Every day I look around at this blooming, lush oasis of a farm and I feel shocked that I get to spend my time, my life, tending to it. I know exactly how we wound up here and I’m so thankful we made the decisions we made that led us to this place. When immersed in a luscious, thriving environment, one can’t help but do the same.
It’s amazing how distracting a garden can be. I have three. Well…I might have four…I just started a large plot of earth that is committed solely to iris varieties. Gardens, shrubs, perennials are a kind of infrastructure. I’ll see the magic of my efforts next year, and all the years to follow. Each time I stroll past one of my garden spaces I accidentally linger, find myself weeding, deadheading, or simply enjoying blossoms or leaf and stalk details. My growing spaces draw me in, draw me near, draw me out of myself, draw me into the essence of green — tranquility and quiet — like floating on a lake surface or being carried bodily by a gentle, fizzing rapid on a wide river.
I made a run to the city for provisions yesterday and wound up picking up eight new roses and another bevy of aforementioned iris. I drove the Tacoma which is experiencing a permanent lapse in air conditioning and I chose to wear cowboy boots and 100% cotton jeans which made wrestling and wrangling eight thorny roses into the back of my truck in 90F heat utterly miserable. On the drive home from the city I kept looking at my merry roses, bobbing their heads in the breeze in the back of the truck and I felt I was with friends on the drive home and George Strait was on the radio so everything was swell.
I have been feeling lonesome this week which is a different feeling for me than being lonely — one feels like an ache and the other feels like being isolated.
I’ve also been feeling worried. Let me tell you something! I’ve never fretted for Robert in his work. This is his tenth year in fire and his eighth year smokejumping and I’ve never been the wife who sits at home wringing her hands wondering about the fate of my man in the wee dark hours of the night. But this summer I feel worried. Robbie has jumped a round canopy parachute for the duration of his smokejumping career. This year he is going through the transition training for Ram Air parachutes which has been extremely intensive — this new parachute flys and operates differently. In the past two weeks, there has been a cut-away in his class (someone had a main chute malfunction and had to cut away the shoot and deploy a reserve all while hurtling towards the earth — it’s a rare occurrence in the smokejumping program and there was an inquisition) and there have been two crashes, one resulting in injury and the other miraculously resulting in no injuries. This stuff happened NOT because there’s something high risk about this new parachute, it’s just a matter of statistics and bad luck and maybe a combination of the two. Anytime there’s a parachute malfunction or an injury or death due to parachuting in the smokejumping program there’s a full on investigation that goes on and to be perfectly clear on the matter, the smokejumping safety record is incredible. They do an awesome job of training jumpers so that when these guys leap out of a plane, they’re almost flying with muscle memory, all the details of how to fly and when to pull a rip cord have been so deeply impressed into their bodies and minds their bodies go through the motions with sureness and steadiness.
That said, after the craziness of the past couple of weeks and Robbie’s reports of injuries and the terrible cut-away, I have had this niggling sense that Robert’s number is up. I don’t need anyone to tell me that it’s not or that I shouldn’t even put such thoughts out into the “universe” and tempt fate. It’s just a feeling I have and the feeling might be right or it might be wrong.
One of our favorite movies is “Always”. It’s a fire movie with Richard Dryfus and Holly Hunter in lead roles. Here’s the run down, he flys tankers for the forest service and she’s a dispatch girl. He flys like a cowboy and takes unnecessary risks that make her supremely anxious. One night, in their wee cabin, she tells him she needs him to ground himself, she can’t handle the stress anymore and she feels like his number is up. After a long, heartbreaking conversation about it, he agrees, because he loves her. She practically faints into his arms with relief. Early the next morning, he gets a call that the forest service needs a tanker to drop retardant on some insane wild fire and they can’t find anyone else to do it and they’re in a pinch. He agrees, he’ll do this one last job. She looks at him and says, “Don’t go. Don’t fly. Your number’s up.” He goes anyway…
If you haven’t seen the movie I won’t spoil it for you. I love that movie and this week, I relate, and it’s hard on me. All I can do is trust that Robbie is putting maximum effort into flying the way he was trained to fly and that he’s pairing that technical skill with his intuition and survival instinct when he’s in the air. The rest is out of my control.
In the meanwhile, I have eight new roses that need planting today, two fat and sassy horses that need riding, bird dogs that need running, gardens that need weeding, meals that need cooking and a huge batch of jewelry that requires finishing. The sun will set and when Robbie phones in for the night I’ll feel relief and we’ll end our conversation with “I love you” and another day will be done.
