I had a nice surprise today: snow! We haven’t had so much snow this winter that I’m sick of it, and anyway, it wasn’t much of a snow — just enough to cover the ground and my front ramp while leaving the sidewalks clear. But it was enough to make a day spent inside feel cozy, especially when accompanied by a book and a cup of lemony spiced tea.
More snow is expected for Thursday, along with frigid temperatures, but hopefully the intervening days will be warm enough for digging.
I’d planted three 6-foot- tall greengage plum trees at the beginning of last winter, which was supposed to be the optimum time for planting, so that’s when the nursery sent the trees. One of the trees did well, but two didn’t survive the winter, though sprouts did shoot out just above the graft mark. (I was hoping to get trees with greengage roots so the inevitable volunteers would turn the tree into a greengage forest, but I took what I could get.) I lopped off the trees just above the shoot, and one of truncated trees seems to be doing well, but still, the nursery said they’d replace both trees. (I had to pay shipping, which made those replacement trees rather expensive, but hopefully it will be worth it, especially since they won’t replace the replacement trees if there is a problem.)
They decided not to take a chance on the replacement trees not making it through the winter, so they promised to send them in March, which sounded good a year ago. Well, now it’s March. Those trees are slated to arrive tomorrow, which is why I’m hoping for decent digging weather. I can’t plant those trees by myself; even if I could dig the hole deep enough (which I can’t), I couldn’t hold the tree upright and fill in the hole at the same time. My contractor said he’d send someone to help, and I’m sure he will. Eventually.
Luckily, it will be cold enough that the trees shouldn’t come out of dormancy if they have to wait a bit. I suppose if worst comes to worst, I can do the planting myself over several days, but I doubt that will happen. I have been so patient with this contractor that generally when something is time-sensitive, he figures he owes me and he gets it done. (Oddly, these extra things he does so quickly for me are more in the line of favors since they are handyman jobs rather than typical contractor projects.)
As always, though, any gardening project is an exercise in hope. I hope the trees get here safely. I hope they get planted in time. I hope they grow. I hope they blossom. I hope someday to eat plums picked off my own trees.
A lot of hope!
But first, the snow.
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Bertram's Blog 
Stitches of Togetherness
January 30, 2022 — Pat BertramSmall talk — conversation about unimportant or uncontroversial matters — is a staple of my life now. When I visit with friends, we talk about small town life, ourselves, their pets and children and grandchildren, people we know. The only time I have a conversation about something more vital is if I know they more or less feel the same as I do because I simply have no energy to discuss anything anyone feels passionate about. Their passion for their beliefs about the “issues” of the day exhausts me.
For many years, I didn’t engage in small talk. At least not that sort of small talk. Jeff and I talked about everything that was important, both in our lives, in history, in health, in myth, in the world. We generally agreed, and if we didn’t, we’d discuss things, listening to each other without interruption, until we came to a middle ground. Mostly, though, through the decades, we formed our ideas in tandem. These ideas weren’t based on feelings but on in-depth reading (thousands upon thousands of books) on a multitude of subjects, including many things we didn’t necessarily agree with but wanted to know more about.
Then there was the other sort of talking we did. Small talk so small it wasn’t really small talk, more like the stitching that holds two lives together. You know the sort of thing I mean. Things said more or less in passing: “We didn’t get any mail today.” Or “I saw so-and-so today.” Or “They were out of something at the store today.” Or “I’m home!” Nothing of importance beyond the moment.
Several years ago, I wrote that one of the collateral aspects of losing a life mate was having no one to do nothing with. Although Jeff and I worked and played and talked for more than three decades, we often did nothing together. We were just there, a presence in each other’s lives. I’ve found other people to fulfill some of the roles he played in my life, such as someone to do something with, but I have no one to do nothing with.
I’m now realizing it’s the same with talking, and why I so often talk to his photo. I have people to talk with, both small talk and sometimes larger talk, but there’s no one around for the smaller than small talk. If I am sad or lonely, I can call someone, or I can go to the library and chat with the librarians while they check out my books, or I can do any number of things. But there’s no one around for the sub-small talk. I can’t call someone to say, “I didn’t get any mail today.” Just the effort to call would turn the idle comment into something it wasn’t meant to be and would give my not getting mail an importance it didn’t deserve. And yet, a shared life is made up of these passing comments, these “stitches” of togetherness.
Those stitches are another of the many things no one really notices until they are gone. In my case, other things were so much more overwhelming — not just the pain and angst of his being dead, but the silence of my life, the yearning for one more word or smile from him, the lack of someone to do nothing with, the stark aloneness of being alone (it’s completely different having alone times in a shared life than being alone in an unshared life).
When grief started leaving me, I became engrossed in other activities, such as dancing and traveling, moving from place to place and trying to figure out what to do with my life. So many of those activities are no longer a factor. I’ve bought a house and moved to my perhaps final home, so now the subtler and more permanent aspects of living alone after the death of a life mate are making themselves felt.
And apparently, this lack of “stitching” is one of those aspects.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.