Life takes interesting turns. A year ago it would not have ranked high on any list of mine that I would now be spending most of my time flat on my back. A year ago Lake Minnetonka was fairly free of ice, the last overnight frost had come and gone, and there was no longer any snow on the ground. Robins pulled worms out of the garden, garlic and topsetting onions were up, and I was in a rush to get plants into the ground.
Not so this year. Quite literally, I have thousands of seedlings in my basement reaching towards the lights, but the ground is still frozen, there is enough ice on the lake for people to drive heavy trucks out there, and the robins, though singing each morning, are confined to searching out bird feeders instead of invertebrates. A more traditional planting day for me is April 15th, which in and of itself has some more ominous meanings, but on the island that is a likely candidate for ice out on the lake, which then means open water protects us from most late frosts. In any given year the micro climate gifted by the surrounding water affords me an extra three weeks, on both ends of the growing season, to grow frost-sensitive annuals. Last year it was far more. This year things are not so sure.
Since the car wreck, life has been a bit of a wreck. Nothing is sure. There is no confidence in my movement or plans. I keep telling myself that all I can do is assume I will be able to do everything, and plan on doing everything, because if I do not at least attempt the prep work and organizing then NOTHING will get done. Things can always be downsized later, but if I do not get plants started, then there I am limited to trying to afford to purchase plants already started. On the scale I do things, that is really not economically feasible.
In a normal year I produce far more food than my own family can consume, which brings a good many smiles to friends, neighbors and relatives. It is not bushels of oversized zucchini, but instead baskets of tomatoes and peppers, boxes of freshly dug potatoes, grocery bags of fresh beans, and basil by the pound for making pesto.
I can see all of those things in my mind’s eye when I see all of the bags of seeds saved from last year’s crop, and all of the young plants stretching towards the grow lights in my basement. The more difficult thing to imagine is it all happening.
Today Patti and I are going to meet with one of the surgeons who will, at some point in the fairly (I assume) near future be cutting into both sides of me. There are a lot of questions we would like, if not answers to, at least realistic expectations for, in regards to what my body will be able to do afterwards. The statement that I would get back to a “normal” life, as said by another of the surgeons after reviewing the results of the discogram performed on me a few weeks ago, brings more questions to my mind than peace. What is normal? Getting up before sunrise to weed a few hundred feet of beans? Tending my bee hives as the dew heavy grass soaks the cuffs of my jeans? Hours in the evening standing at a stove processing tomatoes? Digging up potatoes?
Or does normal mean sleeping for more than four hours without the aid of painkillers and muscle relaxants? Does it mean being able to operate a car safely? To be able to sit at a table and enjoy a meal with my family? There is a great distance between what most people would think of as normal, and what my normal every day activities had been up until last July.
