So I have had to come to terms with some of these issues. I travel frequently for my work and I have these new physical limitations. I’m always looking for help but really can’t afford much. This combination means I have to be content that things don’t look perfect. Well, let’s not even use that word. Things here are comfortable looking, I guess that’s what someone would say if someone were trying to be polite.
So this spring, two angels, one right after the other, appeared on my horizon. The first one was a man who once worked at our post office. I remembered John as bright, cheerful, and helpful. I knew he had two sons because I would sometimes run into him in Peterborough, the boys in tow. Our post office seems to operate like a Catholic Diocese as we get used to one postmaster and suddenly they are gone and someone else has replaced them. Such was the case with John. Years passed and then one day I ran into him at the local natural food store. “Hello there 112!” he said without pause. That is my box number. I was impressed by his memory. We chatted there at the organic meat counter and he allowed that he had been diagnosed with ALS and had to leave his job at the p.o. But, he said, he likes to work and tries to stay active to keep his symptoms at bay. As well, his teenage sons are always needing things like cars or cash. He asked if I had any work I would like him to do. Is the Pope Catholic?
So John came to work for me, a few hours was all he could do in a day but in those hours, he worked hard. There wasn’t anything I asked him to do that he wouldn’t do, shoveling snow in the late spring and then raking the gardens. Spreading compost. Putting a new coat of varnish on the kitchen floor. He told me he liked to organize things so I set him to work on my garage which hadn’t really been tackled since I moved here. He spent two days sorting and arranging, carting things to the dumps and setting questionable things aside. My garage now looks (almost) like a picture book image and I can find just about anything that I need at a glance. He also helped me wash the windows inside and out, which hasn’t been done in several years. For a couple of days, I couldn’t get used to the brightness as I walked into my kitchen. He didn’t charge me very much for his work and his presence was something that I looked forward to. (He loved to talk.) Eventually, he found a job painting which was within walking distance of his house but having John get me caught up on spring chores around here was nothing if not a visitation from above.
The week that he left, Debbie, another angel, swooped in. A few years ago, Debbie survived a near-death experience with an E Coli infection. As she was recovering, she found that gardening was her savior. She once owned a nursery so she was well acquainted with the things that grow around here – and the things that ought not to grow. She didn’t have many gardens of her own but she noticed that her neighbor down the road had some lovely new gardens. She offered to help. That neighbor happened to be a friend of mine. One thing led to another and now she offered to help in my gardens as well. She came with her gardening tools and set to work on my favorite garden, visible from several of my windows – peonies, lilies, hollyhocks are most dominant. And the bird bath. Some of my peonies come from friends and family members and when I have moved, they have moved with me. It was painful to see the Bishop’s Weed get a grip in this one garden where it had not yet taken root. Debbie arrived here like a warrior, pruning shears in her pocket, sun hat firmly in place, gloves and trowels at the ready. She came to my gardens early in the morning and sometimes worked until dark. I would call it a siege as she set about the job at hand, quietly, steadily removing the disease, edging, flinging the weeds into the wheelbarrow and carting them to the pile on the other side of the stonewall where I dump garden waste. Sometimes I didn’t know she was there until she raised her head above the tall weeds, which were slowly vanishing.
One day, she suddenly realized the damage the bittersweet was doing all around, choking one of my lilacs, pulling the branches of my old apple tree to the ground. She stopped work in the flowers and attacked the bittersweet, fiercely offended by its presence. She severed it at the root and yanked the tendrils down from their grip. This was something I used to do semi-annually but it's been more than a year since it's been done. When she left, the compost pile had risen to, quite literally, scalable heights, a mountain of destroyed bittersweet in the pile beyond the wall. If she took it all personally, she also felt the victory just as deeply.
Debbie would not accept any money for what she was doing. She called it her therapy. I gave her other gifts but none so valuable as what she did to my gardens, rescuing them from their near-death experience and bringing them life, light, water, and love. So, for reasons I cannot explain, the angels have been with me this spring. What I find so hard to believe is that these two people, with limitations far greater than mine, came to help. In this world, inspiration and the opportunity for gratitude are set before us far more often than we realize.
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