Irish Daisy

I pulled my back, I mean really pulled it, while helping clean my grandmother’s house last Friday. We were working hard to get things sorted and get it cleaned before the memorial on Saturday, and somewhere in frenzy of weeding, tossing, dusting, wiping and hauling, I wrenched my back the wrong way. Then, on Saturday I did a lot of sitting – in cars, on floors, plastic chairs, lumpy ottomans, more cars. And on Sunday I could not get up. Literally, back was not working, so neither were the legs. Laughing really hurts when you have a knot the size of a softball in the long muscles of your back. I mean really hurts – stabbing pain from my mid back down to my right ankle. But it was so ridiculous, my husband trying to haul my petrified, mummy self off the bed, I couldn't stop laughing between gasps, curses, and yelps. He finally had to leave so that I could gradually roll my groaning self to the edge of the bed and off the side. Luckily our bed is high, so I landed more o...

My grandma was a gardener – that is how I think of her and how I will remember her. Gardeners are gritty people, at home in the dirt. They are often at war with the elements; battling pests and weather and nature to coax, or wrest, bounty from the earth. Not that she didn't dress up; Nana was elegant when the occasion called, with swirly skirts, high, high-heels, special jewelry and fabulous lipstick. She was classy and so gorgeous. But I remember her best in a jacket and sturdy trousers, padding carefully in slippers through the morning dew to her garden to harvest beans, tomatoes or cucumbers. She used to grow cucumbers for me, and would send pictures so that I could see how my cucumber, carefully arranged on a re-purposed Styrofoam tray, was growing. Her garden was lush and bountiful, and huge – with beans strung so tall she would disappear in the rows. Not that that was hard. Nana wasn't very tall, but she was mighty in spite of her stature – a pocket-sized dic...

My baby turned 10. My first baby – the very first tiny human that made me a mama for real is a whole decade old. This birthday was a much more earthshaking event than any “milestone” birthday I've ever celebrated for myself. When that baby was born, we were living in a second-floor condo with two dogs that needed to be walked on a leash several times a day and we only had one car with a back seat. Our other car was a pickup truck with sideways-facing jump seats – not really something you can strap a baby into. So we sold it and traded up to Big Bertha. Big Bertha was a behemoth of a truck – V8 with a crew cab that could comfortably seat five adult men and a full-length bed. The baby fit just fine in the backseat, and we could still use Bertha to have adventures camping, hauling mountain bikes, and four-wheeling through ice to snowboard. Bertha was wonderful, but really, really big. A year ago, the cost of driving and maintaining Bertha motivated us to buy a small commuter car...

I mean, I do garden, I like growing things. And the plants around my house are reasonably attractive, but that's it. I recently started planting seeds, instead of buying nursery plants, to save money. I am ridiculously excited whenever they sprout. When volunteers sprout from self-seeding flowers planted the year before…hoo-boy, the glee. Sometimes, they don’t sprout at all. Sometimes, they sprout and die before developing. And sometimes they achieve plant stasis: they sprout, they grow and then they stop somewhere between seedling and actual plant and never change at all until winter comes and they finally curl up and die. I really have no idea why any of this happens. No, stop it. Don’t give me advice. I mean it, really. Bubble flowers! Come back every year if I remember not to dig them up... I like to be good at things, really good at them. I like to succeed and I am frequently accused of being an over achiever, or type A, or a perfectionist…you get the picture. I...

I haven’t been writing much lately because I've been busy killing myself instead.  No, not really, but the 5.5 hours of sleep a night I've been clocking lately will surely do me in sooner or later. Fortunately, coffee! The massive sleep deprivation is the result of trying to fit the work of 2.5 people into a single life. How does one do this you may ask? By not sleeping, for one thing. For another, you do it by rushing from one thing to the next, doing – or pretending to do – several things at once, and by never, ever sitting down for more than 20 minutes.  Unless you're at the office, then you never get up until you're pretty sure you've developed a blood clot in your leg. Why might one do this? Well, I'm a full-time, management-level employee for a Fortune 1000 company – which takes some time if you want to do your job well, and I do. And I'm a mom of three kids – which takes some time if you want to do it well, and I really, really do. And then w...