he sleeps more hours during the day than she spends awake; she never bothers to get out of her nighclothes. At least that’s how it’s been for the last two days. I don’t know if she’s just recuperating from the stress of the hospital visit or if something else is going on. She eats and drinks, but very little. The diarrhea has reversed itself and now there’s nothing coming out. Something is happening. Her doctor is away on vacation this week. We’re on our own.
It’s a bizzarre feeling — all of a sudden having all of this time to myself. I spent hours this evening trying to learn more tips from Mandarin Meg’s website, looking up true type fonts, making some letters into images. I was unsuccessful in in putting in her codes that would let me put an image in the middle of text; I spent hours playing around with the her code, but I couldn’t get it to work. This is how I play when I’m left with unexpected free time.
This afternoon, while she napped, I went outside to check on my garden — do some watering and deadheading. Oddly enough, there are some tomatoes ripening on vines that are barely there, what with the plague of pests we’ve had all summer. Even though the bottom branches have been infested into ragged brown stalks, tomatoes are still popping up farther up on the wilting vines. Where there’s life, there’s hope.
Over in the back of the house, where my little statue of Pan (that I’ve hauled around with me through several moves) nestles among the leaves of melissa officinalis, the gregariously ubiquitous cinquefoil finds its way into Pan’s muddy crotch, providing much unnecessary modesty to the smooth stoney satyr and inches its way toward my patch of wildflowers, which I planted from seed and still doesn’t sport anything near a bloom.
I have been somewhat partial to Pan ever since I saw this painting at the Clarke Institute in Williamstown, MA. You can’t see the expression on the poor goat-footed guy’s face, but it is pure “panic.” He looks like he’s quite a bit concerned about what those nasty nymphs are going to do to him. Of course, my little cherubic Pan, chipped and bird-splattered, innocently playing his pipes to waken the fertile earth, will never know the neediness of nymphs. Nor will he feel the greediness of the creeping cinquefoil. He doesn’t know that something is happing.
It has taken me two hours to make this post because I was having trouble getting the photos to appear where I wanted them. Even now, they’re not where I wanted them, but at least they’re somewhere reasonable. One of my my best virtues is perseverence. One of my worst faults is perseverence. I have a need to hang in there until things happen.