Roses, Hydrangeas, Dead Things, Anxiety
(a few of my favorite--and not favorite--things)
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Early heat wave in Massachusetts this week, and the high humidity on the southeastern coast turned the air into a soupy mist. Most days were spent out of the garden in air conditioning, either at home or out shopping to stretch my legs. I found a mini Mr. Coffee coffee pot for my classroom at a thrift store for $4.99. Why are teachers like this? We are always planning ahead to the next school year, even in the summer.
This morning, after a night of thunderstorms and pouring rain, I went outside to deadhead roses. Petals had burst free onto nearby bushes and mulch, a soft confetti signifying a natural celebration that had come to a glorious, albeit messy, conclusion.
I can’t complain too much—my favorite blue hydrangeas are gorgeous this year! The blue is so blue in person, they almost don’t seem real.
So I spent the morning deadheading the remains of roses past, then raked and scooped petals into a basket for the compost. Seeing their beauty up close once again after a week of heat, I decided to cut some of the fresh roses and hydrangeas to grace the inside of our home. My curly hair clung to my forehead and neck, and instant sweat beaded down my back, but I manage to make some sweet bouquets for different rooms.
But while I was outside gathering the flowers in a bucket of water, I turned the corner from the side garden into my backyard and stopped in my tracks. The joy and beauty of the moment was replaced with the harsh reality of nature.
There, on the hot patio cement, was the perfectly intact dead body of a robin on its side, its little feet frozen stiffly in the air, its eye open to the sky and rosebush above it.
Poor thing, I thought. Maybe it’s not really dead. Maybe it’s stunned or tired and taking a breather.
Dear Reader, it was dead dead.
This is not the first time this has happened. Last year, we found a bluebird carcass under our front hydrangea bush. The prior year, the bones and fur of a rabbit, meat stripped clean off by a predator, littered the grass under our Kwanzan cherry tree. The year before that, a rodent of unusual size met its demise under our outdoor dining set.
When you build an Eden, it comes with snakes.
It’s the dark reality of gardening in nature. Death happens despite our longing for the natural world to always be beautiful and kind.
My worries went into overdrive.
What if something I did killed it?
I hadn’t sprayed anything; my garden is organic.
What if I didn’t clean the birdbath enough? Or too much?
A small dollop of Dawn soap isn’t harmful.
Birdsong in the four trees along the back edge of my garden began to haunt me. What if it’s an airborne pathogen?
Didn’t I see something about the avian flu on social media?
Are all the birds going to start falling from the trees?
What if it jumps to people?
Dear Reader, there is a reason why I am a dystopian novelist.
Okay, so I needed to use my logical brain to quiet my emotional fear reaction. Occam’s razor is a theory of thought that the simplest explanation is most likely the right one.
Therefore, either the robin died due to the heatwave, or that orange cat that I’ve seen wandering the neighborhood got its claws in it. More likely it was the heatwave based on the crime scene forensics.
To get my mind to stop catastrophizing, I also mentally flipped the experience to the positive. At least the robin was able to die in my garden, intact, surrounded by birdsong and blossoms, under a canopy of trees and blue sky.
I added fresh water to the birdbath, and life moves on.
My dystopian book series (THE WARNING and THE FALLOUT) with Sourcebooks Fire has the theme of anxiety throughout it since the main character, Alexandra Lucas, has generalized anxiety disorder, something my family and I know all too well.
If you haven’t checked out my series yet, please do! If you have, THANK YOU SO MUCH! :)
I would be super grateful if you could please review it on Amazon.
One quick sentence like “Great read!” and a bunch of stars can make a huge difference and allow authors like me to keep doing what we love to do. If my books reach 100 reviews, the Amazon algorithm will help more readers find it in searches.
I’m currently at 14k words on my FIREWALL manuscript, and I hope to be at 20K by the end of June. That’s totally doable if I don’t let the heat wave dry up my motivation.
My literary agent emailed me this week with some updates. She sent my young adult Christmas Romance manuscript, A PENNY SAVED, to four publishers, so fingers crossed it sparks interest with one of those editors. In other news, she said the top secret contract that I’ve been hinting about is being finalized—hopefully by the end of summer there will be an announcement on that front!
I love robins. I’m so sorry. I worry about the cats in our hood- I caught one terrorizing a winged thing the other day and it was too late to stop it. I worry if I make it attractive to birds I’m setting them up for attack.
I would love to read The Warning. I’ll see if my library has it. 🥰