Peg's garden without Peg

Volunteer kale in front of the steps, right in the middle of the pathway. Something purple and pretty growing randomly where it's finding water from the drip irrigation system. That's our "vegetable garden" this summer.

Where there was zucchini and hat squash, there are fragrant alyssum and nasturtiums. And random plants that are fun and interesting, though they very well be weeds for all I know. The strawberries are going great guns, but it looks like the squirrels and various critters will partake before the fruit's on our radar. The entire garden has literally gone to seed.

No tomatoes for the first time in several years. Zoë and I won't be around enough this summer to harvest them, and I think it's too late to plant them anyway. This was Peg's world...she knew so much about what to plant, and when, and had an orderly arrangement for the whole garden. Last summer we harvested the things she'd lovingly planted almost every day.

A year later, nothing has been planted. Nothing to pull out of the ground. But there is a quiet peacefulness in just letting the garden rest this year, as plants go to seed and volunteers pop up. I let the peas run rampant over the herb garden because the fragrance was so wonderful. I love seeing the nasturtiums appear randomly wherever they find root.

The harvest this year is the appreciation of the beauty of this space, and the wonder of how life continues to grow in unexpected places.

Love after Love

Still going through hundreds of bits of Peg's life. A photo slipped into a book. Receipts from a thousand years ago. Cryptic notes in her frequently undecipherable shorthand.

This was taken in May 1984 (I know this because Peg compulsively wrote dates, locations and the subject on the back of almost every photo). Today I ran across the photo and a Derek Walcott poem she had framed on the wall of her office, where her patients would always see it:

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here.  Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.  Feast on your life.

Spontaneous creation

Hired someone to fix the pocket door in the middle bathroom, which has been half-broken for over ten years. Today he had a doctor's appointment.

Zoë and I decided, since Russ had taken the day off, to paint the middle bathroom.  It's been a bland grey for over 20 years...nondescript, "acceptable," ...meh.  She said, "Hey...what if it was an electric blue?"

We picked out some swatches, brought them home, and within five minutes were drawn to this wondrous shade of blue. Tonight we have a new bathroom. It was over 100 degrees in Sacramento, a perfect day to be inside and do something fun with the music cranked up to eleven. Makes me happy every time I walk through the bathroom into the kitchen and see this glorious, vibrant color that we collaborated on.

New color. New life. Good stuff.

Peggy's Colorado memorial

We're having a get-together at Marianne's house on Saturday, July 7, the day before Zoë and I return to California. Everyone is welcome. I'll post the details later, but it'll be pretty low-key and informal....kinda like Peg.

Her heart was firmly rooted in the Rockies. We haven't sorted out how and where, but we'll take her ashes deep into the mountains during our trip and leave them there as she asked us to do.

Hard to believe we leave in less than two weeks. Zoë reminded me that as much as she was looking forward to driving a convertible through the mountains, you're not allowed to drive a rental car if you're under 21.

I told her that we'd evaluate the consequences vs. the joy. I'm guessing the consequences are zip and the joy is immense. We'll be enjoying the fireworks in Aspen on July 4th, even if we have to sleep in the car. A real Colorado adventure.

Back from the beach

First Father's Day as a single dad. First camping trip with just the two of us. Life goes forward.

Spent the first night near Fort Bragg, at a private campground that's one of the few places left in California where you can camp on the beach. Zoë set up her one-girl tent just100' from the surf.

Patrick's Point was sunny but cool (as opposed to Sacramento, which was 110 degrees yesterday). Four wonderful days with Paul and Chris Andre and their two daughters, hunting for agates on the beach and enjoying each others' company. After the many camping trips our two families have shared, it was a real shift not having Peggy there...but we will never forget those memories, even as we move on and create new ones.

This is so Zoë, nimbly creating her own resting place in the cleft of a rock, spontaneously and without instruction. Finding balance and joy in a hard place.