Monday, August 16th, 2010
I guess I’ve been depressed for a week or so. Now that it’s been going on for a while, I am starting to recognize it. My grandma died. She was 103. No one from our family was with her when she died because it wasn’t convenient for anyone, including me. It’s funny how life works. We will take time off work to go to a funeral or a wedding. But who takes time off work to sit with someone while they die? Maybe it’s because we don’t die on a schedule that allows for advance planning. Maybe it’s because no on knows exactly when a body will come to a full stop. Maybe it’s because we are afraid to be with someone when they die, or we think it’s icky. My aunt and my brother were with my grandma until a couple hours before she died. She died after they left, and no one in the family witnessed her dead body. Maybe she wanted to die alone. Maybe to her, dying alone preserved her dignity and the wholesomeness of her memory.
I’ve been carrying sadness about my grandmother with me for a week, while I’ve been reading The Grapes of Wrath. Oh, boy, is that depressing — beautifully written and meticulously told — but really, really depressing. It’s bad enough that people are poor and under-privileged and vulnerable to the slick salesmen of debt, but then to lose their land to the banks, watch the banks’ hired tractors knock down their farms and ruin the soil, and then trek a couple thousand miles to the promised land of California only to find out it’s a mirage. So many parallels for the 21st Century malaise — Steinbeck should be required reading for all students of modern agriculture.
For some reason, I find the dog park depressing. Going to the dog park every day with Moon has been great for him. He’s more confident in himself, calmer, and getting plenty of exercise. But I’m giving up a lot. Morning was my time to write and garden. Now I pace the dog park while Moon races around with his friends. This is why I don’t have kids.
Finally, yesterday, I rescued my blueberry bushes. A month of crab grass had swallowed them up and they were lost under a layer of flowering weeds. The soil was so dry I had to water before I could get the weeds out of the ground. But all nine bushes are saved. I got soaked and muddy kneeling in the wet garden, but it refreshed my spirit to focus on a simple task with a tangible reward. I gardened for six hours, and then I took a hot bubble bath. The gloom lifted, and the next day at the dog park I may have actually laughed.
Gardening is the time of some of my best thinking. I realized I had been brought low by editing a monthly digest of agriculture stories for a regional non-profit. One of the stories I read was traumatizing for me on a subconscious level. It seems that in Delaware recent analysis of the Potomac Aquifer (which supplies New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware with water) has shown chemical pollution from the region’s factories to be at 500 to 8,000 times the acceptable level established by the EPA. But the information was not made public until a newspaper discovered it via a Freedom of Information Act filing. To date it still isn’t a big news story, and yet to me it is a story as big as the BP oil spill.
In the post 9/11 world, and especially since the passing of the Patriot Act, Americans have been conditioned to believe the biggest threat to our future is terrorism, and our best recourse is to find terrorists where they hide and wipe them out before they try to wipe us out. The best defense is a good offense.
I think we are the biggest threat to our future: we are threatened by our lifestyle, our values, our poor decision-making. I’m sure there are hundreds of stories like the one about Delaware, situations where outrageous pollution is accepted as the cost of doing business, and the public will be the last to know when it’s life threatening, but the first to pay the price. Corporations live forever. Pollution kills people, not corporations.
But there I go again, leaping onto a soap box when I should be kneeling in the soil. As a friend of mine says, “Balance or be balanced.” Excavating my blueberries balanced me. The world is fucked up and all is not going according to plan. But if I can put my hands into damp, fluffy soil, I’m ok.
Tags: 9/11, depression, Garden, Patriot Act, Potomac Aquifer, terrorism