monday night. That was a terrible day to do so much physical labor. That crew was heroic.

Twice that day I was complimented on my license plate (MTLHEAD), including by a fellow who pulled up next to me at a red light and yelled over that he loved it. A flurry of devil’s horns ensued.

I decided to wipe the kitchen cupboards before I reshelve my stuff. As I wiped out one cupboard yesterday morning, I realized my mother undoubtedly did the exact same thing 20 years ago when they moved into this house (and then never again). To the extent that the cupboards were wiped after that, it would have almost certainly have been my father doing it.

It’s fun playing house, deciding what to put where.

Sifting through what is still here, I was relieved to discover that I had kept both of the quilts my mother made. I also for some reason kept 15 place mats, give or take, though only one person lives here, and I also have about six brooms.

Today the weather was very pleasant indeed, not as hot and not detectably humid. I went over to my sister’s to pick up some yard tools she’d taken to her place for safekeeping. I was intending to dig out some burdock and needed my shovel.

Several months ago, a utility pole on my lot was replaced. It is obvious that before the pole was stood up, it was dropped on my yew hedge, because parts of the hedge have turned a sickly dead orange and there are visible broken branches.

I am just starting out as a gardener, but I am learning. My glasses kept sliding down my face last visit, so I ordered a strap to keep them in position, and found today that the new strap worked perfectly. In no time at all, I learned that it’s a very good idea to wear gloves when weeding thistles. I have learned that a lawn and leaf bag on its own is unwieldy; it’s better to stand it up in a plastic garbage bin.

I decided that, before I dug up burdock, I would cut the dead parts out of the yew hedge in hopes that maybe the holes will fill in next year. Close up, I could see a place where a main branch had been broken right above the ground by the wayward utility pole. I meant to spend an hour, but ended up spending two just on the hedge and only finished a bit more than half the job. It was very satisfying to see the orange parts going away and just green remaining, and to hear the snick-snick of the same clippers my mother used. I also pulled some ivy out from underneath the hedge, and pulled a few weeds out of the cracks in the sidewalk.

I fetched the broom to tidy up and realized there were a lot of dead leaves under the hedge. I wasn’t sure whether to sweep them out in the name of tidiness, or leave them there in the name of mulch. I compromised by sweeping away most of the leaves in the areas I tackled, but sweeping the final bits back under the hedge.

When I was done for the day, I lay down in the grass. It all seemed swooningly idyllic, the sun shining down and the beautiful blue sky and all the green and the smell of green. I’m starting to have a mystical feeling about this whole thing, like maybe my parents purposely left the birds and the dirt and the thistles that need to be pulled, all these things that are so beautiful and bring so much pleasure and satisfaction. Things that nourish and heal after four years that were so exhausting and difficult, though I would not have missed one second of any of it. The hardwood floor gleaming in the sun, the stately hawthorn in the front yard, the roots easily coming up when the weed is pulled. (Maybe I’m more a weeder and pruner than a gardener per se. I think my father might at heart have been a pruner.)

I called our realtor today to see about getting updated comps, as there is not much more to do to the house, just painting the interior, cleaning, and washing the windows.

Didn’t Totally Suck!

Didn’t even mostly suck.

Having someone else wash the clothes: Initial grade: B. The pickup and delivery were perfectly smooth, which was one source of anxiety after a series of horrible experiences with one particular laundry-unrelated business. My t-shirts came back folded, as requested, and spectacularly wrinkled, as not requested, but I guess there is no way to avoid that. My own laundry procedure results in beautifully smooth t-shirts and work shirts (mock turtlenecks in a cotton knit), but my own laundry procedure also takes an entire day, caused me to fall down the stairs, and was hurting my shoulder. My dark work pants came back from the laundry service speckled in white bits of dust, but that is fixable. They did not attempt to fold my handkerchiefs: good. This is a specialized skill not to be undertaken by just anybody.

As for price, I told myself that if it was less than one thousand dollars, that would be okay, and it was less than one thousand dollars. There is some folding left to do of handkerchiefs and towels, which is fine. I also told myself that if the experience didn’t totally suck, it was probably fine, and it didn’t totally suck. It was noticeably more good than bad, and I have just ordered a steamer / iron for touching up the t-shirts and work shirts, and so am optimistic that I have successfully reclaimed a good amount of time and eliminated one source of shoulder strain.

Dry Run

To prepare for the estate sale in Ypsilanti, my sister and / or I moved almost everything not to be sold into one bathroom, the office, and my bedroom, which was once my mother’s library. What couldn’t be put into one of those rooms, I marked with blue tape. The basement, garage, another bedroom, another bathroom, the TV room, the living room, and the dining room feature things to be sold; this leaves the kitchen. Our estate sale lady said it is impossible to keep people from opening the kitchen cupboards, so she advised taking everything I don’t want sold out of there.

I took her advice, leaving the things to be sold inside various cupboards, so when I left last Thursday morning, the kitchen looked utterly abandoned (except for the photos and cartoons affixed to the front of the refrigerator with magnets), and so it was kind of a dry run for leaving the house for the last time if we sell it not to me.

I have dreaded saying goodbye to the house, and dreaded seeing my sister for what might well also be the last time, but maybe it’s not so smart basing a huge decision on the attempt to avoid one particular moment of emotion that may or may not even occur. Also, I have already been through the worst (I think). If I can say goodbye to my whole entire mother and father, I reckon I can say goodbye to a house.

When I got back to San Francisco, I noticed that I wasn’t having to be so extravagantly homesick for Michigan: I can move there any time I want. Knowing this also seemed to ease my hate affair with San Francisco: I am only here if I choose to be. I’m not trapped here.

I went to work at the hospital on Saturday and was full of zeal for about five hours. By two p.m., I was completely exhausted.

On Sunday, Tom and I went to a gathering of his family for the Memorial Day weekend. It was an utterly lovely day of overindulging in appetizers and watching the children splash in the pool in the dazzling sunshine. Our hostess gave us a tour of her yard, which is spectacular. Going there is one of my very favorite things to do.

On Monday I went to Rainbow, which is closed for Gay Pride Day but open on Memorial Day, and on Tuesday, it was back to work, where I again felt like I was dying by noon or so. I went to see my chiropractor for more treatment of my injured shoulder and to discuss various other problems. The clinic is located not far from work, so I just zipped up there during the day, with my boss’s permission. I asked my chiropractor if everyone feels like they’re dying by 2 p.m. on a workday, and it turns out that he, at least, doesn’t.

He suggested that maybe I’m eating too many carbs. I was startled. I eat an impeccable, in my opinion, Mediterranean diet and assume there is nothing better I could be doing, but maybe I’m wrong about that. My chiropractor said bread, even though whole grain, might be causing a problem and / or fruit might be. He said that either breakfast or lunch on work days should be only protein and fat: experiment. If that doesn’t help, he said he would suggest a supplement that helps to smooth out blood sugar, and after that, we could try herbs to address high cortisol: ashtanga was named.

I mentioned all of this to a co-worker whom I rely on for health advice at least as much as I rely on any MD. She recommended a book written by a doctor at the Institute for Health and Healing, which is where my chiropractor is. The book is The T.I.G.E.R. Protocol: An Integrative 5-Step Program to Treat and Heal Your Autoimmunity, by Akil Palanisamy, MD. I don’t have a diagnosis of autoimmune disease, but I ordered the book.

The last time I did laundry, I further injured my shoulder dragging my wheeled cart back up Guerrero St., and concluded I was going to have to start doing laundry every single week, so it doesn’t get to be so weighty. That is partly why I asked my boss if I could work one day a week instead of two. Lisa M. suggested having someone else do my laundry, but I told her I had tried that in the past and found it unsatisfactory, as I don’t want every last item folded.

But the idea stuck with me, not taking my laundry somewhere for wash and fold, in which case I might as well do it myself, but having someone come and fetch it. The problem is not hanging around the laundromat. I enjoy hanging around the laundromat. The problem is dragging the clothes to and fro and down and up the stairs, so I went looking for a laundry place with pickup and delivery. I found a couple of possibilities, and late last night, seizing the bull by the horns, put in a request to have my laundry picked up today.

It ended up being three giant plastic bags. I asked for some things to be returned damp so I can hang them to dry myself. The place said that when they bring my laundry back, they will include some reusable bags. It was a great feeling looking at that massive amount of laundry knowing someone else would be doing it. The pickup was perfectly smooth.

As if that weren’t enough, today I did something I have been trying to get to for a year and eight months, which was to go pick out new glasses. In September of 2024, I got a new prescription which didn’t differ much from the previous prescription, which has barely changed since the spring of 2017, nine years ago. In the course of that whole year, I could not find two hours to walk to the well-regarded eyewear and opticians place located two blocks from my apartment building. The reviews are stellar and they win award after award.

In September of 2025, I got another prescription which again itself barely warranted getting new glasses, but it seemed that several tiny changes over the years must surely be adding up to some sort of need, and also, just appearance wise, I have been wearing my current glasses for quite a while now. According to my projected schedule for the day, I didn’t have time to go over there, but I decided just to do it, anyway. A lovely young man, with no one else to tend to in the middle of a weekday afternoon, brought me about 20 pairs of glasses to try. After a while, I started to feel a little overwhelmed and began to wonder if maybe I’d had enough glasses shopping for one day when I put on a pair that immediately made me think: this is them. These will be my new frames for glasses for distance, and I am going to use some frames I already had for reading glasses, which are definitely needed at this point.

So I am feeling great! Someone else is doing the laundry possibly right at this moment, I do not need to go to the laundromat every single week and can therefore stick with working two days a week and maybe even finally sew some pants, and both needed pairs of glasses have been picked out! And maybe this book and / or the advice of my chiropractor will result in my feeling a little less lousy. It might not have anything to do with food: I eat the exact same way in Ypsilanti and feel perfectly fine there, it seems to me. I have been blaming the job and may be quite right to do so, but we shall see. As a mentor once said, I’m not tired of empathizing, I’m tired from empathizing. And yet, I find it profoundly meaningful to have those conversations, so maybe it is fine to feel tired from empathizing twice a week, or then again, maybe it isn’t.

Enshittification of the Bike Lanes

I have not read Cory Doctorow’s book, but have lately heard many quotes from it from the other Lisa M., who was enthralled by it.

Due to a series of weather alerts yesterday, I did not walk until after dinner and so saw several people on the neighborhood streets I had never seen before: different shift. Probably a good idea to do one’s walking in the evening as summer approaches, come to think of it. When I was a child, my mother and I used to jog around our block in Ann Arbor at night. Maybe it was sometimes due to the weather, but I think it was mainly due to some sort of self-consciousness or, alas, shame about our bodies. Dementia did nothing to free my mother from dissatisfaction with her body. Even when she could no longer figure out who her immediate relatives were, she remembered that she needed to be on a diet. So sad.

As I walked yesterday evening—it was still rather uncomfortable out in terms of heat and humidity—I mulled over a minor climate control problem: It is certainly at the moment time for air conditioning, but since just a week ago it was in the 40s and I needed my winter coat to walk one day, it seemed premature to turn the A/C on.

I initially concluded that I could just leave the settings unchanged when I depart tomorrow: The heat is on, but it might not ever run. It does not matter if it is too hot, because I will not be here. But then I remembered that I have the estate sale lady and her crew to think of, along with the shoppers I hope will be here on sale day, and also my sister stopping by to get the last of her things out of the house, so I decided I’d better turn the air conditioning on.

I was delighted when I saw that there is a heat-cool auto setting! The thing will figure out for itself what to do when. I guess there would only be a problem if there were an overlap, like wanting the house heated to 72 but cooled to 70, but our settings do not overlap.

I saw an ominous article in The New York Times about Amazon using four-wheeled little trucks to make deliveries using bike lanes. They call these battery-powered vehicles which can hold more than 100 parcels “cargo bikes,” which is certainly a misnomer. It can only be about two weeks before these menaces become ubiquitous in San Francisco. If they are using the bike lanes to get from destination to destination, that presumably is also where they are going to park. On Valencia Street, the bike lane zigs and zags, making its way between and around outdoor dining areas and parked cars; in many places, it is between the curb and parked cars, meaning there can be people wandering into the lane from either side. The available space appears to have been apportioned among the various roadway users a half inch at a time. 

Along with actual bicycles, the bike lane is crammed with e-bikes, e-scooters, giant kid-carrying bikes with the big bin on the front, and of course tech bros shooting by at 40 miles an hour with an inch to spare. There are many stretches where if the bike lane gets blocked by, say, a car or a dumpster, there is not an easy way to get around the impediment. It feels far from safe; one just hopes for the best. (So far, so good.)

So the thought of adding ten Amazon mini delivery trucks per block is dispiriting.

I’m starting to give some thought to taking a cab to work and walking home to avoid cycling on Valencia. I’m not sure how long that walk would take. An hour? I will test it while I’m there.

Now that I might be about to be a property owner on this little block, I am more mindful of how others are taking care of their places: Is that shambles going to affect my property values? Most houses and yards on this block are nicely kept, definitely including mine. I regularly get compliments on the yard. There are maybe four places out of perhaps 20 houses total that are sort of disaster areas, including two houses owned by ex-spouses. You can get a sense of how they might have formed a couple; they had at least one thing in common. I had to smile yesterday evening when I saw a front yard that was occupied by nothing but thistles. They were nicely spaced out, almost as if someone had purposely landscaped with what most consider to be weeds. I’ll bet they don’t get too many trespassers on their thistle lawn; that could be a plus.

My sister came over today bringing two bins of Christmas stuff our mother passed on to her years ago, maybe wanting not to store it any longer but not being able to bear to throw it out. It was fun again seeing all those familiar and colorful shiny objects from nearly 50 years ago.

The big day is finally here: Time to put blue tape on everything not to be sold! I took my car over to my sister’s so the driveway will be free for the estate sale workers and shoppers. I have felt a low-level anxiety creeping up over the past few days, that familiar knot in the gut. But I must say I have been free from a lot of unnecessary anguish, which I believe is thanks to re-devoting myself to the teachings of Sayadaw U Tejaniya. I think I would normally be a wreck at this juncture, but I am not at all. I am reading and savoring his book Relax and Be Aware: Mindfulness Meditations for Clarity, Confidence and Wisdom. I bumped into him many years ago and went on a retreat at Spirit Rock based on his teachings; I have never encountered him in person.

I am sorry I drifted away and plan never to do that again. I am pretty sure that I am hearing some of Tejaniya’s words of wisdom from Howie on Tuesday evenings in our online sangha; he has even mentioned Tejaniya’s name from time to time.