The day started with watering my new perennials and shrubs, puttering, and general yard maintenance. Friends I hadn’t seen in a long time stopped by with their dog on their way to a holiday excursion to a state park and we sat on my patio under my big sun umbrella. I was so proud to show them around my tiny property, and that my patio was such a comfortable place to spend a few hours with them. When they left I spent the rest of my afternoon pruning shrubs and trees and reveling in my newfound ability to have an active day now that my doctor had unraveled yet another piece of my chronic fatigue syndrome and related issues.

That evening, though, a sudden deep, pulling pain in my leg alerted me to a tick that was in the process of embedding itself right next to my 26-year-old hip surgery scar. In my pain and worry I didn’t manage a clean removal. And though I cleaned the wound as best I could, it stayed red and swollen for weeks — maybe even months, but after a while I wasn’t in a condition to notice or remember.

Meanwhile, extra stress at work and extra pain rippling through my family had been digging itself deeper and deeper into my brain for a long time, building and reinforcing insecurities, piling on grief.  Plus, illness can mess with brain chemistry.

Everything started falling apart.

It took various creative and supportive healthcare professionals and an incredibly loving and supportive family to get me through the next 2 months, including relocating to my parents’ home for almost all of August. The antibiotics completely messed up my guts, and the mood meds made the rampant anxiety worse before they started making it better.

Now it’s the last day of April, 10 months after that one lovely day. I think I’m back to about where I was a year ago, back to building strength little by little, managing the chronic fatigue that feels more like its familiar old self than the raging angry animal it became in the months following my illness.

But my hair developed noticeable grey in that first month of being horribly ill, and apparently I lost all sense of connection with my lovely yard.  Months of guilt about having my neighbors and my family do all my yard work throughout the late summer and all of fall, coupled with nearly a year of feeling utterly overwhelmed by even the idea of having a yard to take care of, and my yard no longer feels anything like the haven it was for me in my first year of owning it. I don’t imagine my trees or gardens flourishing. I don’t lay out future perennial beds in my spare time. I haven’t wanted to even look at my little raised-bed vegetable garden.

In the past months there’ve been several points where it became clear to me that the trauma of last summer’s illness was greater than I’d let myself realize in the moment. The sprouting of grey hair was the first, and this odd mental block about my yard is the latest.

I guess it was a big deal. I hope I can learn again how to love my yard and gardens. And you can bet I’ll wear bug spray to guard against ticks when I’m out in my yard this year.

And then, of course, there’s the lawn itself. It keeps growing, and I keep cutting it back; it grows again, and I cut it back. Week after week we struggle back and forth in what seems to be the longest, most evenly matched game of tug-of-war there can be. And all the while I watch the weather because a weekend of rain spells disaster. My little electric lawn mower and I can’t work in the rain, or even after recent rain, and work schedules dictate that mowing happens on weekends. Not only that, but my little electric mower and I can’t work for more than an hour together before my energy and the battery’s charge run out, which means we have to find not one but two dry portions of every weekend to cover the full yard together.

Twice this summer my mower and I have missed a weekend, and each time the lawn has nearly defeated us with its thick growth ready to clog the blades or simply lie down in front of the mower and duck out of the way. Missing a weekend is a risky proposition indeed.

This morning I managed the first of the weekend’s mowing expeditions, and pulled a basket full of buckthorn seedling and crabgrass. Now the mower’s battery is recharging, I am resting, and thunder is moving in. Will we manage a second bout of mowing tomorrow? The forecast is uncertain. The tug-of-war suspense continues.

Then I didn’t walk past his house for almost 3 weeks.

Today as I approached his house he came trotting out with purpose and twined around my feet asking for petting. Then he trotted next to me for the whole block, walked me across the street, and saw me to the edge of the next property before sitting solemnly to watch me make it safely to the end of the next block before returning to his normal morning routine.

Maru

Teachers

Key & Peele:

Recently, it became clear to me that being utterly sedentary (actually, sitting is even more ambitious than what I normally do…) might also kill me. But it’s hard to work in real exercise when a) it might knock me flat for weeks if I overdo it even a little bit, b) it’s not fun, and c) it cuts into my all-too-real need for many hours of rest per week.

So I was casting about for some way to move a bit and remembered that once upon a time I used to really love swimming. Now, I haven’t actually swum in… I don’t know how long. Possibly since high school. And I’ve never done lap swimming except when I was 9 or 10 and on a kiddy swim team. And I haven’t put on a bathing suit in 10 years (and the one I own is both far too small for me now and also really old). But somehow this seemed like the thing to try. Practicalities schmacticalities.

So today I packed my brand new swim cap, goggles, and bathing suit (thank you, online shopping) and a towel, and asked directions to the swimming pool in the campus gym, and wended my way through the crazy maze of a hallway (seriously, this hallway apparently crosses the entire gym, turning right angles here and there, but only has one destination: a tiny locker room), and slithered into the bathing suit.

At this point it occurred to me that I don’t know quite how to put on the swim cap. I mean, I can pull it on, but then all my hair is out of it. And there doesn’t seem to be a way to put the hair into it first and then pull it on. And when I do pull it on it protests and creeps up toward the top of my head and shpoings off. But I finally wrestle it on and shove my hair up under it, wait tentatively to see if it’ll make a run for it, and finally decide it’ll stay.

This is when I realize that I didn’t bring a comb, and my hair is NOT going to look well-groomed when I excavate it from this thing.

But the damage is already done so I head for the shower and then for the pool and I’m so relieved that there’s an empty lane near near enough to the life guard that she can pull me out if I’ve forgotten how to swim. And I really have forgotten how to enter a pool because I get water up my nose immediately, but I don’t let on because who needs that kind of attention.

Also, we won’t mention how serious the other lap swimmers are. They do various strokes and use various boards and make wakes that buffet me around. Meanwhile, I quickly realize that I’m not in shape enough to do the face-in-the-water version of swimming, because I’m breathing too hard too much of the time. So I slowly breast stroke my way from one end of the pool to the other and then turn around and head back, and figure the other swimmers are probably working too hard to keep track of me anyway. With any luck they don’t have their contacts in and can barely see me.

And after 1 lap my arms are complaining. 1 very slow lap. And breast stroke is pretty easy on the arms, if I remember right. So then I spend the rest of the time wondering how I’ll know when to stop pushing it so that I don’t land flat on my back for a week. But my goal is to swim for 15-20 minutes. Surely that’s not too much to ask!

And I made it 20 minutes! With only one rest! I’m simultaneously elated to have managed it and horrified that 20 minutes was that hard.

And it turns out that the pool is closed for the next two weeks.

I hope some day to see my other NPR boyfriend, Kai Ryssdal. Apparently these people exist in physical space as well as just on the radio. Who knew???

Not long ago, the boy’s dad wrote to Barak Obama to mention this fact. And President Obama wrote back.

When I’m up and about and generally feeling pretty good, he greets people who enter the house with interest and high hopes for belly rubs. When I’m feeling crummy, though, watch out. He may just hiss and swat at you, attempt to bar your entry from the house, and even refuse treats in service of his mission to rain displeasure on your head and convince you to beat a hasty retreat from whence you came.

So here’s how I cope:

1. Silk Long Underwear, and get the good stuff (my favorite is Lands End). This is the single most important purchase for anyone living in a cold climate. I’m more of a wimp than most, so I wear this pretty much continuously from October to April. Bonus, I just figured out that you can even wear it under opaque tights!
2. Two scarves — a silk one next to your neck and face, wrapped to cover your nose, and then a regular one over that to keep out the wind.
3. Two pairs of mittens — I have lovely, warm hand-knit ones with thin commercial-knit mittens underneath. And mittens are far better than gloves because all your fingers can snuggle together for warmth.
4. A regular coat for most of the time, but a thick, ugly survival coat for those truly cold stretches.
5. A hat. Ideally it should cover your ears and forehead. It WILL mess up your hair.
6. YakTrax — do NOT try to walk on ice without them.
7. Lots of throw blankets around the house. Nobody can afford to heat a house to balmy temperatures in this kind of cold and wind, so keep things tolerable and then snuggle into blankets for extra coziness.
8. Adhesive foot warmers for inside your shoes. (And when it’s REALLY bad, hand warmers for inside your mittens.)
9. Thick flannel sheets on your bed (again, go for something like Lands End — it’s worth it).
10. Heated mattress cover — warm up the bed for the half-hour before you go to bed. Mmmmm. (Ok, so this one is optional compared to the others. Taking a hot water bottle to bed with you works too. But man, if you have the chance to get one, it sure is lovely.)
11. Window plastic to keep out the drafts. Again, drafts become very, very expensive when you’re talking truly cold weather plus wind.
12. Lots of warm drinks.

What would you add?