Bad at Retirement (and Maybe Gardening)
Plus: Self-Care Bingo Challenge
I thought I would make a great retired person. I’d finally get to do all the art projects and experiments that I stacked neatly in a closet in my brain. (Who am I kidding? It’s stuffed in there like a junk drawer.) But I keep the door ajar so I never lose sight of all the big ideas I’ve had, the things that get me jazzed about having time to make things.
It’s birdbath season, and I've been itching to make a fountain since fall. I drew a picture of it yesterday. It has three tiers with a doll’s head at the top, spilling water out of the mouth or the hair holes and sending it cascading down through two thrifted bowls to the largest bowl at the bottom. Beneath that is a cylindrical container for the pump. It’s all designed, and I have the materials, but why haven’t I made it? Because I need to plan every phase of something functional before I start, and I can’t figure out how to plug this in without making a hole in the cylinder. And when I stop up that hole, the pump can never be replaced. (This is my way of asking for a solution!)
Also, I’m unmotivated. A perpetual self-starter all my life, I am now unable to get anything done. A mosaic sunflower number for my kid’s house is one-third complete. I keep promising myself I’ll get back to it when it rains, but when it rains, I apply for jobs I haven’t a chance of getting, and then I get depressed and watch TV.
During the three-day weekend, however, I was motivated enough to work on my gardens. I dug, raked, weeded, raked some more, lifted, straightened, planted, and mulched. I even got that old toilet moved and planted.
My hands were black for three days.
In the olden days of employment, I would have searched the internet for “best hand soap for gardeners” and bought something without a second thought. The dollar-store nail brush and Costco hand soap didn’t do the trick, nor did the shower. But I’m broke, so I embrace the stain, for I have the hands of someone who makes things, who gets dirty.
With my black hands, scrubbed six ways to Sunday, I even had guests over for dinner: plank-soaked salmon, rice, and green beans.
When all was said and done, between Saturday and today, I’d managed to fill my bingo card.
Extra: Self-Care Bingo Challenge
On my desktop is this self-care Bingo card that I have saved for a few months. I look at it a lot just to do a mental health check, make sure I don’t need a month of therapy. Rarely do I check off more than four things in a day (unless you count “ate a cookie” as “ate food”). And you automatically get “Stayed Alive” if you’re reading this.
✓ Took a shower: This morning.
✓ Got dressed today: Clean clothes, even.
✓ Talked to a friend: Called Aliza to sing Happy Birthday yesterday; had company for dinner and chatted with neighbors on the weekend.
✓ Sat with my feelings: I’m an expert.
✓ Gave myself a compliment: See above.
✓ Moved my body joyfully: I danced for a moment in the kitchen and had a nice walk with the dog.
✓ Ate food: Not just a cookie, but salmon, steak, salad, vegetables.
✓ Listened to my body: It said I was tired, so I stopped.
✓ Challenged negative thoughts: I suck at that (see?), but I did have a fleeting moment when I thought my family would be better off without me, and then I came to my senses.
✓ Had fun: Gardening is fun, even if painful.
✓ Went outside: Spent the whole weekend there.
✓ Tried something new: I made a lumen print!
✓ Stayed alive: There’s that.
✓ Practiced being mindful: I managed to call my dog by his real name for several days (instead of my old dog’s name or my child’s name)
✓ Did a hobby: I gardened.
✓ Used a coping skill: Does having a second drink count?
✓ Let myself cry: I watched the season finale of “Hacks” and the series finale of “Handmaid’s Tale” and cried so many tears.
✓ Took a break: I’m Queen of Breaks.
✓ Asked for help: Does telling Marty to help me count?
✓ Got shit done: Indeed.
✓ Brushed my teeth: It’s a habit.
✓ Practiced self-compassion: I let myself feel sorry for myself a few times because I couldn’t afford something or my body hurt.
✓ Drank water: Another habit.
✓ Treated myself: Despite my brokenness, I bought lots of pretty flowers.
✓ Got 7-9 hours of sleep: Thank you, Big Pharma and Trazodone.
That’s twelve bingos in a standard game. One bingo per day is pretty hard (for me, at least), so I challenge you to play a weeklong game and fill that card. Start the day after you read this. Be deliberate if you have to. Have a negative thought on purpose and challenge it on purpose. (It’s kind of like forcing yourself to smile; if you do it enough, it sometimes happens on its own.)
That’s what they say, anyway.
Here’s the poem in the lumen:
quiescence she and I will pour with nonchalance the contents of this marble box: three dog whiskers, the fang of a tarantula, her dried umbilical cord, pinched and blue like a stone, the orange feather of a friend’s fancy bird, Grammy’s shimmering silver bridge, my own four wisdom teeth, and a few good misspelled fortunes, delighting in your awkward squirm as something animal rolls across the ripples in the couch and touches your naked thigh. she saved the cord! you’ll say to them later, as if we are somehow broken this well-practiced list your new soliloquy against a mother and her girl but we are all tethered to our treasures and who’s to judge the things we save the care with which you dig the dahlia corms and tuck them in a burlap sack the flowers that you paralyze in books, the seeds you squeeze in envelopes who’s to judge a box of lonely things we couldn’t bring ourselves to lose.
This poem appeared in Junk Lit.
Your hands are beautiful.
I love the doll head with flowing water for hair!
And for all the crafty types who love free suggestions, here's mine:
Rather than cut a hole in the wall of the cylinder, perhaps cut a notch/groove at the top of the side of the cylinder. It looks like the assembly is stacked, so unless you need to seal the lowest basin to the crock/cylinder it sits on...
If you do need a seal with some adhesion, butyl rubber strips are sticky and can sort of seal, not water under high pressure seal, but it would make the stack stay together. To disassemble, steady force to separate or a thin knife can get through the butyl.