Donuts!

The wood is on the roof.

Andrew.

Pre-Summer began yesterday. Stating today, we will enjoy a lovely long stretch of brilliant and warm weather. Yahoo. I’m looking forward to working outside and visiting Dave and Andrew to watch their progress on the yurt.

Her Highness and I left for the 7:35 ferry. I was excited about seeing the ophthalmologist and hearing from her what’s going on with my eye. I kept thinking that there was definitely something wrong, but the question was whether or not it could be fixed. Part of the problem is floaters and I doubt they can do anything about them. I Googled “fixing floaters,” and it says that they can be fixed with lasers.

But what a gorgeous day for a trip to Nanaimo! I had a free pass for the ferry because of the medical appointment, so I went to Canadian Tire afterwards to check out their watering systems and plants. I also went to Walmart for pet supplies, and then we headed back to Pinecone Park.

Kathy, the ophthalmologist, brought great relief when she said that she saw what was wrong. She told me that I have the kind of retinal detachment that happens after 1% of cataract operations. She said that it would slowly heal and that it may take up to 6 months for my vision to be clear. The good news is no intervention is required. I see her again in a month.

When I left her, I got into the car and drove to Thrifty Foods and bought myself a six-pack of mini-donuts. Fuck it, I thought, sometimes you need donuts to celebrate. My symptoms flare when anything goes wrong. My condition makes me crave stasis. I need to be calm and in quiet; I need to feel at peace. I don’t feel at peace when anything breaks down, when a pattern is interrupted, when the stasis becomes chaos. It’s endurable, but when correction comes to the thing that is wrong, my spirit soars. I feel wonderful in a calm way.

Now that I know what happened to my eye, and because I am in care, being monitored by Kathy, all is calm, all is bright. And it’s even better on a day when it is sparkling bright, and I can stop for plants on the way home. 

Today is going to be 20°, and for the next three days it’s going to remain sunny, and the temperatures are going to rise. I’ll be gardening every day, depending on how the back feels. I’ve written again to beautiful, wonderful, frustrating Bronwyn, the gardener, hoping that this time she’ll reply, and I’ll get some help with the garden because I have a lot of wood sawing or chopping and stacking to do—slowly.

I cannot wait to get out there today, and it’s all because of this new capacity to see beauty in my gardens. Rather, it’s because the plants have matured and spread, and the gardens look like gardens and not gardens in development. This year, I’ll attending to the few remaining holes in the cover. 

I’ve had this sudden emotional shift from only seeing needs to seeing beauty before. When I did a series of drawings. They were large and they were in pencil crayon. First, I’d draw the basic shapes in a very light blue on the paper. And then I’d tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak the drawing until it was to my liking. Then I’d lay on light base colours in the various parts of the drawing, and I’d keep adding colour through a very, very long and laborious process, and it looked like shit to me during most of that time.

The bigger the brush, the quicker the painting is finished. A pencil point, and even a beveled point, is a minute surface with which to create portraits. Drawing clothing and drapery is particularly challenging, and the work in my mini-exhibition was drawings of portions of the Sistine Chapel. It took for fucking ever to get the pieces done. Each one was 16” by 30”.

But with each one, I’d come to it one day and see something beautiful coming together, and pride in it gave me a second wind to re-commit to it with vigor and make it even better—perfect, in fact, in my estimation. I just got my second wind for gardening.

…

I cut up my drawings to decorate the cupboard doors in my kitchen when I lived in the artist-live-in studio on the wonderful East Side of Vancouver. And when I put that place on the market, my realtor strongly suggested that I replace the cupboard doors. What? You don’t like my drawings?

I put the doors where I put a lot of things when I lived in the studio, in the lane across the street. Everything I put there, quickly disappeared. I was taking more things out shortly having put the doors there, and a man on a bicycle was looking at my doors. He asked me if I had put the doors there. Then he asked me if I did the drawings. Then he double-checked with me that they were for the taking. And when I said yes to that, he lay his bike down, walked over to me, and he hugged me and said thank you, thank you.

So, fuck you realtor.