May blooms into June

Before, the sun was to be in. Now, it is to look at.

It's nice.
....

Miracles of the smaller order

White hybrid tea rose

right side second terrace

Lesson in pruning

Cardinal rule: You can't hardly do it wrong, whatever you do. Including cutting every single stem off your nearly 6' tall and rather old tea rose plant, right down to the main stem.

I learned that yesterday, after having watched this rose plant do nothing visible to the eye since the winter passed and every other plant had formed shoots already, including the hydrangea I transplanted last August (worst time, full flowering) from the entry courtyard (fancy name for a small... entry court alongside the house) to the hydrangea bed (jungle) I made down behind the pool (swamp), and then proceeded to completely neglect (abandon). That poor plant had no root system. I planted its tap root and a few straggling roots in the very best soil I could possibly prepare for it, and settled in to wait and hope. Such waiting and hoping as I did being fulfilled last month or so with a shoot.

Sure, it's not much to look at right smack in the middle of the bed, a stump with a single shoot, but it gave me reason to hope -- not unappreciated -- as I gazed on what I did to that tea rose last November and wondered at what I could possibly have been thinking. You are supposed to leave a couple of stems, even if they are only a few inches long.

And it gave me hope for the CRRA. I have since pruned the Camellia again, removing all smaller branches and what remained of the leaves I had cut in half in the hope that additional conservation of energy would help it develop a root system capable of encouraging it to bud. When I pruned it again, there was evidence beyond feeling that it was still alive. The wood was green.

My husband does not believe there is basis for my hope.

Yesterday, weeding the beds nearby, I turned to look and reached down, placed my hands around it and began to pull, as though to pull it up from the soil (I don't know why. It would never work. They have roots I'd have to cut through.), when I saw it. I stuck my head closer to see if I was actually looking at a weed, but it was the right color, the leaves were folded in just the way new shoots of rose bushes do. It grew from the soil just next to the stump.

The white hybrid tea rose had developed a shoot from its base!

The next thing to check is that it isn't just a sucker, unable to produce flowers. I'd say I hadn't thought of that (I had), but I'd sort of forgotten about it in my hopefulness until just now.

It looks right, though. It looks like a real, flower producing stem. If it is, it will take its place and fill in the hole my extreme pruning of it left just before this pink hybrid tea, at the end of the lavender and rose bed.
....

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it

The New Dawn roses

I have perhaps been wrong. I have been told that I have been, and I am prepared to acknowledge that there is a greater likelihood that I was than that I was not. I checked a reference for my conscience, and it leans toward my being wrong more than right. It concerns a couple of my entries here, a place that is very important to me and which I will protect for whatever reasons are behind this importance.

I have always written. Many blank page books have traveled in my bags and had their pages filled, until it started to seem pointless. Whiny. I started to write here because there was the chance that someone else would read what I wrote, be it about my labors in our garden or my political thoughts, or my life. Writing here taught me to concentrate on what is important and treat the page like I have an audience that might get bored with the level of irrelevant detail and self-absorption a journal takes without complaint. It requires me to edit, just a little bit.

Recently, I have treated the most central issue of why I suffer. I did it because it matters so much to me, and there is so much I want to know and to understand so that I can live with greater peace and showing more kindness, so that I can let go of the anger and the resentment that prevent me from offering what others deserve, and what I am required to give.

Below is a part of, and perhaps it will be all of, if I cannot restrain myself, the last chapter of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some instructions on writing and life. It pertains directly, and I will use it as best as I can as the measuring stick for my own writing because Anne is the sort of person I wish to be, and her writing is the sort of writing I could wish to produce.

If a lawyer out there feels that I may be infringing copywrite, in addition to having written out of vengeance, but not done it nicely enough, please let me know.

Part Five: The Last Class

There are so many things I want to tell my students in our last class, so many things I want to remind them of. Write about your childhoods, I tell them for the umpteenth time. Write about that time in your life when you were so intensely interested in the world, when your powers of observation were at their most acute, when you felt things so deeply. Exploring and understanding your childhood will give you the ability to empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence and insight and compassion.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.

If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act -- truth is always subversive.

Ethan Canin insists that you should never write out of vengeance, while I tell my students that they should always [italics hers] write out of vengeance, as long as they do so nicely. If someone has crossed them, if someone has treated them too roughly, I urge them to write about it. Two of my students, in different sessions, decided to write about the switches their parents selected from backyard trees and with which their parents used to beat them. Use these memories, I told them. They are yours. This should not have happened to you. Personally, I would write about this partly out of a longing to make sense of it all and partly out of vengeance. And this, I tell my students, may be as good a time as any to discuss libel.

Libel, she writes, is "defamation by written or printed word. It is knowingly, maliciously saying things about people that cast them in a false or damaging light."

I knowingly, but not maliciously, cast some people in a damaging light. I wrote about my truth, and I tried to do it nicely, and I did it because I am trying to make sense of something that happened to me that never should have. I have gone back and removed names. I have edited and erased details that have been corrected by the concerned parties or caused anger and a sense of betrayal in those who were not central to my story.

If one day I should write my story and it should appear outside of these journals, I will think long and carefully about how it should be done.

I apologize if I cannot accept the version of events or the interpretations of the actions and the motivations of the actors of my life that you choose. It is not, it was not, intended to harm you. It is that I do not agree with you.

I will let Anne continue:

Maybe this is not only vengeance; maybe it is just wanting to tell the truth as it really happened. Maybe it is also about trying to find some meaning in the suffering. Well. Whatever. Here is a poem by Sharon Olds, called "I Go Back to May 1937," that I pass out to every class:

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it -- she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like ships of flint as if to
strike sparks of fire from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
....

Say hello... to Parsley

They're peaceful.

Howard? Oh, yes. I remember him. Paranoid, He's gone now. Say hello -- to Parsley.

I feel free inside.

Whoa there, what's the rush? Stay awhile. This is my home now. Come, let me show you.

I resisted at first, but now the rhythms of the forest flow through me, and they can flow through you, too.


follow me
forget the world
look around
at the wonders of nature
never fear
everything is here
and you don't need your friends
or family
we're family

come with me
and then you will see
everything you need
within life
hey ho it's easy let it go
when nothing before was real
look into our eyes
you can see the future
look into our eyes
we can see your soul
we can be together
everything is here

listen to your heart
everything is good here
nothing before was real
never fear
everything is here
and you don't need your friends
or family

hey ho it's easy let it go
we're family
we are family
look into our eyes
you can see the future
look into our eyes
we can see your soul
hey ho it's easy let it go
when nothing before was real

listen to your heart
everything is good
nothing before was real
listen to your heart
everything is good here
listen to your heart
everything is good


Don't worry about me. I'm a shaman. My mind's like a fortress.
....

The end of sentimentalism

A red hat

It was my third hat of the week. Melanoma has a way of making hats more attractive, even if they do ruin your hair.

Along with the straw hats not dissimilar to that worn by the master in the over-sized photograph of him that dominates the gardener's corner of the gift shop, the ones that unfortunately bear the imprint of La Fondation Claude Monet à Giverny on their ribbons, there were the real gardening hats; the ones that will stay on your head, protecting it and absorbing your perspiration from your brow over the years. The one that first caught my eye recalled Indiana Jones, had he been an intrepid gardener. I put it on my head and looked at myself in the mirror. It's the one I'd wear around town instead of the one I bought in Les Andelys last week -- the one that made Audouin smile and say, "Tu as l'aire de la mère de la mariée dans ce chapeau." -- were I bolder.

The mother of the bride. That will never be the case for me as I shall be the mother of the groom, and I shall wear a suitably feminine version of this hat. Perhaps the light green, somewhat heathered one, with a brown and écru ribbon. There's even a matching bag. I'll take the gardening tools out and carry mouchoirs and rose petals in their place.

I took off the caramel colored one and placed the red one with the khaki inside and border on my head. The red surprised me.

I took it off and placed first the heathered green one in its place. I felt older than my years. Really suitable for my son's wedding, to which I will bring the flowers, having pruned them wearing it.

I took it off and placed its heathered brown version on my head. Like the caramel one, there was a masculine aspect to this hat. A sort of daring that the heathered green couldn't reach, while not bold like the red, or intrepid like the caramel. I was helped by the fact that all the mediums fit like smalls, squeezing my brow, and would cause me to pass out in the heat of the sun, and the mediums fit like large and would blow away in the merest breeze, making me nervous about bending over to do anything lest it fall in my work. I thought I had decided on the green. The display was the green pattern. Am I so easily swayed? I longed for the caramel; I returned and put the red back on my head.

Bold. I'd start with bold. I'll return for the heathered green for cutting flowers. The caramel for whacking at overgrown things. Audouin saw it on the table when he came home last night and put it on my head.

"C'est pas mal ça," he smiled. "C'est quoi?"

"Un chapeau de jardinage. Je l'ai acheté ce matin à Giverny."

"C'est bien. Ca te va bien." I took it off. "Tu devrais le garder. Ca te va vraiment bien." He smiled again. We have been so much kinder to one another since he thought he really could lose me. Don't try that at home. Just know it.

"C'est mon chapeau rouge. Je vais prendre un autre plus feminin pour couper les fleurs et en faire des bouquets, et puis celui qui fait 'Indiana Jones'," (I did my best swashbuckling gardener) "si Indy était jardinier intrépide et pas archéologue." He smiled. It's really a very nice smile.

Melanoma also has a way of making you playful in the face of the joy of a narrow and lucky escape.

It also goes, sort of, with the gardening gloves my half-sister brought me, along with a reproduction depression era tablecloth she made me and the CD of photos of our father. They, like the heathered green hat, are more suited to the activity and the image of the gardener as cut flower gatherer, which distinction I have not yet earned in my perpetually improving, but not yet improved, garden, but they were a thoughtful gift, a percentage going to breast cancer research.

I have gotten you nothing; memories, I hope, will become heirlooms, I said to her, meaning it.

They already have, she answered. I think, after a week with me -- a week in which I surely said too much of what I have thought and felt, believeing, perhaps wrongly, that anything else was not enough, that any other sort of relationship would not be worth as much --, that she might see them more like I see the photos of our father now, an uncomfortable reminder, something you keep because you can't throw them away, but not something that makes you happy.

I don't think I will feel like crying anymore when I think of our father. For years, my eyes were perfectly dry thinking of him, but I had a way of thinking of him that made a victim of him, a shrew of his wife. Not that they weren't, but I suspect he was something else again. When your memories end in childhood, they have a way of being kind. Probably too kind. It's easier to be hard on those who remain, while they at least deserve the credit for the courage they exhibit in so doing, my father having exhibited none towards me.

"C'est drôle," said my husband, looking at the photos of my father taken from babyhood, through soldiering and salesman, fisherman, huntsman and fatherhood, and back into uniform in his last years, "mais on voit un lâche. Quelqu'un qui ne fut pas un acteur dans sa vie. Il a un drôle de posture, toujours les mains dans les poches, les jambes écartées. Toujours la même."

"Know one thing about our father," she said to me before leaving to ride the escalator to her plane back home, no promises made for the future that can't be kept, "he was a man who was respected by many and admired by all by the end of his life." I could have spoken with her, so expected were the parting words. I know she believes them, but I cannot.

Believe what you choose. Believe what you need. My husband is right. It's what I always knew: my father was not an actor in his own life for certain things, maybe the most important things, but he was for others, and not the best, and he only is responsible for his life, a life I am glad I was spared. I owe him a sorry thanks for that. How much are the empty words in obituaries written by men who hardly knew him and what he carried in his soul, the things he chose to conceal, when he always looked out for himself first, to be buried with full honors for a soldier's life led with no heroism finally worth?

Reading the New York Times today, I came across an article about the letters Donna Reed received from soldiers during World War II that she saved, 314 letters in a shoe box in a trunk in the garage, of which she never spoke, soldiers who "often wrote to her as if to a sister or the girl next door, confiding moments of homesickness, loneliness, privation and anxiety."

Cpl. Bob Bowie wrote of how seeing Ms. Reed in “The Human Comedy” made him long to be back home in Los Angeles and wishing “I could see my Mom.” He added: “I don’t know how it affected the other fellows, we never discuss our feelings with one another.”

If the men and women serving with him at the base knew, then they could answer, but he never discussed his feelings with them. He never told them what he didn't want them to know, what would not have won him praise for loyalty and goodness. They can't answer, and I won't.

Heroes are injured and die in wars, live with their pain and work to help others with what they have, not what they take from their family, not what they conceal of their family, of themselves, and not from personal honor and dignity, but from fear and shame. These are the men and women deserving of honor guards and F16's overhead at their funerals. I won't be found uttering platitudes of respect and admiration.

And I won't feel my eyes sting with tears ever again when I think of him. I will never again feel the slightest regret for the fractures and the resentments and rejections in my family. Let them do that. Let them believe what they will of what they know nothing and judge and punish accordingly. It doesn't touch me anymore.

For years, I have longed to feel as though I had risen from the valley to the top of the mountain, from where I could look out and see everything about me to a far, far horizon, unobstructed, free. For years, I thought it was about work and my success. It is about the soul. Knowing makes you free.

I hope you got what you wanted out of this visit. The words sounded innocent, conveying hope for a wish, but they could have as easily carried the implication, the charge of selfishness. I hope you got what you wanted. It wasn't about what I wanted.

You must be careful, I was warned. You can't start this for selfish reasons; she is a person. But we all walk into relationships vulnerable, and who we are is what takes care us of as we risk; what the relationship will become is up to no one. You can't know before you meet and know one another.

I got what I needed from this visit. I learned who my half-sister is and what she believes. I learned about the later and the last years of my father's life, the part he didn't share with my sister and I. I learned I was better off for it, as hard as anything I ever lived without him was. I could say that my soul and who I am were forged in that crucible, and I would say that I am glad for it. I learned to be grateful and to be glad for myself. My confidence is great. My strength is greater. My world is vaster, my dreams able to carry others and fulfill parts of their own.

You can't protect anyone. You can try to be kind. You must be honest, or nothing is worth a thing, and now, watching her disappear, s'évanouir, in the escalator taking her to her plane back to her home town, a place I left years and years ago, I knew better what many things are worth. I wish her well, and better.

Good-bye, Dad. I don't miss you.
....

Wind in the willows

Mr. Toad and Badger

It has happened again. It has happened before, a number of times. I was lying in bed, thinking about getting up and going to Giverny, waiting for other signs of life around the house, and Wind in the Willows floated into my thoughts.

That's not so unusual. I think often of Mr. Toad and Badger, especially with frogs croaking in our fish pond in the old fountain and toads in the grass at my feet, from time to time, but this morning, I was missing them and their adventures in the English countryside. Maybe it was also our visit to Le Village du Hameau of Marie-Antoinette at Versailles yesterday that brought my old friends to mind.

Shadow moved a little closer to my shoulder, and I nearly drifted back to sleep before my brain decided it was time to get up out of bed. I pulled on my old terry robe and headed downstairs for the second time today -- I had already taken the dogs out and made myself breakfast to take back up to bed -- to turn on my email, looking for one in particular, a reply that wasn't there. But among the other three or four emails since earlier in the morning, there was one from Amazon.co.uk. The subject line read, "Save 20% on 'The Annotated Wind in the Willows' by Kenneth Grahame."

I need to learn how to consciously use that other 90% of my brain, although it's doing pretty well on its own.

It makes me want my original book, from when I was little and sat in my hanging wicker chair, listening to Mr. Toad and Badger bicker, rowing up the river and picnicking in the tall grass, or racing in roadsters, and crashing inconsiderately into everyone.

Jude's take on this, having read it:

"My preferred guess: your brain has achieved some kind of attunement with the digital signals being sent to your computer, even when the system is not open to the screen, which is just a representation of those already-sent signals anyhow.

My frightened guess: your brain was playing with information that Amazon had already discerned algorithmically via their perusal of your browsing habits--in other words, they tuned into the unconscious via marketing technology before or as you did via your dream. Finding he email verified the effectiveness of their tailored marketing algorithms."

I don't like scaring myself. Let's go for the preferred guess, along with Jude.
....

Surviving

my father

June 17, 1933 - July 27, 1989

In addition to his wife, [Î remove the names], and daughter, [name removed]are his daughter [name removed] of Connecticut, and grandson, [name removed], 1 1/2.

I didn't consider his obituary. I knew that it was not desired that we know our father had died. Our presence was not wished for at his funeral, but I didn't think about printed words in a newspaper that cut us out. Erased us from his life, from existence.

His death was sudden. She knew he was ill for some time. How long, exactly, I don't know. He coughed, but that was normal for someone who smoked as heavily as he did. He coughed blood, if I can remember what my sister told me on the phone when I finally got to ask how he died. I had imagined lung cancer. It had to have been lung cancer. I knew he was dead because I had searched for his brother, his surviving sibling -- our aunt had died of breast cancer at 40, maybe 42 --, and found him the year before. I hadn't seen him since I was 6. I said, "I need to know how Dad is."

"I never thought I would hear from you again," he said. My mother always liked him, maybe better than her husband. There were issues, she let me know. There had always been tension between them. It always felt like my mother took my uncle's side.

"I have been afraid," I told him on the phone, "that he would die and we would never know."

"I haven't been in touch with your father in years," he said. There were, he told me, ugly things It didn't matter what the details were. They are nothing.

He wrote to me two weeks after Dad was buried to tell us our stepmother had forbidden him, but he couldn't not tell us. Dad had died and was buried. I didn't know where until recently. He is buried near his second wife's family home, where he passed my grandparents' home on his way up there over the years and stopped to see them, when he didn't see us anymore.

He sat in his garage, watching television. Maybe because it was cool there, or maybe because it was quiet. Maybe because it was his space. They used the garage in their first home together as a family room. We ate there sometimes, paper plates set into wicker plate holders. Potato chips and potato and macaroni salads, hot dogs. Lemonade. The things of summer suppers in America, before it discovered "pasta" and espresso, arugula and parmesan cheese in blocks, and not in round cardboard canisters with shaker tops.

She called my sister one day and asked her how he was.

"He's coughing a lot."

"Get his bag packed with his toiletries," she instructed their daughter. "I am coming home to take him to the hospital."

He died two weeks later, in July of 1989.

She had noticed at the Cape, only the month before, that he had seemed weak, unable to do his usual swim off Newcombe Hollow Beach, where he had vacationed for years with my mother and us, before. They had just celebrated their 19th anniversary there. Tired. Pale. But dying? No.

"He told me that he had spells, when he passed out in the kitchen."

"When?" she had asked me on that first phone call. "When was that?"

"It was in 1983." She thought a moment.

"That makes sense now. I remember that my mother had just replaced the linoleum of the kitchen floor, and one day, there was a burn mark in it. Like a cigarette burn. She asked Dad how that had happened, and he didn't know. He must have fallen and not remembered." Or chose not to tell. "He used to get up during the night and go downstairs to sit and smoke in the kitchen."

What did he think during those nights, the gentle man who thought people, and not things, were important? Who believed in service, and who was loyal above all. What did he think about those nights, alone in his kitchen, a cigarette, and maybe another two or three, burning down to his fingertips, ground into the ashtray in front of him, before he fell, the cigarette in his hand burning his wife's new linoleum floor. He knew he was sick. He told me. He knew I still thought about him and cared, that I was still his daughter. I called him. What did his wife think he thought about in the kitchen at night, while she lay in their bed? He didn't tell her. I knew he was passing out. He told me. I knew he was going to die soon. He told me. He died, and no one told them we were his daughters.

Did he think of us? When he wrote the pages and pages in his hospital bed as he prepared to die, not mentioning us, were we in his thoughts?

"Cape Cod was important," she told me.

"Cape Cod?"

"Yes. We went there in the summers."

"I see. So did we. Do you remember where you stayed? Was it near a big white frame house on a bluff overlooking the bay?"

"Yes, it was in a cottage next door."

"Was it off the main route, a left across from the general store, where you could buy cotton body surfers and flip flops, up a winding road to the top?" I still get weak with yearning for the smells of that parking lot, the first place we'd go for the stuff of our vacation, sand under our sneakers again after months in suburban central New York. I longed for our two weeks in South Wellfleet all year.

"Yes. Yes, that sounds right."

"We stayed in that house. The big white house." Maybe it wasn't so big, but it was to me. It had two floors, unlike our small ranch house, with sun streaming through the windows of a glassed in veranda and our bedroom above, white sheers billowing in the sea breeze. There was a sink in a tiny bath off the kitchen entrance. It made a terrible gargling noise as the water went down. We called it "Charlie". "Dad was remarkable for being able to head out to swim powerfully in the surf, even in the coldest water temperatures, off Marconi State Beach and Newcombe Hollow Beach."

"That's where we went, too," she said. "One day, Dad looked over and saw my sister looking up the beach. He and Mom looked where she was looking, and there was her father. He asked her if she wanted him to go to him and ask him to talk to her. She said no."

Did he think of us, wishing we were on the beach with him in Newcombe Hollow, like we used to be, running up and down those dunes, brown as berries?

"There's a photo of Dad with a huge fish he caught when I was little. I don't know what kind of fish it is, or if he caught it in the ocean or on a lake."

"It's a striped bass. He caught it out deep-sea fishing off Wellfleet. It was in 1969. We had it for dinner that night. Dad cleaned it, and we were 13, Mom and Dad, my sister and I, our grandparents and my grandmother's sister and her husband, and my Mom's sister and youngest brother. That's only 10, but I remember 13. My childhood mistaken for her own. My father having replaced us with them.

She brought me a CD of his photos, given to her over the years, scanned with care to make albums for our sister and me, and the back of the photo tells the story in my father's sharp, slanted handwriting, "With my 32 lb stripped (sic) bass taken summer of 1969, So. Wellfleet, Mass. Cape Cod. Aboard the 'Viking', with skipper Capt. Al Larsen." Summer of 1969.

My parents were divorced by January of 1970, both soon to love elsewhere, my mother already determined to move on in her life by that summer in her white convertible on the Cape, Dad gone home before us, top down and the radio playing the songs that marked a year that would be my last with my family. Such a family as it was, as it had become. Not much of one, at all. He found a better one for him, even if something caused him pain. Even if he sat up in the kitchen and smoked the cigarettes that would let him die soon as he "knew [he] would".

"I have a mole somewhere," her hands moving to the skin at the base of her throat, searching for what she couldn't see, but Dad had. "He told me it meant that I would be rich. I was in the bath; I must have been young enough that he still toweled me dry. I was very excited," her eyes grew wide as she remembered how she felt when he told her she would be rich in life, "and I asked, 'Really! I'm going to be rich?' and he answered, laughing, 'Well, no, I don't mean that kind of 'rich'. I mean more like full.'"

I remember. I remember, being bathed by him when I was very little, too, but what did he say to me? I want to remember like she can, every word, and I can't. They're all gone. The only words I can remember are "Your mother and I are going to be divorced. I don't want this. She does."

And my own, after he took me in his arms, where I lay in the dark of my bed, hearing him cry softly, "Dad, we all want this. We want peace and quiet and to be happy." He let me go.
....

The orange room, furnished

Time to finish vacuuming and do the dinner dishes, then go to bed. Airport in the morning.

At least there's a room ready.

And 6 bistro chairs around the Moroccan mosaic table on the terrace. Ready for petit déj on sunny mornings.
....

Praise with elation

Morning has broken, beautiful

finally

And, I have nearly finished with a guest room suitable to receive a visitor. My half-sister. My father's last child. Another story I haven't told because it's one that might not stop. I haven't seen her since the day her mother asked my father to have us come for the afternoon and dinner to tell us that there would be nothing for us, my sister and I, my father's first children. We never saw him again, not on purpose. I saw him once more across a crowded Greyhound station in Syracuse, NY about a year later. I wasn't sure it was him. He looked so much older. "Dad?" I called, not very loudly. I didn't want to be wrong in front of all those people. He didn't hear. I continued to walk towards him, carefully, and called a little louder, "Dad?" He heard. His head made a sudden movement toward me, his eyes looking at the faces around him.

"Dad." They found me.

"Jackie?" He looked uncertain. I nodded. Yes, it's I. He walked over to me. Did he hug me? I don't know. "What are you doing here?"

"I just got back from visiting my cousin Kathy at North Adams. Mom's waiting for me out in the car." He nodded. We said good-bye, and I never saw him again. I called from college over the years, but he was detached. Drifting like a space lab with a broken arm. I wanted him to talk; I wanted him to sound proud of me. Once, he told me that he had been in NYC with his wife, to see the doctors at Columbia Presbyterian. She had already seen the best neurologists in Syracuse, but she wanted a physical cause for her searing headaches, not a suggestion that she see a therapist when they found none. She asked for the best, and they referred her to Columbia.

"Why," I asked him from my dorm room, "didn't you call me? It's only a couple of miles from me." I knew the answer. I wanted only to ask the question. I had to ask. He didn't answer. He told me about the doctors in Syracuse, the doctors in NYC, the pain.

"They found nothing," he said. "They suggested she see a therapist, too, for possible emotional causes. She refused." I listened. "They said the only way to make the pain go away is to cut the nerves to the left side of her face, which would leave her paralyzed, like a stroke victim. That, or try seeing a therapist."

"So, what is she going to do?" I knew the answer.

"She asked for the surgery." He sounded flat. Worn out. Disbelieving. He didn't get it, but he couldn't decide for her.

There were so many things I ought to have said rather than leave his bubble intact. I didn't know. You can't change a man. Remember, that, Jackie. You can't ever change a man. My mother had told me that so many times, not that she ever stopped trying herself. It's hard, I suppose, not to want to try. I let my dad be. I think I was wrong now. There are things one should say if the other can't.

I called him the last time in the early summer of 1983, 4 years after I saw him for the last time in the Greyhound waiting room, when he didn't try to talk to me longer. Didn't offer me a Coke or offer to tell me why he was there himself. Didn't come out to see my mom and tell her he'd bring me home, that he'd call and come to get me soon to spend some time together. He let me go.

I called to ask him to sign the adoption papers.

"I always knew," he said, sounding empty, "that I would never see you or your sister again." Why? "I passed out in the kitchen the other day."

"What did the doctor say?" He hesitated.

"You did see a doctor, didn't you?"

"I --," he stopped.

"You didn't see a doctor?"

"No. It doesn't matter. I am going to die soon anyway." He let me go, and he was killing himself. Three packs of unfiltered Pall Malls a day for 30 years should do it. Eventually. There were things I should have asked, but, I must have thought, Why? He had made a choice. He made it the day his wife put her hands on his shoulders from behind his easy chair in their split-level ranch and said, "Bob, you have something to say to your daughters, don't you?" and he turned white. As white as his shirt. He looked trapped.

"Bob, you had something to say to them, didn't you? she prompted again. He continued to look at us on the sofa with the comics spread on our knees, our half-sister playing on the floor between us, his wife's daughter looking on, and no sound came from him. He was frozen.

"Well, then, girls, the reason we called you here today is to tell you that there will be nothing from us for school, or anything." She had dared to say it. Dared to say what my father couldn't, and she knew he couldn't. We listened, quietly. Me, 16. My sister 3 years younger. I nodded politely. Our father sat perfectly still, perfectly white. She couldn't see what we saw from where she stood behind him, her hands resting on his shoulders. He didn't love her. He wasn't anymore. If he were to love her, then he had to become another man, one who couldn't know us. "Dinner's ready. Come to the table," she finished. We stood up, and we walked to the table. I didn't ask him to drive us home. Right now. I was polite.

Always polite.

He sat at the head of the table on my right, facing his wife, my sister on my left, facing, our step-sister, our four-year-old half-sister to her left. At dessert, our stepmother said to her older daughter, a year younger than I, "Why don't you go upstairs and get all the nice clothes your dad bought for you to show the girls?" I looked at my father. He was paler still. Absolutely silent. Where had he gone inside himself? Why, I asked myself, doesn't he stop this? It was a set-up. She had planned it all out. A theater piece to show my sister and I who his children were, and who they were not. We had nothing. I bought my clothes, paid for my lessons -- everything -- with my babysitting and waitressing money, and I was saving for college. He sent nothing. Once, I asked for $20 for track shoes because I wanted to join the high school team. He offered me one of my savings bonds. I thanked him and bought them for myself.

She stood from her place, and went upstairs to return with shoes dripping from her fingers, a pile of blouses, skirts, pants draped across her forearms, as though she were offering them to us. That was it. She didn't show us each one, or how they went together, how many outfits she could make from them and how nice they looked on her.

"It's time to take the girls home now, Bob." He let us go.

That was 32 years ago.

I found my half-sister, Jennifer, in January, and she asked to come here. She looked like me when she was a baby. She looks like our father's mother now.

"Tu vas la reconnaître à l'aéroport?" my husband asked last evening.

"Bien sur. C'est le visage de ma grandmère, comment pourrais-je ne pas la reconnaître?" He smiled.

"Et elle, elle va te reconnaître, tu penses?"

"Je ne sais pas. Elle n'a vu qu'une photo de moi, et pas très récente, à moins que notre soeur lui a montré l'une des siennes. Horribles, d'ailleurs." I am not photogenic. My mother always said so, You're not photogenic. You're telegenic. The problem is that people don't watch me on television, and there are only a handful of photos that actually look like me, or the way I see myself when I look in a mirror, which I don't do often, if I can help it.

"I only ever saw our father cry twice," Jennifer told me. The first time was when our stepsister's father called to say he could adopt his daughter, if he wanted; he didn't want her. The second time was when I called to ask him to sign the adoption papers. "He went outside and dropped onto a lawnchair and sobbed. He wouldn't talk to anyone." He had done what he couldn't believe any father could.

"Don't think," my sister told her, "that she wanted that when she called. Dad could have said no. She wanted Dad to say no." But, he let us go. He replaced us with his wife's children and led the life we had with him, were supposed to continue to have with him, until he died just 6 years later. Longer, I imagine, than he had hoped.

Tomorrow Jennifer will be here, and I will see him again, in the photos she will bring of him and in her face. How do you prepare yourself for that? He taught her to ski moguls, he left me before I was ready. He left off with me, and continued with her. The skiing, the summers in South Wellfleet, the dances at the weddings. He left her with his flag, to cry for his loss. I think that flag will travel here, and Dad will be there, here in the French countryside in Moosesucks with us.

I am left to wonder about his masters in psychology and the love he developed for photography.

"Did he still hunt?" I asked Jennifer?

"Oh, yes! Right up until he died, although in his last years he'd just have soon have taken his camera as his rifle." And my son, who has inherited my need to photograph what I see. From my father? I knew about the obsession with a perfect lawn. He carried, she told me, his dandelion lifter in his back pocket, just in case he came across one. I asked her to bring me one to replace the only one I ever saw here and lost, somewhere in the garden. I probably threw it away with a bunch of dandelions, before I learned that spraying and soil care is a lot easier than bending down to jam the dandelion thing into the ground and pry them out, one by one.

Somehow, he also learned to live while he was letting go of us, and of life. Why didn't he call us? Perhaps the space lab had just drifted too far, the arm grown too broken to reach back out. If he thought to repair it with the tools he sought in psychology, he certainly also thought it was too late, that we wanted things this way, that that is what I had asked for when I called to ask him to sign the papers, when it didn't occur to me to add, "unless you want to be our father," rather than waiting for him to say, "No, I am your father, and I am coming to see you."

I must go and finish preparing her room. I imagine he knows that I am doing that for her, for him, and I can't even count the number of spiders who gave their lives in the effort.

The white door and trim on the orange walls are about to go Meteorite, too. It was my first idea -- a little more "modern", to go with the pared down simplicity (ahem) of the room --, but it was easy to do the white first and see. Audouin says orange, and I have to agree.

Forever orange.

My arms are killing me, right along with my hands and upper back. Audouin looked at me last evening, folding laundry at 11:30 pm and said, "Tu n'as pas arreté toute la journée."

"C'est comme ça depuis 2 semaines." In case he hadn't noticed.

I exaggerate. It's been like that for 2 days, although I have worked pretty hard for all of the last 2 weeks on this room. And I thought I'd get both rooms done on time. I edit constantly while I zip around like the Tasmanian devil through the multitude of things I feel I have to do, prioritizing on the run, the phrase, "Remember ladies, lower your expectations," running through my mind.

Things I have had to decide to live with:

1. It's the smaller room that will be ready.
2. The sea grass floor covering will not be installed because of the various leaks in the bathroom.
3. The house will not be House & Garden quality.
4. The pool is still a swamp because I haven't received the estimate I want from the fourth electrician with the middle price and the cheap one hasn't called as he said he would.
5. The furnace continues to emit foul-smelling smoke, choking and offending us.
6. The garden is not perfectly House & Garden quality, either, but it's not that bad. I've gotten to most of it, and made a Herculean effort -- ha, get it? Sisyphe making a Herculean effort? -- to clean up after the disappeared workers (another story I haven't had time to tell) and weed some more.

Oh! Did I mention the asbestos the roofer found?

I have to get going. IKEA waits for me, I must finish mowing the lawns (sounds grandiose, n'est-ce pas?), and I have the house to vacuum, the chair covers to decatfur, dry cleaning to pick up, and the list goes on.

I should make a list.

I am too tired to make a list.

I don't even want to stand up. It's 11:45, the clouds have gathered, and I meant to have left nearly three hours ago for IKEA. Time to lower my expectations another notch.


....

Still orange

Audouin hasn't come home, fallen down in shock and dismay and asked me to paint it anything but orange yet. I thought about disappearing to *Leroy Merlin to see if they have canvas shades for the window and French door so that I wouldn't have to see his face when he first sees it, but it's too late; they close at 8 pm.

Sam likes it.

The Facebook crowd likes it. Then again, there are two lovers of orange, someone from the 'Cuse (Go Orangemen!) and another from the University of Illinois -- vive les oranges et bleus! --, and we all know why Florida would pick orange for UF. Hell-o!

I like it.

I just keep seeing all the little things I need to do better, and I do have to do a second coat. If only I could have the sea grass floor covering right away. Now I have to scrub the spots of plaster filler and paint off the terracotta tile. I'll never get the paint from when the workers were attempting to paint the metal shutters off it. The Jackson Pollack effect wasn't at all limited to the plastic sheeting they laid out.

And if the Marbre reminded me of sails and sneakers, the addition of the tarp on the roof over my head as I work, flapping in the breeze, makes me feel like I am on a sailboat. I only need close my eyes.

Hopefully she's watertight (enough) for now. Now I need to add roof details for a toit végétalisé to my "to do" list.

* Leroy Merlin is basically like Home Depot, although I think we have that here, too. I forget what's it called, but it has the same little guy in overalls on the signs.

Funny enough, the name means the King and Merlin, but it's supposedly the real, actual last names of the two men who started the chain. I'll have to see if that is apocryphal.
....

Orange

"The color orange occurs between red and yellow in the visible spectrum at a wavelength of about 585 – 620 nm, and has a hue of 30° in HSV colour space. The complementary colour of orange is azure, a slightly greenish blue. Orange pigments are largely in the ochre or cadmium families, and absorb mostly blue light."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(colour)

I opened the can. It was a very frightening moment (you can't return it once it has been opened). It was 10 pm. I began cutting into the freshly primed, starkly white, smooth wall. Only two previous painting moments in my life have been as unnerving: when I started cutting-in the deep terracotta color in my kitchen in Greenwich (God, what am I doing? Have I lost my mind? White is good! White is safe!), and when I began cutting-in with the Madras Red in Sam's room here a few years ago. Audouin had nearly had a heart attack when he saw it; it looked like a murder scene with those gashes of blood red paint. I had suddenly wished I had bolted the room shut until it was finished. There is something horrible in those first strokes of strongly colored paint against white primer.

"Ca va aller," I remember telling him. "Je te le promis que ça va aller." He was amazed when it was finished. He loved it.

Suddenly, the Marbre (marble) looked... dirty. Dull. Drab. Wrong. I had been so certain it was the thing to do, and at 50 euros a can, I didn't want to be wrong. I was also so certain it was the right color to go with the Cactus, the green in the adjacent room. The wall painted in Marbre is intended to be the continuous element. The high wall along the back of both rooms, separated by the lower bathroom. It's meant to tie them together and remind you that it is one volume, really. It brought sails and sneakers to mind as I rolled it on, not entirely unhappy that it didn't cover perfectly.

Returning earlier in the evening from a night on duty at the hospital, Audouin came to see the progress. He looked underwhelmed. I had been priming and painting the Marbre all day with a roller pad that kept falling off the roller. Worse, the walls may be smooth, but they are not regular. Getting the paint on everywhere was the sort of challenge my right shoulder, ruined from too many intense garden projects involving axes, chainsaws and shovels, and carpel tunnel syndrome can't take. I needed some praise and a little encouragement.

I wasn't getting any.

"C'est lequel le mur que tu vas laisser blanc?" I nodded to the rear wall that I had killed myself painting all afternoon.

"Ce n'est pas une sous-couche?" I practically started hearing a loud buzzing in my inner ear. No, I said, it is not primer; it is the paint.

"Non, ce n'est pas une sous-couche. C'est le blanc, "Marbre", du mur."

"Et les autres tu vas les peindre en orange?" Why did he sound so dubious? He wandered off to look at the paint cans on the shelves in the bathroom. I watched him. He fingered the can.

"Qu'est-ce que tu en penses?"

"Je ne suis pas un fou d'orange." I'm not crazy about orange. I might be crazy, but I really wanted to do it. Still, my walls looked really nice white. I'm just going to freshen them up with a coat of white paint. Sure. "Et ce vert," he continued, "je n'aime pas trop les verts non plus." I was batting 1000. I thought he'd like that one.

"Tu ne le trouves pas beau?"

"C'est un peu... khaki -- armée." Oh! But it isn't!

"C'est beau avec des blancs et des crèmes," I said lamely. I wasn't going to convince him no matter what I said. He'd have to see it done and then make up his mind. Right along with me. "Je les changerai si tu ne les aime pas une fois que j'aurai fini."

"Oh, je suis sur que ce sont des couleurs qui vont bien ensemble et sont jolies éclairées la nuit." He left to go get his kids. I cleaned my roller, wiped my hands and headed in to make dinner. I was on my own. I still am, for all I know.

I don't know if he looked in the Formerly Blue Room to see what I did after he went to bed. All I can think this morning is The Van Gogh Room; I can't wait to put vases of Bluebonnets, yellow irises, magenta peonies, purple-blue Cranesbill geraniums and lavender in here! and I hate Leroy Merlin for not saying the Dexter 180 mm pro paint roller does not work on the Dexter 180 mm "best buy" roller.

This has been sheer hell, but the Marbre was the right choice after all. All things look different when they are actually done and in the morning.

Meanwhile, the sink really is leaking from the plumbing (so much for the sea grass floor covering right now) and the dog fur and laundry are piling up in the house (I can't see you!). I don't want to know what Audouin is reduced to wearing for socks. I bought Sam underpants.


....

Chut! Perfect silence, please

Perfectionist at work.

One corner, taped and primed

Remind me never to say, I think I'll just freshen those walls up with a coat of white paint. There is just no such thing (in my world) as a little paint job. Audouin came in after work the other evening, looked around and asked, "Tu es sure que tu vas pouvoir finir pour ta demi-soeur?"

Of course I will be able to finish for the arrival of my recently found half-sister. No problem! "Bien sur," I lied, "l'autre chambre est beaucoup plus facile."

"Et plus grande." He had to remind me. Don't say that, I thought. Please, don't say that.

"Oui, mais je peux poncer le crépis [that's the ticket]. C'est comme un plâtre et pas comme cette pièce." I'll just sand down all those fancy things in the plaster work, slap on -- no! no! -- some plaster, sand it fast and whip on that paint. Yeah.

I knew then I had a problem. There was nearly no way to finish in the time remaining, and that was before the rain started dripping down the inside of the walls yesterday, staining the ceiling where I had done a short-cut job cleaning up (hiding) the black mold.

Today I noticed a puddle under the sink, running off toward the toilet where it saturated the towel we had put down -- wait. Towel on the floor? Why had we done that? Was there already a leak I have forgotten? And I told the carpet layer that the bathroom is dry and barely gets used when he asked if I was sure I want sea grass in there.

Oh oh.

Yesterday, Sam came in and stuck his finger in the plaster mix on my trowel and started fingering it onto the smooth wall.

"Sam? What are you doing?"

"I wanted to see what it feels like."

"You're wiping it on the area I just finished." There were finger smudges in the freshly troweled and painstakingly smoothed plaster.

"Oh. Where can I wipe it?"

"There, where it's bright white. It's dry already there." I sent him to the store and troweled what he had wiped onto the wall. He owes me. I got him his MacBook Pro.

This morning, I noticed all the things (imperfections) I can't live with and fought as hard as I could against mixing up some more plaster. I need to paint. I struggled. I couldn't stand it. I sanded elsewhere. I really need to paint. My eyes drifted back to those spots. I tried hard not to, and then I gave up. I went and mixed more plaster, thinking It will have time to dry while I cut-in.

I really need to paint.

I am going to start a support group for perfectionists of little patience in an imperfect world, entitled POLPIANIWS Anonymous.

Maybe I should leave a few letters out? But, which ones? Stress! I need the perfect acronym.


....

Désespérant

The leak has sprung

shit.

This morning so didn't go as planned.

Was there a wet spot before? Yes.

Was there black mold? Yes.

Did I tear that out, spray vinegar and plaster over the area? Yes.

Did I know what an idiot I am? Sadly, yes.

Was I guilty of wishful thinking? Alas, yes.

It gets me nearly every time. But, why now? Why? Why did it suddenly have to fail right as I was about to paint? Just when I was about to realize a major improvement of these two spaces for the greater enjoyment of guests and myself, having, now, a place (finally!) to banish the step kids to watch their TV shows (Disney Channel. Enough said.) and play Wii with their friends?

My own son already banishes himself. He's at the age where his room or the space in front of the computer are the only places he really wants to be. Unless he wants to talk to me.

Those of you who are essentially positive will laugh and say, "But, don't you see? You were fortunate! You could have painted, had the sea grass carpeting installed, moved all the furniture back in and then had this happen! You were lucky!"

To you, I say, "What? You don't think I am not still going to do all of that anyway?" I said this was a New York City clean-up job.

My first thought was to move the ladder outside and see if there was anything I could do. Not much. My second was to move the ladder back inside and retrieve my camera from on top of the bathroom ceiling and take a picture of my unintentional green roof. Meaning no one ever intended it to be this way. It's a perfect failure, like so much here.

Like everything.

I called the roofer.

I had hoped to be able to "get to it in time". Not a lot of time even. The time to get through May, make some drawings and call the roofer here in Mousseaux to see if he was interested in doing a toit végétalisé. They are quite beautiful, ecologically friendly and efficient, and low cost. Now, I have an accidental toit végétalisé and a waterfall. I am hoping they can at least put a tarp over the room as a stop-gap measure to prevent further inundation until they have time to get to us and do my roof, or get someone else if he isn't into plants for roofing.

Yesterday, the carpet layer came to do the estimate to install the sea grass. He left having given me all his contact information so that he could come and install it before next Tuesday, when a half-sister I haven't seen in nearly 33 years -- it's a long story, the American family; although, according to the carpet installer, his wife is looking for her older half English, half French half-siblings, who live in England, hence -- beyond my being charming (I am) -- his desire to help me out in a pinch --, is arriving to see me again. She suffers from asthma. I am suddenly not so sure our house will suit her, and I am starting to panic.

It just doesn't stop. I feel like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the damn.

Or, like Hunca Munca in charge of an entire forest of untidy little homes.



Off to see the dermatologist. That should cheer me up. Maybe I'll get to have the additional 4 mm of skin and flesh removed from my toe this morning to really round out the day before another electrician and the roofer come this evening.

And the rain falls.
....

Sam, Me -- Egalité

Les pieds sals de Sisyphe

September 15, 2003

He owes me his life. I owe him mine.

A few weeks ago, Sam knocked on the open door of my room and asked if he could come in. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, just about to put my shoes on.

"Sure, come in. What's up?" He looked down at my foot and cocked his head and frowned.

"What's that?"

"What?"

"That, on your toe. The dark spot." Oh, that. "How long have you had that?" I thought about it. Actually, I had been thinking about it on and off for awhile.

"I don't know." I shook my head and thought about it. "I don't know how long I have had it, or if it has always been there. I have been trying to remember. Longer than a year, I think. Maybe two? I don't know." We both continued to look at the beauty spot on the inside of the second toe on my right foot, nearly in the web.

"You should get it checked out. Bob Marley died of a thing like that on his foot." Bob Marley. I could end up like Bob Marley, dead from a cancer on my toe. How ignoble.

That's too bad your mom died. What was it, Sam? That's what he'd hear all his life.

Like Bob Marley, a melanoma on her toe. That's what he'd answer.

I nodded.

Later, I went and searched through my photos on the computer. There was one that I had taken of my dirty gardening feet back in my earliest gardening days here. I was wearing a pair of beach thongs I got in the States earlier that summer, just like my sister's. I was amused that day at how dirty I can get working in the garden.

As bad as the quality of the photo is, it confirmed that no, I had not always had this thing on my toe.

I didn't think I had.

I asked Audouin what he thought before we went to bed that night. He looked at the spot and said, "Je ne sais pas. Je suis nul en dermato."

We went to sleep.

A couple of days later, I was checking what everyone was up to on Facebook, and someone had posted 5 pictures of melanomas. I did a double take and took off my sneaker and sock. Bob Marley died of a thing like that on his foot. That evening I suggested to Audouin that he try to get me in to see a dermatologist. I was leaving for a few days in Brest a week later. Just before I left, he suggested that maybe our sister-in-law, a doctor, too, could get me in to see someone there. I shrugged, "Je ne sais pas. C'est plus facile de voir quelqu'un ici. Dans le cas où." He nodded.

Christine offered to get me in to see the dermatologist where her sister works, "Ca ne pose aucun problème."

"Oui. Je sais. Merci. Mais, je pense qu'il vaut mieux voir quelqu'un à Mantes, quand je serai rentrée. Si on a besoin de l'enlever, on pourrait le faire où je serais suivie." She nodded. When I got back, Audouin called me from the hospital one day -- highly unusual -- and said, "Tu as rendez-vous chez le dermato mardi 10h45. Avec Pedreiro. Il est bon. Sois à l'heure; il t'a rajouté à son programme. Normalement c'est 6 mois pour avoir un rendez-vous. " I nodded. He couldn't see, so I said, "D'accord. Merci."

"Sois à l'heure. Avant même."

"Je le serai. T'inquiète."

A 10h50 mardi le 28, Pedreiro looked at my dark spot and then up at me, where my head was at the other end of the examining table. He furrowed his brow, drawing his eyebrows together, and said, "On va l'enlever immédiatement. Ce matin," and proceeded to draw a circle around the spot, 1 or 2 mm larger, to be sure to remove enough.

"Est-ce que c'est profond ou superficiel?" I asked. He looked up at me again. I was starting not to like that look very much.

"J'espère pour vous," he said, "qu'il n'est pas profond." I nodded. He had answered a different question. Not the one I had asked. I meant are these things deep or superficial? He meant if they are deep, you are in trouble. He used the word melanoma.

It looked like I might be in trouble of a sort that was new to me.

Audouin was waiting in the corridor when I came out.

"Ce fut toi qui appellais tout à l'heure?" He nodded. The phone had been ringing insistently while he was cutting and stitching me back up. I thought it was probably Audouin at the nurse's station. It was. It wasn't a moment when they could answer.

"Ca va?" he asked. I nodded.

"It's a melanoma." Pedreiro came out into the corridor and stepped up close to Audouin. They spoke in medical language in low tones. The sentences came quickly. I caught little of it, smiling like I was at a cocktail party where everyone was speaking Polish, while I was just beginning to learn it and grasping the general meaning, unsure I was intended to. My odd beauty mark was on its way to the lab in Paris. He'd asked to have the results in a week, 10 days at the latest.

We walked back out together to pay the fee. The young woman handed me a folded note and gestured to leave my purse at my side, my checkbook tucked safely inside. I slipped the note inside next to it. I'd read it later. Madame de Lanète? she had looked up at me when I presented myself at the counter for my paperwork. I didn't recognize you! It's been, she looked at her computer, and then back at me, with a smile I usually see only from the friends who see me the least and, so, have the most reason to appreciate me most, 2 years. I'm so glad the doctor is with someone like you, she continued. He deserves to be very happy.

One after another, the young women smiled their au revoirs and we headed to the lobby doors and on to my bike, parked under the stairs to the esplanade. He had patients waiting for him in the emergency room.

"Ca va?"

"Oui, bien sur."

"Il a été gentil avec toi?"

"Oui. Pas comme les secrétaires, mais je ne demande que qu'il soit bon et correcte." He hovered a moment while I removed the lock, pulled on my gloves.

"Ben. Je devrais y aller."

"Je sais. Vas y vite." He looked at me staring back from my helmet and leaned down to kiss me under the lifted visor.

"Ne t'enquiète pas, d'accord?" I nodded and we backed my bike out. I climbed on and started the engine, heading toward the gate as the first drops of a shower started to fall and slide down my visor.

At home later that evening, he asked what the note said.

"Quel mot?"

"Celui de ma patiente dans l'administration ce matin."

"Oh! Je l'ai oublié." I pulled it out and unfolded it. "C'est gentil. C'est ses numéros de téléphone pour que je puisse l'appeler et elle me prendra tous mes rendez-vous. Elle dit qu'elle connait tous les secrétaires et peut avoir les rendez-vous avec qui qu'on veut tout de suite."

"C'est gentil de sa part." The truth is that Audouin can do that for me, too, but everyone wants to do things for him, even for me, for him.

10 days was time to clean up and weed the lower garden, and while doing that, I was seized with the need to repaint the guest rooms in the petite maison. Right away. My foot didn't even hurt. I wasn't going to be running, but I could drag the mess to the burning pile and climb up and down my ladder, applying plaster to smooth the walls and sand, drive back and forth to IKEA and Leroy Merlin for curtains and supplies. The days passed. Audouin asked if I were worried. I asked if he wanted to do my bandage. He seemed perfectly unconcerned. I did my own.

The following Tuesday came and went, but there had been a holiday in between, and the results were not ready. Pedreiro says Thursday. Friday at the latest. But Friday is the holiday...

Thursday was warm for the season, with a brilliant sunshine. I called the plumber to tell them the fumes from the furnace stunk to high heaven, an acrid odor, like an electrical fire with tires thrown on top, every time the furnace came on to keep the water in the boiler hot. Madame Molas said she'd send someone during the day. It was their son, fresh out of his apprenticeship at 19, who cleaned the furnace and chimney the week before. He said it would continue to smell bad dans un première temps, but were we in a deuxième now, or not?

I called electricians from the Yellow Pages to come and fix the severed cable to the pool pump so we can clean it up. I'd rather swim in the fish-pond-in-a-fountain. There was one recommended by Madame Molas, another by Sabine at the pool installation and supply store. Three others from nearby.

One came at noon, just before Johan, who has done the plumbing work here since I arrived. His wife is a patient of Audouin's. We watched the fish and the frogs in the basin. He cut the overgrowth in the neighbor's tree from around the chimney, which is was smothering on one side, to make sure it wasn't the problem. He adjusted the furnace. The bad smell went away. I applied the plaster, sanded, swept, watched the dogs and cats, listened to the frogs.

The second electrician called to say they would be there on Monday morning. The office of the first called to say the estimate was on its way. I applied plaster and sanded, swept, watched the dogs and cats, listened to the frogs.

The third came at 6 pm and gave me a verbal estimate for one fourth the price of the first, under 100 euros. I applied plaster to the ceiling and thought in just a couple of hours, I could get news that will change everything. I could learn that I will die. The sun shone on the frogs calling out for mates in the basin. It was a beautiful late afternoon. I drew the trowel across the plaster and felt peaceful. I have two or three hours to enjoy the sunshine and the frogs, my dogs and my cats, the flowers and my work. I smiled. I was happy and serene. I had two or three hours of peace to enjoy. Just enjoy these moments right now. Enjoy them.

Schroedinger's cat. As long as the box isn't opened, the cat still has a 50% chance of being alive, and so did I. Enjoy it while the box was closed.

The gate below slid open at 8 in the evening.

"Baccarat! Viens ici!" he barked. Oh-oh, I thought, he sounds grumpy. Maybe not such a good sign. But, he is always grumpy when Baccarat darts out the gate and disobeys, wandering up the lane, pretending she has no idea we are calling her, followed by Rapide. The gate slid closed. I continued to apply plaster to the ceiling. He walked across the terrace, directly into the house.

"Salut," I called from my ladder in the room across the lawn.

"Un instant. J'arrive." I spread plaster with my trowel. He appeared beside my ladder, a grin breaking out.

"J'ai des bonnes nouvelles."

"Je n'ai rien!" I teased.

"Non. Tu n'as pas rien. Tu as un melanome, mais c'est le moins mauvais possible." The smile faded, and he looked exhausted. "Je ne pense pas que tu sais combien tu es passée de près."

No, I did realize how close I came. I did. I thought. I learned that I didn't at all. Melanomas of a certain depth are certain to have metastasized. They are untreatable.

"Je ne savais pas tous ces derniers jours si j'allais n'avoir que de te voir mourir dans les 3 mois sans rien pouvoir faire."

If I didn't know how close I had come, it was because he had refused to let me know. He had kept it all to himself. I was more worried about his constant abdominal problems and his sleepless nights for two or three weeks, suggesting that maybe he should see a doctor, worried that he was sick, but I also suspected that he was very worried, and it wasn't the time to teach him that he needs to stop protecting me so much. He needed to do that. I am stronger than he thinks, and he has needs, too, but I couldn't pierce the bubble he had made to protect me. He was asking me not to by pretending not to worry, and so I didn't ask my questions or go do any research. It wasn't necessary. It was easier for him if I lived without worrying. He was doing enough of that for all of us.

I told him that I was certainly aware that I could have metastases, that I could die. I have a 95% survival chance in 5 years, "That's about as good as life offers," I said. He nodded. I will have to have more tissue removed -- 4 mm all around what he has already taken --, and then I will be followed very closely and regularly for any further suspicious changes in any beauty marks I have.

I was embarrassed to learn that his colleagues had all known and were worried to death about me, and for him. He had to tell them because they needed him to take a day on duty this weekend -- there have been problems during this month full of long weekends (that's May in France) -- covering the on calls the weekend. Here, one doctor in certain emergency services like obstetrics and gynecology has to be in the hospital at all times, so they each have nights where they are there all night to handle any problems in the birthing rooms, emergencies, emergency surgery, etc. --, and he had to say no. The chief of staff told him that they had each taken a Saturday, and it was his turn. Audouin told him he needed to speak with him outside the room, where he told him that I had a melanoma and that he was expecting the results Thursday. Berardi was upset, too.

He returned to the meeting with Audouin and said that Audouin had "family problems" and that he couldn't take any nights on duty for a period of time. He told the room full of the medical staff that he agreed that he shouldn't; they'd all pick up the slack for him. By yesterday, Audouin told them all what it was, and he said that their faces fell all around the room at the staff meeting -- all the doctors, the nurses and midwives of the department in attendance.

"Je ne peux pas prendre des gardes," he said to me. "Je dois pouvoir concentrer, et je ne pense qu'à toi." He was collapsing from fatigue. What relief allows you to do, but it doesn't feel better yet.

I had no idea all this was going on.

Audouin had to be at the hospital at Poissy on Tuesday, but he returned to Mantes to see the dermatologist and wait for the results in the late morning. They would come by 12:30 pm, if they were to come. When they didn't arrive, he returned to Poissy. I asked why he had done that; why he had come all the way back from Poissy, when he'd have to return, only to come back to Mantes to see patients at 4:30, "Pedreiro could have called, couldn't he?"

"He said he wanted to discuss the results in person when they arrived," and they wanted to be able to see the results on the first possible day. It was Tuesday that Pedreiro found out that he'd have them Thursday. Audouin didn't tell me any of that.

I suspected when he called his daughter to tell her that he thought it would be more fun to be with her mother on her birthday Thursday, and he explained to her mother why. She just had a lumpectomy and will undergo radiation for breast cancer with an excellent prognosis. When he told her -- a midwife -- that it was a melanoma, even she was concerned, despite her long-standing hatred of me. I was suspecting by then. It is highly, extremely not like him to cancel anything with his children. He told his daughter that we'd celebrate her birthday once he was certain everything was alright.

If he would be certain everything would be alright.

"Le téléphone sonnait tout l'après-midi," he told me, colleagues calling to hear the lab results, from Mantes and Poissy. I had seen one the day before at the gym. He had an appointment with our trainer right after I did, and the three of us had coffee together, and we talked about how he has been doing since the end of a long relationship. He was doing well; he had lost weight. I was so happy to hear what he was saying, delighted for him, and then when he saw Audouin yesterday at the hospital, he told him that he had nearly started to cry when he saw me. I hadn't even known that he knew.

I was stunned, and grateful and moved, but, as we talked, Audouin turned grayer and his face folded into a multitude of lines. He was exhausted. He needed me. It was time to take care of him now.

"Si j'avais appris que tu aller mourir, j'aurais voulu que ça soit moi." Terrible, beautiful words I never thought I would hear, or have to say.

"Demain, je voudrais qu'on se ballade ensemble."

"Moi aussi," I said.

"J'ai appris," he said, "que je t'aime." I learned, he said, that I love you. He smiled an ironic little smile. I think he did. I know I did. He turned and walked into the house to call his daughter. I cleaned my tools and put everything away. I turned out the light, and closed the door behind me, taking a second to look at the work I'd leave for a couple of days before following him into the house, where he was bent down in front of the little refridgerator, pulling a bottle of champagne out of the freezer. He doesn't drink champagne. I do. He has the smallest old single malt scotch, not even a single finger in the bottom of the glass. I am the one who puts champagne to chill to celebrate. I was touched. I didn't point out that he didn't get the crystal out. Paper cups would have been fine.

We sat in the kitchen in the fading evening light, listening to the frogs and the birds, drinking our champagne across a pile of unfolded laundry. It felt like a champagne of duty. A champagne of desperation and loss avoided, joy somewhere just past exhaustion and the lingering presence of fear tearing apart, like a chill fog in which he'd been caught.

"Je t'aime. Je ne veux pas te perdre."

"Vas te reposer. Tu dois manger, et tu ne vas pas me perdre."

The next morning, I went up to see Sam in his room. He had been out and came in while we slept. He was still in bed.

"Sam?" I heard a groan of recognition from the other side of the door. "May I come in?"

"Unnnh." I took that for a yes. He was curled on his side, and turned his head toward me. I sat down next to him and put an arm around his legs.

"Nice save. I have the best prognosis possible for a melanoma, thanks to you." We looked at each other for a moment, before I added, "Not bad for a 17 year old." He smiled. "Thanks. If you owe me your life, I owe you mine."

He nodded and let me kiss him. I let him go back to sleep, and we headed off to spend the day with family and friends, to enjoy these moments of peace and safety while they are ours.
....

Work, and anti-work

It all falls off

Bonjour Maçon

Bonjour maçon,
Aurais-tu du plâtre?
Oui m'sieur, oui m'sieur,
Trois sacs pleins.

Un pour le maître,
Un pour la dame.
Et un pour le p'tit garçon
Au bout du chemin.

Merci dit le maître.
Merci dit la dame.
Merci dit le p'tit garçon
Au bout du chemin.

(Sung to the tune of Baa-baa, Black Sheep, the modern version. Wonderful how the tune for the sung version comes from a French song published in 1761, Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman. That is how many bags of plaster and blue junk ended up out in the entry courtyard, waiting for the garbage collection day tomorrow.)

Well, I came out yesterday morning to get back to work, and the first thing I see is a large blister in the plaster I had applied to the "blue wall". I nearly fainted from shock and disappointment, but, wait! There were others. They were everywhere. I stood and looked at them, a deep sense of futility settling over my can-do, positive spirit. It was one of those moments when you think If I just stand here and look long enough, it will eventually go away, and everything will be just as I want it.

Okay, I'm ready. Change.

Now.

I'm wait-ing. [foot tapping]

No. It doesn't ever work that way. This was reality, like it or not. It was just like when you paint a surface you haven't cleaned well enough after sanding, or have failed to prime, hoping to get away with skipping a step -- as baleful in its consequences in painting as in math --, and you have to scrape it off until you can't and start anew. I picked up the spatula and pushed it into the center of the blister. It caved in.

I don't know what I was expecting to see, since it is virtually impossible, or just impossible, for the plaster stuff only to blister, but there below was a perfectly, satiny smooth surface. The blue stuff had come away in a crumbly mess with the plaster stuff I had applied, and there was Audouin's wall!

I dug the corner of the spatula under the edge and pushed it along the wall. A whole sheet of the blue stuff came away, leaving a still larger satiny smooth section of wall exposed. There I was, lamenting all my hours of work, all the plaster stuff wasted, blistered and now falling off the wall, and the truth was that it had done me a big favor. It wasn't really a waste. Wallpaper remover might have been cheaper and easier, but it never occurred to me that it could be possible to remove this stuff that way.

Whatever it had taken, the fact remained: Audouin had been beside himself when a certain person applied that gunk to the wall he had just taken such great pains to finish so smoothly -- and perhaps I have underestimated his reserves of patience? No [shaking head]. No, that's not possible. Now that I am here to do this stuff, he has none left for it --, and here, all these years later, was his work, restored to him, delivered to him, to enjoy every time he walks into this room, and I am the one to have done it, rather than criticize him.

For once.

There's a certain poetic justice there.


....