Waiting is hard

Tell us about it, they say, and hurry up with the carrot, already. The. Carrot. Now.

I know. I know all about carrots. I can see a truckload of them on the other side of contracts and construction, and it also terrifies me because for some reason that totally escapes me, I feel the worst after an accomplishment. I could never run for President. Travel all over the country, compulsively shaking every hand I can find completely genuinely, and trying to schedule time for campaign induced bulimia to rid myself of all the fair food, but not because of that. No, because if I lost, I’d fall apart, sinking into a depression of immeasurable depths and end my days in level 1335 of Pet Rescue. If I won, I might, too. Someone asked Pete Buttigieg how he managed emotionally after losing his bid for Indiana State Treasurer. He had a great answer, but I can’t remember it. 

I am going to venture a guess. An idea that suggests itself as I type (another reason to write a blog), the mistake is investing oneself too much in the process. That sounds the opposite of Zen. More like anti-Zen. But, no, it’s not that you neglect the process. You pay attention to it and you do it, faithfully and rigorously, talking yourself down from every thing that starts a cold sweat and makes you want to reach for the Atarax, but you think bigger than the process all the way through it so that it doesn’t become your reason to live. 

It can be like a cancer of the soul, the thing that animates you to lift a hand, to grasp a mouse, to double right click and type, to get up, to eat, to sleep and to toilet, and — nothing else. The process that is supposed to help you takes over the ordering of every neuron in your brain, redirecting them from previously passionately held pursuits and towards its own ends and no other. 

How ironic that it was my doctor husband who correctly diagnosed me. 

“It’s a funny thing about you. When you get doing something, you do it 100%, to the exclusion of everything else.”

“No. No, I don’t. That’s not true.”

Yes, it is. Yes, it absolutely is. Getting the laundry and grocery shopping done do not count. Don’t even bother. 

But, I insist. I need really badly to be right about that, or project being right. Why? Because — I need to be right? That’s it? That’s all it is? Shit. I thought it was untrue! 

I thought I was better than that. More valorous. 

Face it. A year ago you vowed to get this done, and everything else disappeared simultaneously from your life. You thanked your lucky stars that the man who runs your boarding facility is an angel for the horses, and recounted the anecdote about the vets saying that when there is a case of colic there, they know it’s very serious and prepare to handle the emergency. 25 horses and one colic in the 5 years we have been there. That was an elderly horse with other issues. His time had come. That anecdote was your justification. Monsieur is your insurance policy. 

And the garden? Ok, credit where it’s due. You killed ourself out there. You even gave your right elbow to the effort, but what was behind it in large part? The work on the house. Things that had to be done, trees that had to be felled, cut up and trailered to the dump to let the work move forward. you mowed the lawn, but that is like doing the laundry. 

The weeding and the pruning?

Shame is a powerful motivating force. 

And wait. Shit. Isn’t it right there at the bottom of this blog page? What Camus said? 

“The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

Why does my heart feel so empty in the waiting days? The days when a packet of work is done, and celebration would make more sense than the fog and the fatigue of some sort of exhaustion blanketing me? 

Yesterday, I struggled beyond it and drew the plans to make the floor area and lot surface coverage calculations that would tell me whether we will need a building permit or “only” a declaration of work at the mairie. The magic number, as I understand it from our mayor, is a total not in excess of 160 m2 of habitable floor area because of our PLU, or plan local d’urbanisme. 

I drew the polylines around the areas to calculate, and noted the numbers to add and to subtract. The total came to 160 m2. I should have been delirious. Punched the air like I do after vanquishing an especially difficult level of Pet Rescue. I just smiled and felt satisfaction. I knew this was the right solution. It just works. 

And today, thinking, Finally, today, TODAY, I will feel sharp and on point, I felt the let-down. 

What’s left is to keep on moving. Keep on. This time, I am not waiting in uncertainty. I know the contractor I prefer is coming next Wednesday. I have plans that only need dimensions and notes to take to the mairie to confirm that we’re good. I am a little worried about the roof overhang projecting over the property line. I don’t think our neighbor will object, if it can work that way, à l’amiable. There is also the little matter of the cladding doing the same... but surely, 3 cm or so can’t be a project stopper, can it? 

I can fix the overhang problem, if it is one, with a change in the proportions of the elevations. Not that I really want to. It makes the whole thing taller. 

The difference between the animals and me is their only expectation is immediate. Carrot. Now. It requires no effort beyond a contortion of the neck (not actually necessary at all, but they seem to think they need to come down to the height of my head on the other side of the bars). Their disappointment can be forgotten easily in a distraction, a neighbor, their hay, a nap. 

For me, it is otherwise. Disappointments have to be transformed into new ideas and more work, a continuation of the struggle that not only makes me happy, but fucking exhausts me. 

Manco, on the other hand...

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All before the coffee

I was greeted this morning by a tremendous ruckus in the garden. Wings flapped and raucous voices squawked at each other. Fia, who I was letting out to do pipi down in the bottom garden, took off like a shot. I heard wings beat harder and looked in the direction of the noise, somewhere down by the (completely empty!!! Argh!!) pool, and not far from the tulip and birch trees, in time to see a massive feathered body with long, long wings rise nearly vertically into the air and settle on a high branch of the birch. A pheasant. 

I stood stock still and thought about the wonder of a pheasant choosing to visit our garden. 

It is behind walls, along a cultivated field and trees by the Seine. The local hunters release birds, like pheasants, grouse and partridges into these fields to hunt. I have become more familiar with these birds from my long rides with Fibs along the fields and bosquets near where I board him with a grain farmer. Their specialty is taking fright as easily as my Thoroughbred, and suddenly flapping up a storm in the  wheat, the barley or the cornstalks just by his feet, where they go unseen until they lift up in a burst of flapping wings and scare the life out of him. 

It’s always fun.

And, now, here, in my garden, on our enclosed property, a pheasant had just nearly done the same to me. Fia ran about, the usual aviary residents were taking off in all directions, including a second pheasant, also rising nearly vertically to make his escape over the garden wall. I looked back at the one perched in our tree and noted a large nest just above the pheasant, where the turtle doves have been busy without my noticing them. Another sign that I have been neglecting everything that usually occupies me. 

Yesterday, I had a clear sign of that neglect when I opened my box of grooming brushes. It was a mess in the box. I knew the “booboo” cream has leaked all over the toothbrush I use for — I forget what now (see???), but the hair from the end of his tail that I had trimmed and bound with a rubber band was all picked apart. 

I did not do that. I absolutely definitely did not do that. I picked off a bit and threw it into the wet hay at our feet, noting it was kind of less clean and had to have rained hard there. I absent-mindedly opened the little compartment near the tail hair, and there was a nest. It was unmistakably a nest, beautifully rounded, and made of the rest of the tail hair, bits of chewed off plastic (the same color as the surgical gloves in their box I also keep in that box, but I didn’t verify), some white fluff from one of the greys and a little hay.

I felt like shit.

I had been absent long enough for some mammal to locate my grooming box, manage to get into it (how?!?!) and determine that it was the perfect place to nest. As if the damp and pitiful state of the curry glove, the sheepskin glove and the brushes weren’t enough. 

See? I brought it home to clean. 

I looked back at the pheasant and realized that I needed a photo. I ran to the house, Fia in pursuit -- we were going to DO something! No --, grabbed my iPhone, and returned. The branch was empty. 

On my way back inside to return to feeling a bit depressed in the let-down from my months of work on the house plans (waiting is the worst), I stopped to take more photos that I don’t need of a couple bright orange-pinkish red Christopher Marley blooms that had opened, the verbena in the angel hair grass, a bee in the lacey, daisy-like flowers that bloom in the autumn like the lilies in the the fish pond, where I disturbed a frog where he had been sitting in the yellowing reeds and grasses, hearing his plop into the water, and I thought about how smart these pheasants were, to find a place where they could be safe from my neighbors with rifles and a license to kill. I have no problem with that, really. They eat what they shoot, and there is much worse in the world. 

But, when I miss a photo, it bothers me. I needed to find the pheasants. They don’t travel, to my knowledge, based on my intimate, but still pretty limited, observations, very far. Also, I can deduce that in releasing birds, for which you have paid good money, the hunters have a reasonable expectation of finding them nearby when they go out with their rifles. 

I opened the gate, neatly avoided a dog poo (someone lets their dog crap right in front of that gate, and it’s very annoying), and saw the chestnut horse in the pasture look up at me, surprised by my emergence. 

“Hi,” I called out, raising my arm in greeting, as if he couldn't hear me and need help understanding that I was addressing him, “It’s me.”

He returned my gaze. Friendly, but not very impressed with me and — there was a slight, very rapid — nervous even? — movement in the grass between us, not far from where I stood. Something was trying to hide. It was a roundish thing, deep chestnut. The pheasant’s head? I trained my phone on it, and BOOM!!! An explosion of feathers and wings and he flew off over the field. I hit the button that is not a button as fast as I could, hoping for one decent photo.

They really are such beautiful birds. I am not even sure they have a reputation as such. Kind of like how I think people think of turkeys. Food. 

Turning back to the gate with my photo of a pheasant in flight over a field of canola flowers, the petite maison caught my eye. 

God, it’s really, really narrow. How can something SO petite be worth the investment of rebuilding?

Those are the forbidden thoughts. It exists. It was useful. It will be rebuilt. 

By the way, I remembered how to ride, and for all his doing nothing, he held himself up pretty well. I hated myself even more when I saw him, with a noticeably reduced top line. He cut his turns on the right reign and needed help, but he was born that way. I’ll do what I can.

I don't know which is worse, the heat pump unit or the embarrassing overgrowth. I can camouflage the heat pump. The stuff never stops growing.  

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