You can see I wasn't true to my word regarding posting pictures on Saturdays...but a few weeks later, here is a shot of the red and white petunia tubs on the front porch and over the arbor.

It's a good thing they bring me so much joy to look at, because we've endured a disaster recently. DH and I decided the time was overdue to replace the aging shingles on our home. We couldn't afford to have a roofer do it, and besides, DH is loath to pay for what he can do himself. He spent two grueling weeks stripping the roof to the bare wood. Now remember, we live in a desert here in Utah. We waited until the weather had turned consistently warm, but hopefully not blisteringly hot, so DH could survive the days working on the roof. The materials to dry it in (tarpaper, ice shield) and the shingles were due to arrive Friday morning. Thursday night it started to rain.

It wasn't any little afternoon thundershower like we so often get. This was freak monsoon rain sucked up from Mexico. We discovered that it rains inside the house when there are no shingles on the roof. Here are a couple of shots of what our house looks like now--after the disaster clean-up people came and dried it out. This is the kitchen and family rooms:

Every room looks something like this. DH calls it the Swiss Cheese Effect. I have a sign that used to sit on the sideboard saying "My house may be a mess, but you should see my garden." It's more true than ever now. I'll try to keep up with the garden shots of my baskets as we deal with putting the inside back together. You'll have to forgive me if I neglect my blogging.

Disappearing Blogger

It's not hard to fathom why I haven't written for nearly a month. It's May--following close up the heels of April and finally the weather allowed the planting and rearranging to begin. In went the peas and strawberries. Ten hanging baskets of petunias, lobelia and vebena were potted up to hang along the back fence. Eight more metal tubs filled with red and white petunias were hung under eaves of the front porch. I still have ten baskets to put on the archways of the two front gates that will eventually form an arch of flowers over each gate.

Petunias. I've long scoffed at their cliche and commonness. But they grow so faithfully, attracting hummingbirds and sphinx moths. I've given up the exotic for the tried and true--at least in my hanging baskets. I use a specially designed hanging basket with octagonal openings all along the sides, called Bloom Masters. I've found that in a few weeks time, the 2" seedlings I plant form a ball of flowers, completely hiding the container. Halfway through the summer they trail lush ropes of flowers 3 feet long or more. I'm going to post a picture each week so you can track the progress with me. Look for it on Saturdays.

At last! A day of sunshine on a weekend! Small blessings. On top of that, DH promised me he would spend the day with me in the garden, pruning, chipping and shredding and moving compost around...all of those heavy work jobs that are so much harder for me since the cancer.

We were in the garden by 7:30 AM and I tried to be sensitive to the fact that for him it was just hard labor, not a labor of love or passion. He quit the first time at about 1:00 PM, saying that the compost all over his arms and hair was making him itch. It's a fall-out of running the chipper-shredder. So he went in to shower. A while later, he joined me again--I know it was his secret hope that if he quit, I'd quit too, but he didn't say anything, to his credit. And I didn't quit. I am sure he doesn't think that's to my credit.

But it was still a warm spring day, many hours of daylight left and more to prune. I can't stop while there's light in the sky and breath in my body. He came back out when I got to some large rose branches I couldn't prune out. Then without my asking, he kindly chipped the next huge pile I had assembled while he was in the house. After that pile he hit the shower again. I kept pruning. He joined me one more time at about 4 PM when I got to the last climbing rose and had to prune out a 7 year old cane.

Poor guy--he's not used to the War of the Roses, and was pricked, scratched, poked, and stabbed. He lamented a lot about his scrapes. I commiserated with him and pointed out that's why I wear long sleeves and elbow length pruning gloves. I must remind myself that he's a total novice at working with the roses, so it's quite a shock to him, I'm sure. (I might also add that I've been pruning and tying up our 26 rose bushes scattered throughout the gardens for more than seven years by myself. )

I really do appreciate his help, although by 5:00 PM he told me "that's it, I'm done." I kept going until 7:30 PM. Finally, the mosquitoes drove me inside. I ask myself "why does the garden energize me so?" It seems to kill others off. I don't get it. But at least now, when he heads off to the golf course on a Saturday and says "have fun" to me as I head into the garden, I can gently remind him of how much work my kind of fun is. It's not that I mind it, it's just I want to be validated...and helped now and again.

It drizzled sleet all weekend. Not strong enough to be snow, but too thick for rain, it's been a continual gray curtain for two days. If you could stay curled by the fire with a good book, it wouldn't seem so onerous, perhaps. But I had to accomplish some rearranging of rooms and organization of my office. DH rose admirably to the occasion, though I know he hates these sudden projects being sprung upon him. I started taking all the books off the shelves in my office. He asked, "What are you doing?" I told him I was planning on moving the bookshelves from my office to the front bedroom, recently vacated by my married daughter and her little family. I'm turning it into a library-guestroom-play-TigerWoods-golf-on-the-X-box room. Right now my office, the guest room and the front room are in disarray as I move things from one to the other. DH installed another desktop (a counter top piece) in my office to complete a U-shape around the room. It wasn't easy. We couldn't get a piece from the factory that had 45-degree angles on both ends, so he cut it himself. Took some sanding and finessing to get it right...not perfect joins, but very close. I can live with that. At least I have a lot of space on which to spread my scrapbook projects out...and I can leave them in partially finished states without disrupting the flow of the rest of the household. I've got the room about 70% sorted and organized and I've been working on it for four hours. But when it's done, I'll be able to share my scrapbooking / office space with Chrissy. As it is, only one of us can work in here at a time.

I even think I'll have room in the corner for the overstuffed chair I fantasize about, with a reading light and a window to gaze out. That will be a good day.

It snowed 13 inches Tuesday morning. Gack. I hurt my shoulder over the weekend and so can do very little. Shoveling the wet mess was left to DH, who did it with grace and no grumbling. Of course this means that the crocus, daffodils and other brave flowers just beginning to show their colors are now mashed to the ground under the load of snow. It's always inspiring to see how quickly they regain their composure after being dumped on and flattened into the mud. Wish I could learn to do the same. It is supposed to snow over the weekend again.

Spring is teasing us in Utah. One day it will be 60 degrees and the next it snows. The sunny days are all during the work week and the storms seem to fall on the weekends. It's painful for a gardener who also works full time. In fact, not able to stand it a moment longer, I spent a few hours this afternoon puttering in my garden. It took until late Sunday afternoon for the temperatures to climb back to 50 degrees.

I was suduced, as I so often am. I noticed ten or so bright yellow crocuses near the driveway, fighting their way through a mat of dead alyssum. I stooped to clear the alyssum away, got tangled in a pansy and noticed a sprig of lamb's ear that sowed itself in an entirely inappropriate place. So I cut back the pansy, pulled out the lambs ear along with dead the alyssum and stooped closer trying to remember what the small-leafed perennial was I planted beneath the America rose. A pile of dead foliage was forming on the driveway, so of course I had to go find my yard cart--back behind the compost pile. I piled the leaves and tangles of dead perennials in the cart. But wait--a little more raking back of dead leaves and the yellow-gold striped blades of "Harkonen" grass can catch the light.

Then suddenly, two hours had gone by and I had pruned back two of my eight climbing roses and cleaned up two of the entry way beds by my front gate. My back hurts a little and when I think of the rest of the garden that needs attention I feel overwhelmed--yet somehow strangely peaceful with the smell of dirt in my nostrils. Spring is here in all her fickleness.

The weatherman says four storms in the next fourteen days, and if it holds true to the recent pattern, they'll fall on the weekends. So I'll keep on, squeezing some puttering time in the cracks of sunshine.

Hair.

Ever since my hair grew back from the chemo baldness, it's soft and dark, a newness not yet turned coarse by sun and wind and life. I often run my fingers through it and ponder how the barren landscape of my scalp has so quickly been cloaked by hair again. Hair must be nothing but a common weed to grow so unabashedly. Like gardeners battling bindweed, we pluck it from our eyebrows, from the earlobes of our 52 year old spouses, from our upper lips and chins. There is something obscenely old about a hair sprouting from body parts that never saw hair before. But I am thankful for it. There is something even more obscene about looking at yourself in a mirror and not finding one hair on your naked body. You don't know how much you love your hair until it's not there. The picture of Jacob and I was taken in August just a couple of weeks after my last chemo treatment.

The bright side. My daughter put water based tattoos of roses on my scalp. I never had to shave my armpits or legs or worry about errant hairs while in a swimsuit. I pretended to be a Trill. I wore scarves and hats and got ready to go anywhere in under 10 minutes. People stopped me in Park City when it was only a quarter inch long all over and complemented my fashion sense and radical hairdo. I really can't decide if life is better with it or without. Hair.

This second picture was taken towards the end of October 2005. Only about 8 weeks after the bald me. And I even have eyebrows and eyelashes again. The human body is amazingly resilient. And I did too look like Uncle Fester.

Today is February 8, 2006. A Wednesday. I am recovered from last November's hernia repair surgery. I can do all my normal ab exercises, yoga...everything. Yet I have a nagging worry in the back of my mind. I hate not knowing whether it's founded in reality or I'm just being a hypochondriac. My body doesn't feel like the me I know. I've gained 40 pounds since the onset of cancer a year ago. Everyone else I know seems to lose weight with cancer...me I gained. I continued my workouts the entire time I was going through chemo, my eating habits haven't changed. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe I have to finally get much more strict with myself.

Yet I have these episodes of heartburn, of urping surprise mini-vomit into the back of my throat. At times I feel bloated and gassy. Is this because of my added weight, or is the cancer returning? My doctor tells me these are things to report. But in January I had two different doctor visits, bloodwork, an internal pelvic exam, and they tell me all is well. My CA-125 levels are at 20 and have been stable since last August. If I try to speak of this to anyone (family, friends) they tell me I need to be positive and not dwell on the statistics of ovarian cancer recurrence rates. I think it bothers them to talk about it.

Two nights ago I told DH that I thought it was important that we redo our roof (has a leak), take care of big projects and pay off all debt as fast as possible--while I am still employed and we have two incomes. He did not like the conversation I could tell, but he listened. Then he asked me if I was worried I was dying. I said "not worried, really, but the reality of the prospects have to be faced. There's more than a 60% chance I won't be here in five years." This is not a thing anyone likes to talk about. Mom is going about normal life, goes to work, works in the garden, teaches exercise class, does everything she always does...so all is well. I hope so, but still, I wonder at times.

Spring is fast approaching. It's been a very mild winter. DH golfed on December 23rd. That is really weird for Utah. There is no snow covering the chaos of decaying plant matter from last season. I keep telling myself it's good for my perennials, that it's good for reseeding, that it's good for the birds. It certainly isn't tidy looking though, and all my neighbors have these sterile, clean looking winter yards with frost defining every trimmed grass blade. Mine is a riot of stem, curled brown leaf and seed. I find beauty in that too. The picture is of star zinna seed heads cozying up to a red sandstone in my front garden. The saying on the stone "Don't tell your God how big your storms are, tell your storms how big your God is."