The Art of Isolation—III-- What I Leave, What I Keep
I cull carefully through my old life as I prepare to leave. It is like dying before dying, like jumping out of an airplane with a parachute that may or may not open. It is my choice to leave, my choice to start again.
I have hundreds, maybe thousands of pages of writing about writing that I will probably never go through. I find a letter penned in red ink from an old boyfriend when I was 21, explaining to me why we can’t be together.
There’s another letter from someone I wanted to be my boyfriend when I was 22. He spends pages writing me in eloquent prose why he isn’t interested in me like that and how angry he is wasting his time having to explain it to me. His prose is razor sharp, spot on, his use of the semi-colon sublime. I look at my own rough drafts in response to him, which sound blunted and childlike compared to his. Now, 28 years later, as a college English teacher who works with students slightly younger than him, I am astounded—hurt feelings aside-- at what a spectacular writer he was.
I am moving to a small space, so I throw away most of my books. But I keep the important ones—stories of women surviving despite difficult circumstances, stories of holocaust survivors, of near miss mountain climbing disasters. I keep the Confederacy of Dunces, penned by a man who killed himself because he couldn’t get published. Postmortem, his mother got him published, and now he is famous. Ah, the irony….
I throw away most of my clothes. I want to become someone else. I don’t know yet who exactly. I hang on tenaciously to every single piece of published writing I’ve ever done—about 2,500 to 3,000 articles, most of which are organized neatly in black binders which stretch across the single shelf in my exposed closet without any doors.
Some of my paintings I think about chopping into bits and burning. But I don’t. I hang only the paintings of mine I like the best, and the rest get shoved under the bed. Directly in front of my bed, I hang a picture of a naked woman with a huge butt walking away in the night. It is the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night. “I did that,” I think. I am walking away into the night.
The Art of Isolation—III--Life and Death in the Garden
When the pandemic first struck, I have to admit I was a bit ecstatic. I drove home from school, and in my momentary moment of madness, shrieked to my housemate, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me!”
I was elated—for the moment. It was my chance to cast aside disappointments of failed romances, soured friendships, failed attempts to teach students how to seamlessly integrate quotations into essays—or, more importantly, to teach them the difference between their, they’re, there; and two, to, and too. None of this mattered anymore. All that mattered was trying to stay alive.
With all the excitement of a new love affair, I leapt out of bed in the mornings, and tore up the grassy hillside outside my bedroom door. The ground was moist and supple and ready for me. There was no pressure now to go out to make new friends, to find a new boyfriend, to create a newer, more exciting life. This WAS my life. Just like the patriotic Americans who planted victory gardens in WWII, I farmed like my life depended on it, because maybe—just maybe—it might.
The best thing about weeding is that there aren’t many ways to do it the wrong. With weeds, you just pull them up by the roots and they’re gone. I spent most of those initial weeks of the pandemic on my hands and knees in the dirt, carving my hillside into glorious terraces for planting. I’d lie in the freshly dug dirt at the end of the day, staring up at the billowy clouds in the sky. My dog would lie beside me. I’d reach for him and feel his wet nose and his warm breath on the back of my palm.
I thought of my hero, Anne Frank, hidden away in an attic for years at a time. I thought to myself how lucky am I to be out in nature with the mountains, the trees and the clouds to keep me company in my new found isolation.
My garden kept me going. I amended the soil with bags of compost. I bought dozens of tomato plants. I planted green beans, potatoes, eggplant, yellow squash, kale seeds, and lettuce. I’d do most of my planting in the late afternoons and tuck each plant into the soil like a baby, covering it with warm, rich soil.
In the mornings, I’d rush down to the garden and greet each plant like a friend. I’d lie on my side and count the flowers on the tomato plants. I’d examine the tiny, purplish green leaves on the eggplants—oh so delicately-- beginning to unfurl and whisper to them, “Yay! You can do it! You are doing it!”
When the sun set, I’d carry my book, reading light and a bottle of wine and sit among the plants. Life was just about as perfect as it could be. As the cold weather turned warm, I’d cut the tops off the kale and make salads for dinner. I picked the ripening cherry tomatoes, popping them into my mouth like candy. It was a quiet kind of joy.
Then, one day the heat struck. The kale turned bitter overnight. The tomatoes went on strike and stopped producing. The green beans which had promised to become giant beanstalks in the sky, crashed to the ground. The zucchinis stubbornly continued producing fruit. The squirrels came out in droves and attacked what was left.
The sunflowers continued to flourish. They shot into the air, six feet tall, their golden, reddish petals defying the summer heat. Ah, the irony of it all. I had spent hundreds of dollars on the garden and here I was—a $2 packet of sunflowers laughing in my face.
I became depressed about my failed garden. All the time, effort and love that went into it. I thought of what my uncle used to say. “It doesn’t matter what kind of life you’ve led. It almost always ends ugly.”
I thought about my paternal grandfather--the kindest, gentlest, most athletic, handsome man—both in his youth and well into his older years. He died of Alzheimer’s. One day, when he realized what was happening, he clutched my arm and said, “I never thought this would happen to me.”
I thought of my ex-husband and how we first kissed on a cold winter day in front of my fireplace. I felt then like I had a won a $5 million lottery. I thought of us picking out furniture, bed sheets, buying our first house together, and painting our bedroom walls. Years after that first kiss, I came home and said, “I can’t do this anymore” and it was over.
What had gone wrong? Was it him? Was it me? It didn’t really matter anymore than it mattered what had gone wrong with my tomatoes or my kale. It was gone.
So what does one do in the face of such devastation and death? I think of my ancestors in WWII who watched their family members go up in ashes in the Nazi concentration camps.
I think, too, of all the Central Valley farmers who I’ve written about and admired for over 20 years--how they’ve faced droughts and freezes, and how—sometimes in the space of a single day—all their hard work comes crashing down.
So, what is there to do? With the farmers, the answer is always the same: Plan next year’s crops. I will also plan for next season’s crop, because really, what else is there to do?
In the meantime, amidst the wreckage of my garden, there are still tiny signs of life among the mint plants that refuse to die. I’ll water them and coax out whatever bit of life they have left.