You Are the One

"You are the one, the one in my heart...you're my darling, my life's greatest thrill...."
I couldn't stop humming it.  Or singing it.  It finally replaced "Dynamite".

I planted some things today.  A week ago, I was in full on garden-mode.  I remember loading up the top of my cart with pretty things, the bottom, scorched earth napalm death.  Spray for fruit killing, tree eating mites.  Spray for ants that are massive and try to get in the house.  Agent Orange for the hideous ivy from the vacant lots beside us that desperately want in.  Round Up. 

I was sick of the Galapagos next door.  The vacant lot.  I have seen every type of species running wild and crazy over there.  Squirrels ten times their normal size.  Predatory birds.  Snakes.  A beaver dam. 

I was excited when I rolled my backseat garden wagon toward the house.  And the poison I had put in the trunk. 

And then darkness hit in a way that I couldn't imagine or apparently deal with.  I have been in a fog.   I can't really teach right now, as much as I try.  I want to give my lovelies a good send off.  But I am scorched earth.  Hours of testing every morning and then, the wildness and worry.   I am barely there. 

"Got some room in your Herbie?"  my across the street neighbor asked.
"Yeah, sure, they just picked up today" I answered.  I was on my attempted renewal, arms full of marigolds and desert-like flowers.  That guy has always been nice to us.  He walked over the minute we started moving in, one of the few people in this area that has lived in his house for thirty years.  Even brought us cookies.  It baffled me.  I have lived a lot of places, but have never received the welcome mat like that. 

"Mary Ellen died on Monday" he called.
"What?"
"Mary Ellen, my wife.  She died on Monday". 
I put everything down. 
I was stunned.
"I am so sorry," I stammered "I am speechless".
"She had cancer for seven years.  She went into hospice two weeks ago...but still...."
"Are you holding up okay?"
"No" he responded, with a sideways look.
"I'm sorry, of course not".

I walked back up to the front of the house, carrying my renewal, my flowers of the dead.  As shitty as it is, I felt like a self appreciating asshole for being so absorbed in what has been happening to me and the fact that I kept planting.   I didn't know what else to do.  But I couldn't stop thinking about it.

I am funny about death.  I remember the night a girl that lived upstairs in an apartment building that Alec and I had lived in for nearly ten years committed suicide.  We pulled up in our car and cops and ambulances were everywhere.  She had hung herself, which seemed even worse than any other way to die.  And I was horrified, that this person that I didn't even know was so miserable, living right beside us. 

And I didn't know our neighbor was dying.  Or that she had died.

"...for you are the one in my heart and I know that I love you and I always will....". 


*Carl Smith, You Are the One