Sand in My Eyes (22 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

THAT’S IT! IT’S TIME
to pull weeds, time to clear away all the physical clutter that has become me, so I may see and smell and touch that basic beauty that Cora describes,” I decided as I folded the letter and stood up.

But how much easier life would be if I didn’t have a creative compulsion. I could mop floors, fold laundry, and feel content, I thought, taking the bucket of daisies and the things Fedelina had said with me throughout the house, as I scraped bubble gum off the floor, dumped cups of rotten milk hidden beneath the sofa, and swept beach loads of sand into mounds near the door. It was there, coming from the front hall closet, that I heard a gang of boxes hollering out for me to unpack them—boxes marked with my own black graffiti, identifying to which room they belonged, boxes I had stashed away, having no space to put them, or time to unpack, or adult company with which to use elegant glassware. I picked up a black marker and pulled a faint idea from my head—something I wanted to include in the story I was writing—and I jotted it down on a cardboard box.

There’s no need for toxic chemicals. Keep your plants properly fertilized, mulched, and watered, and you won’t see many bugs. Set your boundaries, caring for and strengthening that which lies within, and you won’t find many pests entering your space
.

I then moved to the kitchen. Cleansing, not cleaning—there is a difference. I opened cabinets, pulling out mismatched mugs, eleven-year-old kitchen towels, burnt-black hot pads, extra tablespoons we never used, and I bagged and dragged them all down the steps and under the house, where they joined the books I had tossed out there the day before, and then I went back for more.

A thousand plastic food storage containers came tumbling out as I opened a door, and I didn’t need a thousand plastic food storage containers. No one does, so out they went, onto my lawn. All the junk Timothy crabbed about. “Crab no more,” I muttered as I cleared away place mats with stains, centerpieces with dead, dried flowers, and half-burned candles.

It was late afternoon when I moved to my bedroom, putting the pail of floating daisies on my desk, introducing them to the orchid in its pot and the roses in their spot before continuing with my in-house “weeding.” Flat sheets, fitted sheets, red sheets, blue sheets, sheets of every color, sheets of every fabric, wrinkled sheets, ironed sheets—all sloppily shoved into the linen closet. I didn’t need ten comforters to make me happy. It only made me dizzy, so out they went with the other clutter that had become me, the socks without a match and the dresses without a sash. I would dump, donate, no, sell it all. It would bring me a year’s salary minimum, which I needed now that I no longer worked and we were in debt, and the credit cards that once were my friends had become my enemies. I dropped it all under my house, making several trips, and it felt good, as if I were removing mold and mildew from my mind.

I continued the activity of cleansing, not cleaning, and moved to the bathroom. There, in my makeup drawer, I found enough lipsticks to paint the lips of every woman in the world and nail polish to coat all the walls of my house and perfumes stinking back to my college years. I didn’t need ten different bottles of shampoo in the shower, or fifty bath towels, all of which were dirty. It overwhelmed me to have to decide what to wash my hair with and to fold all those towels … It all had to go, I decided, and by early evening I had carried outside years’ worth of physical accumulation—dusty things I once thought made my life beautiful, when in reality they only entangled me into pretending I had it all when I didn’t.

Around dusk, I felt unwell as I stood underneath my house on stilts, which no longer looked like a house on stilts but a department store. I feared I had gone too far, ridding myself of all these things. But when I walked back into the house, it was calm and uncluttered, as was my mind, and I heard that familiar something ringing out like a church bell in the distance. I stood still as a statue and listened, praying I might hear it more clearly, and then I did—that inner call to write serenading me more closely. I grabbed a pen and scribbled down a quick thought.

All this stuff was hindering my view of true beauty. It’ll be easier now to see the daisies
.

I went to the kitchen, opened the bottle of wine Gwendolyn had given me for my birthday and, without reading the label, I poured myself a glass. Then I went to my bedroom and turned on my laptop. As I waited for it to warm up, my habit of self-doubt crept like garden pests into my mind, gnawing at my self-confidence. I read what I had written so far and disliked it immensely. It was nothing the world would want to read, and I was disappointed with it and myself, for getting this old, for reaching this point in life and still not having a good piece of written art to show for it.

Granted, there were still a few days left, time to myself in which I might create something good—but with the return of my family and household responsibilities I knew my writing would only sink back down into the depths of the earth, buried beneath adulthood and all its layers of obligations.

Self-doubt and fear do bad things to a person—freeze them creatively and age them mentally—and my hands as they slapped down on the keyboard felt heavy. My fingers—no rings or polish, just knuckles knobby from bearing children three times—were like the bare branches of an old tree on a wintry day without snow. I knew that a writer who studies her hands like I was mine was a writer whose mind has gone blank, but as I looked out my window instead, I could see no flowers or fruits or birds sitting in the tree, nor good ideas perched on my mind.

I opened the book
How to Grow Roses
and flipped through its pages,
looking at the blurbs that Fedelina’s mother had written with ink in the margins and white space. I read a few:

How should you be talking to yourself when you’re feeling down and out
?
The same as you would to a flower when wanting it to bloom. Self-doubts are like weeds, a constant part of life, but you must inhibit the weed seeds from germinating. I’ve learned to control them with the least amount of time and energy, but strong weeds, I’ve found, have a way of emerging through concrete
.

When you try something over and over to the point of insanity and it still doesn’t work, keep in mind that pinching off spent blossoms and leaves encourages other blossoms to open and makes their flowers last longer
.

When you know with certainty that your leaves are spent, let go and move on. It’s okay
.

Any time you put effort into something the world declares a failure, it only makes the future things you do more prolifically successful
.

Holding onto your disappointments will result in loss of energy. Holding onto spent blossoms takes from the flower the energy it needs to stay alive. Trimming these away helps the flower to channel its energy to healthy parts
.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

WHEN I GOT DONE
reading the blurbs of inspiration from Cora, my hands no longer looked to me like the barren branches of an old tree in winter. Rather, I saw them for what they were capable of producing, and my story for what it could become.

As I began to write—my mind coming to life with everything one imagines in a springtime tree—I knew that people garden for reasons similar to those for which they write: they enjoy the process, while hoping to produce something useful or beautiful. I wanted to create something beautiful. Like Cora, I would put forth time and effort, enjoying the activity, but expecting and believing that one day it might sprout forth every bit as beautifully as a rose.

I had caught hold of several good ideas, churning them into sentences that I liked, when all of a sudden there was knock at my door—and there was no person in the world I could like at the moment as much as my writing. I grabbed my glass of wine, taking it with me. A woman opening her door with a glass of wine in hand looks socially engaged, I told myself, in the midst of something important.

“Oh, hi,” I said—spilling pinot noir on my toes—expecting to see Mrs. Aurelio, not her son, standing at my door.

“Sorry to bother,” he said, eyeing the glass in my hand and the wine on my toes.

“It’s no bother,” I said, formally, too formally for having bumped boats
and for talking as we had. “What brings you over?”

“My mother,” he said.

“Your mother’s a wonderful person.”

“I guess she never mentioned how she used to chase after us with a frying pan.”

“What?” I asked, and when he grinned I said, “I don’t believe you.”

“No one does, but it’s true. The seven of us—we were a handful.”

“The most I know of your mother is what I’ve seen through my windows, all that time she puts into her garden.”

“Yeah, she’s always had a real passion for it, but let me ask you a question,” he said, lowering his voice. “She’s getting older and having some issues. You don’t think she’s working too hard, do you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“She’s not in the best of health.”

“Oh?” I said, biting my lip. If only he knew of her collapse in the yard, and how I saved her.

“It’s hard,” he went on, “tough knowing she’s here alone. It’s why I’ve come to visit—to check up on her situation, see how she’s doing, whether she’s getting by on her own. My sisters put me up to it. They’re trying to make arrangements for her.”

“Arrangements,” I said, making a face. “What sort of arrangements?”

“Move her back north, closer to them.”

“You think that’s a good idea?” I asked in a tone reflecting my neighbor’s desires. “I see her out there all the time, and she looks fine to me, fully capable of living her own life. I should mind my own business, but I think it’s vital to her health that a woman lives where she wants to live.” I thought about what his mother had told me of orchids, that even they will wilt if they don’t like their spot.

“Just covering my bases,” he said, “making sure I’m not overlooking anything.”

“Not to my knowledge,” I said, telling a white lie and fearing it would turn into a big, bad lie if something worse happened to his mother. “Anything else I can do for you?”

“Actually, yes,” he said, looking back out over the porch railing. “You’ve
got a lot of stuff outside. I thought maybe you might need help moving it back inside.”

“That’s not necessary,” I told him, embarrassed he had seen the years’ worth of accumulated junk associated with my life. “I’m having a yard sale on Saturday.” I made a mental note then and there to call the paper in the morning and place an ad for my sale.

“If the raccoons don’t throw a party before then,” he said.

“They better not. I’m hoping to make a lot of money.”

“You should,” he said. “I stepped on a couple of ties on my way over here—good ones.”

“Oops,” I said, and it wasn’t the most caring-sounding “oops” a wife should voice when her husband’s seventy-five-dollar ties are lying in the dirt, getting stepped on. But that is what Fedelina’s son, a glass of wine, and a productive writing session had done to me—turned me into a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was I. “There is one thing I need help with,” I said.

“There is?”

“If you don’t mind, I’ve got this love seat inside that I hate—the world’s ugliest love seat. It’s terrible-looking. I could use help getting it downstairs.”

“Why don’t you show me?” he said, and in my mind I said, “so long” to my mood for writing—there was always tomorrow. And so long to loneliness.

He followed me down the hall and into the great room. “Nice clock,” he said when we passed the cuckoo that Timothy and I got as a wedding gift from his parents.

“You like it? It’s yours for twenty bucks.”

“No, thank you. I don’t really like clocks that tick constantly, reminders that I have to hurry—have to be somewhere. Your house smells good. Are you baking?”

“No, it’s a sugar cookie candle.”

“Oh.”

I stopped in front of the love seat. “Here it is,” I announced. “It’s horrid, isn’t it?”

“It’s not bad.”

“You’re being kind. My husband insisted we buy it, and did I mention he’s gone?”

“As a matter of fact, you did,” he said. “Why don’t you take that end and I’ll take this end. Are you okay walking backward a moment, until we turn it?”

“Oh, fine,” I said, putting my wineglass down, then arching my back for a quick stretch before grasping the love seat. “I’m sore from canoeing.”

“That goes away the more you do it,” he said. “If you want to feel sore, you should try rock climbing!”

“Do you do that?” I asked, “Rock climb?”

He laughed. “Not as much these days. I’m more of a hiker now. Last summer I trekked through the Amazon rainforest—a four-day guided tour starting in Lima.”