I thought I'd feel more relief. I've been agonizing over a puzzle of sorts for months, and this evening, I finally got all the weird little pieces to fit together. This is that project I alluded to obliquely a few days ago, and now it's done. I can hand it over to the person it was for, and I can move on to the things I've been delaying until I got it finished. This has been such a source of stress, I really believed that once it was done, I'd feel wiped out and loose. Quite the opposite. I'm all knotted up, and tense, even more than before. What gives? Maybe that effect won't set in until I actualy release it and get it out of my house.
I do have a lot more to do, but quite a lot of it will involve stringing words together. I have three weeks' worth of Rotary newsletters to create, although the middle one from last week only involves transferring a different editarian's words into the proper format, and matching photos to it. But other than that, I'm going to go digging through my spiral notebooks that are wedged into every available space in my bedroom, and see whether any of the stories I had started to tell in the last two years are ready to speak to me again. I never wanted to give up on any of them, but somewhere a year ago I lost my ability to tell fiction. I even tried to revive it back in November, and I failed miserably. I can't even *read* fiction these days. I haven't made it more than two or three chapters in a book in a full two years or more, neither reading nor writing. Now that several of the biggest obligations have been met this spring, I'm going to work on retraining myself in those skills.
As usual, I'm up late writing this. It's just past midnight, which means it's now my mommy's birthday. I think that means it's a wonderful coincidence that the most current photo I have, from this morning, is of a flower I associate with her more strongly than any other. There is a single bachelor button growing in the debris that collected in the rocks we left up front when I lost my motivation to use them to build a pond in the back yard. (The plan has changed, and now these will be the berm with a cherry tree.) I had bachelor buttons in a large tree-size pot last year, and one dropped a seed in the seam between the driveway and front walk. That hardy little seed took root and is thriving in less than ideal conditions like a champ. We're hoping to let it form seeds of its own, to plant in the flower beds on either side of the yard (the Unless garden and the new berm).
The first time I remember mom growing bachelor buttons was in Idaho, when I was about 8 years old. She had a funny little rubber planter that looked like it once was a tire. We had just come from Germany the year before, so she called the planter a "Gummivase." I've never been able to forget that word in the decades since. The other reason I think of her when I see bachelor buttons was from the day I got married. We were working on the whole "something old, something new" tradition. She found some growing wild on our way up to the site in the mountains where we married. She plucked one little bachelor button, and tucked it into my bouquet, telling me that was my something blue.
She's the reason I bought the bachelor button seeds last year, that planted this little guy. Happy birthday, mom.
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