That God Godself is Here

It hasn’t been the best of summers.

Sometimes things get worse before they get better, and sometimes they just get worse. I never know which it is until after the situation is over.

I tried a new probiotic pill to see if it would help heal up the embarrassing remaining symptoms that I was having– hopefully from the antibiotics I took to treat the colitis and not from the colitis. I couldn’t afford to have colitis any more. I don’t think any of us but Adrienne will have insurance by the end of the summer. But in any case, the probiotic was the wrong idea. It gave me terrible indigestion. And then I made it all worse. We had a jar of those old herbal vitamins from the irritating California herbalist’s catalog in the house, the kind I used to take for my chronic fatigue before I received a proper diagnosis. They were good for giving me a bit of pep. They are not good for someone who’s been struggling with serious gut issues for two months. They’ve got a big shot of habanero and cayenne to boost circulation.

The pain was so bad, I thought I would end up in the hospital again.

I could eat nothing but vanilla pudding and bananas for two days straight. That, in turn, threw me out of ketosis, which is the only way I control my poly-cystic ovary syndrome, so I stayed in bed exhausted for days straight. I could barely venture out into the garden to check on the tomatoes, which is when I found out that a groundhog had been there.

I’ve mentioned that there were groundhogs in the neighborhood. Last year, they stayed away. About a week ago, I saw one waddling through the yard of the haunted house next door, and thought of how my stalker who used to live there vandalized my garden and then blamed it on a groundhog– as if  a groundhog could cut off the heads of sunflowers and throw bean poles like javelins. And I pretended that the groundhog was my neighbor, reincarnated, doing penance for her crimes, and laughed.

I was not laughing just now. The furry penitent had taken big bites out of two bright green Stripeys and smashed three nearly ripe Stripeys to bits. A Stripey tomato is an heirloom tomato. It takes an agonizingly long time to get ripe. Those relatively flavorless Roma tomatoes would be ready for the sauce pot in a day or two, but I’d have to wait a long time for more Stripeys to eat raw. Even though I couldn’t eat a tomato with my bowels so sensitive. Even though the mere thought of a tomato was making me sick. But the destruction made me sicker.

I couldn’t afford a groundhog trap– or a crossbow or a fancy Medieval battleax, which was what I wanted just about then. I was still, for the second or third month in a row, behind on rent, and the landlord was being patient with me making it up before the end of the month for the third time. It’s impossible to write as fast as I need to when I’ve been sick for two months. Everything’s slipping behind. And anyway, I couldn’t drive out to Rural King to buy a trap with the car still on the fritz for going on a month now. A whole month of northern Appalachian heat waves without the lake or the waterfall or even the pool. I’m too exhausted to walk all that way. What a perfectly horrid summer.

I went inside and complained on social media.

Immediately, neighbors who live in the neighborhood advised that animal control would bring me a trap, and a neighbor who raises cattle outside of town offered to lend me his humane trap for free. I remembered why I’m coming to like it here in Steubenville.

At some point in all of this, while I was napping, Jimmy came to the door. When I met him later, he said that he’d gone ahead and ordered us the part that will probably fix the fuel pump to the car– he was going to rent the fuel pump tester first, but replacing it would be cheaper than testing it. It’ll be here by Tuesday at the latest. We can pay him back for the part whenever we’re able. He’s only sorry it’s taken this long and I’ve been trapped at home.

At another point I went out and borrowed the hose from the next door neighbor and his wife. They must’ve come in while I was watering with the bucket brigade, because the next morning, the hose was carefully hung on my side of their fence, and the neighbor himself made sure to tell me I was welcome to use it.

I was so exhausted, I could barely get the hose turned on before I needed to catch my breath. I ended up setting it down and let it dribble water all over the ground among my tomato cages for five minutes. Then setting it down again in the summer squash. Then again in the pumpkins. Each time, stopping to catch my breath as if I were running a marathon.

Bees browsed among those giant sunflowers, taller than the kind neighbors’ fence. Some of the Autumn Beauties are over seven feet tall, with new red and gold blossoms unfolding like fans every morning. The great big Mammoth Gray Stripe growing out of the compost is nine feet tall, though it drooped over when it finally opened its one great flower. The other Mammoths are taller, ten and eleven feet. I think one of them is fourteen feet, but I won’t know until I cut it down after it’s quite dead, to save the seeds for next year. And I did somehow get one glorious Velvet Queen, a short one, only as tall as I am, which is unfolding in black buds that go a warm deep red with time.

Potatoes were blossoming with little white stars.

Tiny green knobs were forming on the pumpkin.

That red rose I bought on a whim was sending out new leaves.

Birds were singing.

The sky overhead was bright and blue as a Northern Appalachian sky could ever be.

No, it’s not a rotten summer.

Jimmy will finish fixing the car by August. We’ll have an abbreviated summer, a few weeks of swimming together, and then Adrienne will start the seventh grade at her school that she fiercely loves with all her new wonderful friends, and I can swim by myself at the lake until September. Then it will be time for the glorious fall color to start. I will drive the Baker Street Irregulars to their lessons and watch all the children grow up.

Meanwhile, I’m in a place that I like, groundhog and all.

I can get away from here to places I love– and, here has also become a place that I love. Both are real.

It all rushed over me just then– a little bit longer and I could get away from here to someplace I like. And also, I could like the place where I was.

That getting away is something I can do, and that I can be happy where I am.

That Heaven is something which is coming to meet me, and that it is also something that is welling up right where I am. That God Godself is something you are welcome and able to journey for eternity to find, but that God is also here.

It only lasted a moment, and then I went back to being miserable. But I listened.

It hasn’t been such a terrible summer.