Depression can cause confusion and confusion is depressing but the which of the two that leads the way makes all the difference. I can overcome the November dive, spring always proves it. But a more permanent decline? Ah, that one is not monthly, hormonal nor seasonal. That one stays. "Some are very happy," said the woman I met Saturday at the Dean's post-turkey Mexican feast. The woman who works at a residential center for memory care told me her merry grandmother would say, "You people are so sweet, I wish you were my family."
"Memory can be stone," said Serena at one of our Thanksgiving weekend gatherings, quoting another. "Or sand. Or water." And we moaned at our sloshing and pointed at the rock hard detail person in the room.
Sunday morning I put thirty hyacinths in the ground under a steady cold sleet. The first bulb was the hardest to put in, bound up in my layers and made awkward by the plastic rain poncho from that time we were caught in a storm at Disney. The ground at the side of the house under the boxwood is part clay and my special digging tool quickly developed constipation and was abandoned for a good old hand spade that turned over some worms, yay! and made the job possible, strangely, (for this is my point) in a fever dream of flow that had me looking in the bags for missing bulbs. Where did half of them go? How did they get in the ground so fast? Mud clogging my shoes, mud on my hat, my gloves caked in wet mud as thick as the waffle batter Nora made this morning but all that spring joy and potential got buried faster than I could comprehend.
