
The smoke from the fires in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and northwestern Ontario has hit upstate New York.
The rising full moon last night was blood red.
And the sky this morning looks like a diffractionless opal, a whitish translucent
wash with the barest undercoat of blue through which the sun just
glowers. I'd planned on taking it easy today anyway, because I kinda knocked myself out weeding the New Paltz plot yesterday.
Before:

After:

Doesn't look like I did a lot, does it? But it was four full wheelbarrows of brambles and other assorted weeds.
Harder work than I thought it would be, & I was kinda achey from all that squatting & pulling. So I figured I'd go easy on myself today. Resume weeding tomorrow, but get there while it's still cool out.
And that turns out to be a
good decision because today I'm feeling a kind of generalized
air hunger, some shortness of breath with exertion. Though whether that's from the smoky air or generalized anxiety I can't quite tell.
###
Said anxiety is due to
Icky being even more of a dick than usual.
Last fall, after I closed down my garden in Hyde Park, I brought all my gardening stuff back here & stashed it in the shed because I thought I'd be gardening here this summer.
Then, six weeks or so ago, Icky announced that he didn't want to garden with me. Was it my breath? My ineffective underarm deodorant? My generally displeasing personality? No! It was that Icky does not like to work or play with others.
Fortunately, the good folk at the Hyde Park garden had just written me a love note:
We miss you!So, I decided to go back & garden there again. (And, of course, the New Paltz Community Garden just found some open spots, so now I'm juggling
two gardens!) And I transported all my gardening stuff back to Hyde Park.
###
Then yesterday, Icky went on a tear because he decided all the gardening stuff in the shed belonged to
him.All day long, he fusillaged me with text:
Those tomato cages are mine. I’ve had them since before I moved here. I put them all back there after the seasonI texted back,
As I said, I brought the 10 cages I used in my garden last year to your shed in October last year because I thought I was going to be gardening here this year. After you told me you’d prefer to garden alone, I took those same 10 cages—they were stacked on the left side of the shed—back to Hyde Park. That’s all I know, Iggy. He texted:
Where are my cages then? I put all the cages I used all of last summer in that shed. There are no cages now. I never saw yours in there.###
This is the kind of petty hammering he does relentlessly & he is so fucking relentless that he usually gets his own way—because who in their right mind wants to spend hours texting about fucking tomato cages?
Finally, he called.
"Look," I said. "We're at an impasse. And I'm at a disadvantage in all my transactions with you since you own the house, so you have the power. Are you interested in some kind of compromise or should we just keep up the text chain till I move out?"
This was said with more bravado than I actually have, of course.
Moving out would be difficult at this point.
I'm an elderly cat lady and the rental situation hereabouts is not exactly clamoring for elderly cat ladies.
On the other hand, I'm an excellent tenant, and Icky doesn't want the house sitting empty for the 20 days of each month he's not on the premises.
And I suppose it's possible that I
did grab some of Icky's tomato cages without thinking about it—though I'm certainly not going to admit that to him.
The compromise?
I'll bring back any extra tomato cages and check the slag heap at the Hyde Park garden where old tomato cages go to die. Bring him
those.###
The situation is highly anxiety-provoking because it reminds me how little
control I have over my life.
Of course, because of the way I was brought up, it never occurred to me that one
could control one's life simply by making wise choices. I was a waif bufffeted about by forces I couldn't control! And then as an adult, I kind of
mythologized that choicelessness! Turned it into a philosophy. Became
fatalistic. I don't know what the answer is.
I
do know many people who have organized their lives around making wise choices, and for many of those people life has worked out well, but for just as many, life hasn't.
The random factor is very, very powerful.