Yesterday morning was bright and warm. But the weather report said that in a day it would get cooler and then there would be several days of rain. Meanwhile, I had garden work — mostly, edging the garden strip to cut back the ivy sprawling from the strip onto the patio, which it clearly intended to vanquish — that I’d put off for weeks because of earlier rains, so this was my chance to clean things up.
It’s hard work for someone with my disabilities who gets around with a walker. A heavy long-handled lopper is involved, also a clever long-handled grabber tool to pick up the clipped stems and leaves and put them into a plastic bucket (so that I can take them inside to very slowly and methodically use sharp-edged hand tools to reduce them to short bits of stuff usable as compost back on the garden strip). The ivy trimming is demanding, sweaty work, but satisfying because the result is a handsome garden and then, eventually, a pile of excellent compost. But there’s a nice rhythm to the labor — and it sets my mind free to wander on other things, like the postings I’m always composing.
Very quickly I realized that it was in fact blazing hot — 85F, high-summer-hot — so I speeded up, and got considerably less fastidious as I worked along the strip. Retreated inside the house, did my slicing and chopping until I had a pile of compost bits.
By then my caregiver J had arrived. I gave him the bucket of bits to distribute in the garden, he came back to quiz me about my medical state. Looked anxiously at me, because I was flushed and speaking slowly, but he went on to ask some general medical questions. He asked if I’d weighed myself, adding that he’d seen in the bathroom the … umm … what do you call that in English? And I couldn’t think of the word. I went on haltingly to explain that I was having trouble finding the word, but not to worry, this was normal, I was just hot and tired, I wasn’t having a … what do you call it when you get a blood clot in the brain? or even that thing that Jacques had when he suddenly couldn’t talk or walk, it has a name with letters and another long technical name.
I know, I know, not being able to find words for not being able to find words.
