My beautiful, loving, giving, caring, quirky, fierce mother died this morning after suffering from pancreatic cancer for over a year.
The last phase was short and mostly painless and we’re grateful for that. She was ready to go and I’m happy that she was able to stay home, with my father, until the end.
Category: life lately
My week – habit style
5.18.20
Had a productive morning, called my parents after lunch. It went downhill from there. I have a hard time accepting things the way they are.
5.19.20
Wrote 5,000 words again. Thought about photography. Despite everything that’s going on my creative side seems to be waking up.
5.20.20
Driving to town, thinking out loud, I felt I could handle it all. But I lost my train of thought in the shops and now I don’t remember what made me feel that way.
5.21.20
I felt like it only gets worse every day. But then we went for a swim and all was well with the world – at least for a while.
5.22.20
Life going (more or less) back to normal feels surreal. Curfew was pushed back to midnight, so we stayed at the bar until after nine just because we could.
5.23.20
Woke up feeling hungover (only drank water last night), went to the beach, and did nothing all day. My mind is working hard to make sense of things and that takes a lot of energy.
5.24.20
I started the day right, but then I lost my energy and focus. The rest of the day was… well, there’s always tomorrow.
inspired by Habit Blog
A simple shawl
This is not my best knitting year. Every time I finish something I feel like “Wow, I actually finished something!” Oh well.
So here are some pictures of the simplest shawl I ever made. But that’s okay. I may actually wear this one. Or not. I’m starting to believe that no matter how much I love how other people look wearing shawls, I don’t feel right in them. I guess I’m more of a cardigan person. Luckily I have enough of that blue cotton yarn left to make a cardigan too…
My week – habit style
When Elizabeth mentioned Habit was back, I was really excited. I used to love the pictures and words they posted back in the days and I always wished I could do something like that too, but I never really felt like I got it. But times have changed and I’m in a blogging rut anyway. So stirring up my love for photography and limiting myself to 36 words might just be right for me right now.
Here’s last week (starting Tuesday).
5.12.2020
I may not know (or use) all the fancy words, but I do know what really matters. I’m eager to learn more, but I need to trust my experience and intuition too.
5.13.2020
My body wanted a lot of salad, and I was happy to oblige. Gathered with friends (we’re allowed to do that again). Didn’t realize how much I missed these people until I saw them again.
5.14.2020
Had a painful night. After way too much stress-related grinding and clenching, my tooth didn’t agree with the carrots I snacked on last evening. Writing was rather productive until I started doubting myself again.
5.15.2020
Work went well (wrote 5,000 words), the rest of the day is a blur.
5.16.2020
On my birthday I allowed myself to do whatever I wanted, so I ate all the wrong things because that was the easy part. Not sure if that was the best way to go.
5.17.2020
Felt inspired to take self-portraits. Didn’t recognize the woman in the picture. These past few months really show.
This weekend
This weekend I…
:: realized that our we-were-supposed-to-be-in-the-Netherlands period ended this Friday. I can’t explain it, but I feel a lot better now. Like a fog has lifted. Easier to accept that we couldn’t be there, now that we would have been back here again, I guess.
:: went on a little road trip with T. on Friday. Lockdown had been lifted here, we are allowed to be out on the road each day again and shops and restaurants are open for business (under strict rules of hygiene and social distancing). We thought we were only going to see if our favorite restaurant was open for take-out (we were craving pizza or fries). It wasn’t, so T. proposed to drive all the way to Mambo Beach to see if the place we used to buy fries at was open. It was! And the beach bar next to it was open too, so we stayed for a drink.
:: worked in the garden on Saturday. I have a lot of plants in containers and I had seedlings that needed bigger containers. Have I told you how much I love working with plants and sticking my hands in the soil? Only about every time I mention the garden, I think?
:: went to the beach with T. We did have a beach date with a large group of friends, but they wanted to go to a paid beach, that warned that they would close if it got too busy. So our friends decided that, to make sure they got in, they would be there at eight. In the morning. Well, good for them, but that was not our idea of being free to go whenever we wanted again. So we worked in the garden (me) and on the computer (him) and then we went to a free, local beach. And that was great.
:: sent my mother some roses. She’s still hanging on and though she’s not feeling too well and very tired, she’s still determined to live what’s left of her life to the fullest, enjoying every minute that she can connect be out in the garden, smell the roses (literally – she loves flowers), and connect with all the lovely people visiting her and me calling her as often as I can.
:: received love from a distance from my girls on Sunday. Messages, phone calls, money wired to us to “do something fun” (I think I want to use that and my birthday budget to buy some citrus trees). I tried really hard not to think about how Mother’s Day used to be (busy with visits from the girls and to my mom) and soaked up what I got.
:: totally forgot to take pictures to go with this post, so I grabbed an old one.
Wishing you all a great week!
I wanna go home
T. woke up singing “I wanna go home” (from Sloop John B. by the Beach Boys). I didn’t really know that song, but goodness, that jukebox in his mind is always spot on…
Today we were supposed to fly to The Netherlands to see our kids and our family. Our flight has been canceled for a while and I thought I’d processed it, but the closer we came to this date, the harder it got. And today it just sucks.
On top of that, my mom called Friday to tell us that she thinks it will be over soon. She can’t eat anymore and the doctor told her to stop forcing it. She’s also very, very tired and I think she’s ready to go. She wants to see our girls and her sister one more time. That’s all happening this week, and I think that will be it…
If the borders were open, the timing would be just right for us to arrive tomorrow. But they aren’t. And there aren’t any options. Even if we could get Curaçao to let us go and The Netherlands to let us in, even if we’d ignore that we can’t afford to stay in The Netherlands for months (we wouldn’t be allowed to return) and what would happen to our house if we’d just let it sit, even if we don’t take all those things into account, we’d have to stay quarantined for two weeks. And that would make it all rather pointless.
I won’t even go into the fact that we’re both having cold symptoms (so we’re probably not even allowed to fly).
Anyway. I know I’m not the only one with problems like this and I know there are people with much worse problems (on this island alone 50.000 people are in poverty right now – that’s one-third of the population). But I am having a hard time right now.
I know people worry when I don’t post for a while (and I can’t even begin to express how much I appreciate that!), so here’s a head-up. I probably won’t be posting often for some time. I’ve been blogging since 2001 and I know by now that I just can’t keep blogging when life gets a bit too hard to handle. I’m going to try to post when I feel like it, but I won’t force it since that usually ends with me quitting blogging altogether and I don’t want that.
So… hope to see you soon! Wishing you all a much better week than I’m having 😉
Random three
1. I am so tired! I try to work in the garden at least an hour a day, but my body isn’t as strong as it used to be. Or this is harder work than I’ve ever done, that could also be the case. I’m still in the phase of cleaning the grounds. Need to kill or dig out the stumps of the thorn bushes before I can really start planting. So it’s hard work that I can do only for a short time. But I am having fun with it.
2. We’re allowed to go swimming! And since we’re on walking distance from a beach, we can go each day again, if we want to (driving somewhere in your car is still only two days a week). That feels like so much freedom.
3. I went grocery shopping yesterday. Okay, I mostly went potting soil shopping and picked up some groceries too. That last part made it into quite the experience since I had to visit a lot of shops. T. told me I could pack a total of 200 liters in the car, but I only managed to buy 150. Oh well, at least I can pot some plants. Seeds are coming up faster than I can buy potting soil. I may have to make another round Saturday (Wednesday and Saturday are the days our car is allowed on the road – they check the first letter of your license plate).
I deleted my rant about social distancing that followed here (we all have thoughts about it, I’m sure). I’ll just say that if that virus is as contagious as they say, we’re about to have a really big breakout here. Two of the shops I don’t visit usually were really crowded and nobody was keeping their distance…
linking up with Carole’s Three on Thursday
DITL :: look what he built!
Last Friday I didn’t know yet that I’d decide to keep doing the day in the life blogs, but to do combine Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for a Monday post and do Monday through Thursday on Friday (um, does that make sense to you? – doesn’t matter, it does to me). So I didn’t really take pictures of what I was doing, except for this one of me grating ginger. I’m trying to make ginger oil.
On Saturday, I spent a bit of time in the garden, but I had a headache (again!), so I mostly sat in the shadow and read (an Agatha Christie novel – The Pale Horse) and we had this beautiful sunset.
On Sunday we had a lot of visitors. Of the iguana kind, that is. I guess they’re hungry (it’s been dry for a while) because they’re coming closer and closer, hoping to find some greens.
I spent a lot of time with this book lately. It’s about the medicinal herbs that grow or are widely available on Curaçao. Very interesting, though I wish it had better pictures and/or drawings of the plants. I don’t think I can identify them with the information in this book. But we’ll see if the internet can help with that. I was planning on visiting her garden (where she grows most of the herbs and trees she mentions), but it’s closed because of the lockdown.
Meanwhile, T. got busy with scrap wood (beams from the rotting balcony we removed and ceiling panels that used to be in the kitchen) and built me this planter table. Isn’t it great? He even added some protection. The birds seem to love some of my seeds.
And then he was on a roll and built me two other ones that fit exactly under the windows in the kitchen. We were out of screen material, so no protection here. You can vaguely see the plastic bottle I used instead. In the other planter, I started aubergine from the fruit and turmeric and ginger from the roots.
Loved the meal I made (I don’t always do). This was minced meat, a yellow onion, a leek, a zucchini and a little can of small red beans. I added shredded turmeric and black pepper for taste.
Sunset. My camera didn’t really catch the colors again. It was a much deeper red.
A bit of knitting to end my day. The shawl is going slowly, but it is growing.
How was your weekend?
In my garden
More garden content… I’ve been thinking about starting another blog for my garden and things related to that (herbal medicine) because there may be a lot of that in the nearby future, but I decided to just keep it all together and go with the flow. This blog has always been very personal and changing along with my interests, so maybe it’s time to accept that it is what it is, instead of trying to be “more professional”. It’s supposed to be fun. Don’t worry though, there will be knitting/crafting too 😉
Anyway, this morning I started early (before it got warm) and walked around.
Here’s what I’ve been doing:
:: watering the banana tree and wondering if it’s a plantain (banana in Papiamentu) or a banana (bakoba in Papiamentu). I asked when I bought it, but I was talking English and the woman I bought it from was speaking Papiamentu and Spanish (she wasn’t from Curaçao). I only realized there might have been a miscommunication about this being a banana tree when I was driving back home. I tried to look it up online, but I’ll have to wait until more leaves and fruit are growing to know for sure.
:: watering my papaya trees and wondering who’s eating the leaves. All six of them look like this or worse. I suspect iguanas, but we’ve also seen a deer on the other side of the fence and there is a part missing. I do hope this will stop soon.
:: hoping the geraniums (pelargoniums) I planted out yesterday will survive. Over the day they lost about all their color and they don’t look too happy. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all those years of working with plants, it’s that you have to give them time. Even if you think they’re dying, they’re often just trying to adjust. So we’ll wait and see. I did move them to a spot that has a little bit more shadow though.
:: noticing the neem tree is flowering. I checked online to see if neem flowers have any use. Oh yes, they do. So I gathered a few to dry them and I will be clipping more this evening or tomorrow morning. I also want fruit, so I have to be careful not to clip too much.
:: thinking this ancient Kalbas tree just outside our property may grow one kalbas this season. At least if I’m right about this being the flower. It’s fun to get to know these local trees and plants.
:: treating my desert rose with dish soap (diluted of course) and hoping that will get rid of the bugs that are bothering it. It’s still flowering (all year long!), but it doesn’t look as happy as it usually does.
:: wondering what tree this is. It’s almost always bare (iguanas eat the leaves), but right now it has flowers that smell wonderfully sweet and there are berries on it too. Maybe it’s time to join some of those local gardening groups on facebook so that I can ask if someone knows.
:: planning to do so much more. Sow some of those seeds I bought Wednesday, plant my avocado tree (it needs more room than the planter can give it), remove more thornbushes to make room for more plants, make ginger oil, look up more recipes like that… Oh, the list in my mind is endless. I think I’ll start by writing it all down, that might help 😉
Three in the garden
Before the lockdown, I had big plans for the garden. I had some work to finish and then I’d spend most of my days doing what I love most. Well, that sort of backfired. First of all, that work took a lot long longer than I thought (still not done). Then I started to feel sick and wasn’t even able to work in the garden and because of the lockdown it wasn’t possible to go anywhere else than the supermarket anyway, so buying potting soil and seeds was out of the question.
I have to admit this sort of sent me into a downward spiral towards depression again (that and some things I’d rather not talk about right now).
But… I am slowly feeling better now (fewer headaches, no more arrhythmias) and I’m working hard to snap out of that downward spiral. Gardening always helps a lot with that.
Three garden-related things that are making me very happy right now:
1. I went to Goisco yesterday and was delighted to find they didn’t stop selling products other than essentials and groceries. So I was able to buy potting soil, planters, and seeds (and I’m planning on going back for more).
2. My kitchen herbs are catching on. Okay, the chives are iffy, but I have thyme, parsley, peppermint (that’s the one below) and outside the frame there’s some rosemary too. I’m hoping to save the oregano I neglected when I was sick and I bought some tarragon yesterday.
3. Early this morning, T. and I worked together to give this dieffenbachia another chance to live. It was in a container but kept tumbling over. We’ll see if it makes better roots this way. It’s not exactly a useful plant (it’s toxic), but it’s beautiful (when it’s healthy) and I hate killing living plants. I love that T. knows this, agrees with it and helped me to do this.
Linking up with Carole’s Three on Thursday
NOT A STATION 