Gardening, cooking, reading, writing, and a lot of adjusting

The cats are getting used to the absence of Sugar Ray and so are we. I find that the period when we were facing the decision about euthanizing him was much worse. The grieving started a month before his death. The week afterward was hard on all of us, especially Mingus his cousin and Xena who takes everything very seriously. Mingus is adored by both females and is spending more time playing with Xena and cuddling with Willow. At night, they sleep in each other’s arms or spoon. Things are finally reaching a new calm, a new normal. I miss Sugar Ray as you do any companion who has been loyal and affectionate and an intimate part of your life for more than 17 years. I’ve been working in the gardens as much as I can, since next week I can do nothing but the workshop and cooking. Melenie is planning to come from Amherst to help me cook for the class party Friday afternoon. Monday is the last day Dale will be working for me, a half day as I’ll be in class all morning. He has been working for me since late January and has been an enormous help, but in summer, he has two jobs already starting. Right after Labor Day, I’ll try to find a new secretary/assistant. The gardens are being very productive. I’ve frozen 19 pounds of spinach and started freezing strawberries, rhubarb and broccoli. As soon as the workshop is over, I want to make freezer jam from strawberries. It will probably be time to harvest black currants and maybe red currants by then. Certainly the black. We still have lots of lettuce and the bok choi and broccoli are ready now as is the fennel. Now that I’m done with reading and annotating the participants’ manuscripts, I have been writing my own poems. That feels good. I finished John LeCarre’s THE NIGHT MANAGER. It was very engaging till the last few pages. They were disappointing but quite realistic. The super wealthy rarely pay for their crimes. I have been reading Daniel Bourne’s translations of the poetry of Tomasz Jastrun from the Polish with great pleasure. Sunday the workshop participants arrive. I have only today to work in the garden. I have been madly weeding, weeding, weeding. I filled three big pots yesterday with showy foliage plants for the two that are on either side of the steps up to the house, shady from the weeping beech on one side of the drive and steps and the sugar maple on the other. Then I dug flowering plants –orange lantana and dark purple sweet potato vine, into a big pot for a sunny area. I transplanted dahlias from the container in which I’d started the tubers into another great big pot where they can grow to maturity. I’m looking forward to the juried intensive poetry workshop. intensive is putting it mildly. Class in the mornings, conferences in the afternoons, a reading and a party in the evenings. Woody takes care of the beach party early in the week. Melenie will help me prepare for the class party to which friends also come and significant others of the poets. I hope we can make it a garden party as it always has been, if the weather lets us. Then at least I don’t have to try to find time to clean and straighten up the house. I don’t know when I could find the time to do it. The public reading is Thursday evening and the party Friday starting at five.