May 2, 2008

Someone left a May Day gift on my back porch, a paper funnel full of candy, and a blueberry bush. The blueberry is problematic, for one needs two for them to come to any good, and I don’t know where to put them anyway. I perceive the gift as a sort of test: "See what I have given you. What can you make of it?" I believe my neighbors J and H, brilliant former students, are to thank, but I will not thank them. They wanted a mystery, and they shall have it.

Wrote early. Lost the whole morning’s work to a computer snafu.

Maude stepped on my foot this morning, and cut the second toe on my left foot. There was no blood, but instead the transparent fluid that my swollen legs are always full of. It has been seeping all day, wetting my shoe as I was gardening, leaving a sticky pool when the foot sits still on the floor for a while. It is kind of appalling, but also kind of cool– a stigmata, of sorts. I can’t imagine that it could go anything but good, draining the leg almost to normal for a while.

Titanic effort left the front garden free of grass and turf and weeds, pristine, if a little rough and brown from the uprooted herbage left dying in the open spaces. Hard as it was, I had thought it was impossible, so in the scheme of things it was a easier than I imagined. Lilies and iris were hidden in the thickets, and I uncovered them. A whole bank of beebalm emerged from behind the barricades of grass. One rose I had to dig up and clear the intertwined roots of grass away from its roots by hand, strand by strand. I replanted it. We’ll see if the surgery was a success. Napped gigantically, because of hard labor and no meals. Now it is almost time for the real sleep, and I am ready for it.