Spring in my Heart

Almost March, and the snow still lies in dirtied drifts on the ground, piled person-high at the edges of parking lots. The wind chills are more often than not in the single digits.  Usually, by now, the snow pack has gone and the days fool one into thinking Spring has come early.  My peas are supposed to be planted on St. Patrick's Day, and I don't know if the snow will be gone by then, much less the soil warm enough.

In short, I am sick of winter.  

I want something new. Like many Americans, I think I want a new pretty thing. I replaced my iPhone 6 Plus after three or four years with a refurbished iPhone 8 Plus, and I'm already accustomed to its shiny new look. That's the problem with new things -- we step on the hedonic treadmill, buy shiny new things, and feel happy until that happiness, hedonic happiness, quickly fades.  

I want a new thing for my soul. I want to plant peas on St. Patrick's Day and watch them grow. I want to see my books progress toward being printed. I want to find a new challenge that absorbs me. 

If I can't have Spring outside, I would like Spring in my heart.

My Sanctum

As I have mentioned before, one of the things that saves me from severe winter blahs (aka Seasonal Affective Disorder) is my planning for the spring garden. 

I should explain that my garden has rules: everything I plant in it should be, at least in part, edible*. This means that I landscape with edible flowers, herbs, and plants that have been gathered and eaten in American or other cultures. Most of these can't be found in nurseries or are rather expensive if bought as plants, so I grow them from seed myself in my grow room.**

 Here is a view of my grow room, which is a small basement room that used to be the coal room back when my 100-year-old house was a youngster: 

Not very impressive, is it?

The wires are for all the fluorescent fixtures and the heat pads -- and the ancient iPad repurposed for record keeping that you see at your left.  The wall that you can't see is lined with reflective material that was meant to insulate a garage door. Peel and stick -- excellent for increasing the light in this room.

The flats you see are for two sets of items I'm growing -- the edible nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant) and a handful of herbs (celery, lovage, yarrow, calamint, perilla, hyssop, alpine basil herb).

Closeup of my first herb flat

I have more to plant -- I'm waiting on seeds for my moon garden and more herbs and for some flowers (and for lots of things that will get planted directly in the garden. By the time I'm done, I will have six to eight flats of seedlings to nurture.

Not all of them will survive. Past seedlings have succumbed to damping off disease (which I fight heroically with cinnamon water spray) and watering malfunctions. Some seeds never come up. On the other hand, sometimes they grow faster than I expected, which is why I'm setting the top shelf (that you don't see) for taller seedlings to reside. I will save the best of the plants that come up for planting come spring.***

Spring comes to me sooner than to most because of my grow room, with its ugly cement floor and worn shelves. Today I sat with my seedlings, thinning them out so that they could grow strong, and feeling, if not happy, a bit less out-of-sorts.








* This year's exception is the moon garden, which is comprised of white, night-scented flowers, most of which are toxic to deadly if eaten.

** When I say "grow room", people think I've got one of these high-tech setups advertised on eBay where people grow -- well, plants that are illegal to possess or use in this state. Mine is not nearly so exciting.


*** This doesn't count the direct-seeded vegetables. I have to admit that I'm not as good with these because it gets too hot to weed and there are so many weeds. I'm working on using more mulching and earlier morning weeding.

Light

This time of year depresses me -- literally -- with its dark mornings and uniform bleakness of the terrain. It's not the deep despair of my bipolar depression, but a constant sense of flatness, of anhedonia, of just wanting to stay in bed. The festivities of Christmas that buoyed up my spirits have long passed; all now is grey.

My psychiatrist has prescribed 1 hour a day in my grow room for light therapy. There's plenty of light in the small basement room, supplied by eight fluorescent light fixtures. And, although it's a small room, there's a table and chair where I can sit and even an old iPad I use to maintain my plant records.

And then there's the plants. Right now, I have starts of herbs like hyssop and calamint, celery leaf and Asian celery, and my tomatoes and peppers popping out of the ground. For the most part, they're tiny seedlings with their seed leaves no bigger than a baby mouse's ear. But they're alive, and I almost believe I can feel the light of their lives brightening my day.

In the gloom of this season, I will take all the light I can get.

Writing about the moment.

Good morning, dear friends!

I feel like I'm fresh out of ideas today. I just got another rejection email, it's freezing rain out there and I still have to go to work, and I'm wearing one of those technological reminders of mortality around my neck -- a Holter monitor. (Don't worry about that last point -- we've already found the problem with the little pitty-pat-cha-cha of my heartbeat, and it's easily fixable with a med tweak. They're just making sure that's all there is.)

It's a good day to be down. Not depressed, just down. The desire to wrap myself in the coccoon of my blankets (rather than throw my clothes on over the monitor, put on makeup, and trudge down and up a flight of stairs with my computer backpack) is almost overwhelming. Almost. After all, life is out there, not under my blankets, and the adult thing to do is make the best of it.

Girly-Girl is sitting on the arm of the couch next to me, purring. She's my editor.

My editor is falling asleep on the job.

It's definitely dark (and rainy) out here at 7:30 AM. I've had a Messenger chat with my favorite nature interpreter about aquascape and pond design. The rain hits the window like buckshot. I discuss the sorry state of American politics with Richard.

I check the seedlings downstairs in my grow room -- the only evidence that there will someday be spring. The tomatoes and peppers and eggplant stretch and grow in their bigger fiber pots; the perilla seedlings perk up, the first of the miner's lettuce seems to be sprouting.

Someday there will be spring. Someday I will find an agent, someday I will feel healthy enough to work out, someday I will accept aging gracefully.

But for now, I sit in a warm room lit by the glow of candles, next to my cat. I can live with that.

Hope Springs Eternal: Querying again

Spring must be coming. My cat Girlie-Girl is standing on my chest while I write, some of my seedlings are coming up for summer, I'm dreaming frisky dreams that are too graphic to write about, and I'm querying again.

Girlie LOVES being held, doesn't she?

I've sent four or five out yesterday, and I felt good about it. This is the stage of querying agents that is fun -- the part where I get to brag about my novel. This time, it's Mythos, which starts with a woman's missing memory and ends with the upcoming Apocalypse.

Here's the beginning:

In the waning light of a Chicago summer evening, a male rested his back against a light pole and gazed at the indigo horizon over the lake. The breeze from the lake caught a strand of his dark hair and blew it across his face. He gazed up at the concrete horizon to see a form falling, falling from a good height. He squinted, and then raced down greasy streets to its impact, his nerves on edge, his heart barely pounding. 

He arrived at a dead end where a woman lay sprawled, her head pillowed by a cat that had been crushed by the impact. Just behind her stood a rusty dumpster in front of a wall, which amplified the smell of dying. 

He knelt in one flowing movement. He checked her breathing – she breathed still, steadily, as if she slept. He, of anyone on Earth, knew she did not sleep. 

The man leaned closer, and his face brushed against curly blonde hair. He could smell the sharpness of blood. “Can you hear me? Let me know if you can hear my voice.” No response.

 He did not touch her so as not to injure her further. He did touch the cat, black with a white locket, whose labored breath indicated certain death. He whispered to it, “Well done, brave cat. You have saved this woman’s life.” The cat purred.

He leaned again to whisper in the woman’s ear, his hair falling in his face: “Please do not die. We have just met, but I suspect you are the most important being in my life, my love.” He stroked her hair and murmured words of comfort. Tears ran down his cheeks. 

When the sirens approached, he froze for a second. 

Then he dissolved into nothing.

**************

The less fun part of querying, of course, is getting rejections. I've never not gotten one. Every time I go through a round of rejections, I swear I will quit querying. But I keep writing, and I keep querying. And spring keeps arriving.