One year ago yesterday, my brother-in-law of nearly 20 years died of a massive heart attack, the kind of which in the aftermath there is no pulse, no chance of revival, no going back with a lifestyle change, a stent, a caution to rest. After a reportedly very good day, it became a very bad night, for my sister, her 3 children, and all of us.
After all that time, if one is lucky enough and puts the effort in, the in-law part drops, and one just has a brother. We weren’t confidants or buddies, but we adored one another, with our texts filled with ‘brother mine’ and ‘sister mine’. As someone who grew up without brothers, save for a brief stint with a stepbrother, having them via my sisters has been especially delightful.
The last thing I gave him was some of our homemade Garlic Scape Pesto, and this year I looked at the pile of scapes and let them rot in the refrigerator. I just couldn’t.
Maybe next year.
I describe it as a bomb going off in our family, leaving a smoking crater where there was once just level ground. Everywhere you look is smoke and blackness. A year later, the blast is tidied and no longer do waves of smoke rise from it, but it is still hard to look at. Eli and I brought yellow flowers to Billy’s grave under a tree, leaving them next to the mums from my parents, and then left a bottle of wine for my sister on her doorstep.
It’s been a busy autumn. The garden didn’t do so well this year, between drought and rabbits and groundhogs. There’s still some tomatillos, tomatos and squashes in there, and I’m hoping we have a week or so before a hard freeze in order to let them fully ripen. Our CSA ends this week but we’ve signed up for a winter share. Our usual trip to my sister’s to get our fall stockpile of veggies is going to have to wait a year. Our son turned 10, and we spent a brief few days in Florida celebrating. He has taken up trombone and the gardening club at school.
Work is busy and Eli continues to launch his work into the world. We have a teenager now, so we see her less, but are delighted at her friends and social life, delayed due to the pandemic.
The children are thriving after a tough couple of years
We prepare Sithean for winter as we always do. Our pantry is stocked, our freezer is full, and it’s time for fires in the wood stove.
But this year it’s also time to plant bulbs. Missing from Sithean’s legacy plantings were tulips and snowdrops, which are the first flower here, often appearing on a crust of snow, and now is the season. Over the next few weekends we will dig our bulbs in to the chilly ground, cover them, and hope that in the spring another area of the yard is covered in a profusion of oranges, pinks and purples, with a little bit of cream and some blue alliums tossed in for good measure.
When I arrived here the soil was dead and dust in most places. Each year, we amend it with compost and plantings and try to make this place better than we found it. With vegetable gardens and fruit trees for sure, but also with things that just exist for beauty and the benefit of the insects.
We’ll bring a few snowdrops to plant by Billy’s grave too, just because.
None of us know our time left, so our job is to fill it with life and joy and love. As for me, I’m going to fill my world with gardens.
Little House on the Fairy Hill 