Issue No. 4

'Tiger Eyes' Viola

Hi friends,

Have you heard the term “vulnerability hangover” before? Dr. Brené Brown coined it to refer to the “emotional cringe” we experience after we decide to put ourselves “out there”. I can guarantee that’s what’s going on for me right now as this issue lands in your inbox. It pretty much happens with every issue, but particularly when I talk about chronic illness. A voice inside my head—an a-hole I call Dinkus—says, “Nobody wants to hear about that!” But maybe that’s not true. Maybe there’s something in your life that you’re trying to bear too, the best way you know how. Maybe it’ll help to hear that you’re not alone. In-it-togetherness: that’s my jam.

Thanks for being here. Happy Full Moon.

x J

---

007 | Viola cornuta, ‘Tiger Eyes’

Today, I could not walk in the garden. If there can’t be a garden walk the day feels strange—the same way a day might feel if there is no cream for coffee or paper to write on. I could not walk in the garden because of the “category 3-4 atmospheric river”—a long, meandering plume of water vapour carried by the sky and released as an actual river’s worth of rain.

I can blame it on the downpour, but the truth is that even without a fairly major weather event, I’ve been too hobbled to move much at all. I’ve been on prescription-grade NSAIDs for too long and seem to have developed a stomach bleed (as if being perimenopausal isn’t already sexy enough). All last weekend I tried not to panic from fear, worried I’d have to go to the ER. Things have settled down now, just no more NSAIDs for me, which means I’m down one less way of managing pain.

On bad days, like today, I must plan every move strategically and rely heavily on A. to retrieve things for me. I feel bad about this, but A. says it’s okay because he was born to fetch, seeing as he has, since childhood, identified as part dog. So, A. fetches and I tell him he’s a good boy and rub his belly and he throws his arms over his head and barks a little, satisfied. I know, I know, the private lives of couples are weird. And I haven’t even mentioned the bestiality (me being an English Lop to A.’s big shaggy dog).

It was still pouring at dinnertime. We made breakfast for dinner because storm days seem to call for comfort food. Normally, we’d eat breakfast at the round table in the kitchen, which looks onto our covered porch. Since it wasn’t breakfast-breakfast though, but breakfast-for-dinner, we headed through the French doors with our plates to the table in the ballroom where we have room to play a game. This is our weekday ritual—placing tiles to build roads and cities, while taking bites of our food and often having to move our plates to accommodate whatever shape the game takes. It’s a little nerdy, but also a lovely way to slow dinner down and shake off, at least temporarily, any stress from the day.

We call our living room “the ballroom” because it’s the size of a studio apartment. It has high ceilings and the original Edwardian crown moulding, wood flooring, and fireplace. In photos I found in the city archives, the room looked as if it was used as one of the many sitting rooms in the now-divided old mansion, but still we like to imagine that people danced in here while Violet Carlotta, one of the original occupants, played the piano.

The ballroom’s décor is minimal because we simply don’t have enough things to fill it. Before moving here, we always lived in places only a couple hundred square feet bigger than the entire room. Two benches, a couch, a trunk, three soft chairs, a few makeshift end tables, a hutch, and a dining table—plus interesting branches and pampas grass and other things I’ve brought indoors—don’t crowd the room even remotely. Ms. Monster, the monstera plant who now has a sprawl of nearly five feet, doesn’t even encroach on anything. Our walls are warm white and bare—though I have it in mind to make a large, pressed flora lightbox. We have gold ochre velvet curtains though. They frame a pastoral view filled with trees—from a Pineapple Broom and ‘Red Bells’ Enkianthus to a Weeping Birch and Cherry Plum, and many more in between.

After dinner, A. remained at the table, drawing a scene from the day in his composition notebook, and I laid on the couch with a quilt and book at the other end of the ballroom. Around eight-thirty, the flood of rain outside was replaced by a flood of light that, unlike the rain, breached our windows. It spilled, as if slowly from a massive bucket, first across A. and his notebook, and then over me and my book, and then shored up against the back wall. A. said it was “Hollywood glamour lighting” and I said, “Or god lighting.” Either way it was unexpected and special enough that we got to our feet so we could stand close to the windows to peer at the sky. Everywhere, the thrum of well-watered green sparkled with raindrops. Then, as quickly as the light had come it disappeared, leaving behind the unseasonable damp and chill and glooming of night.

Somehow, I suppose to cheer us up, what came next was custard. Not the homemade kind either, but Bird’s Eye, found at the back of a kitchen cupboard. Using the hook end of my cane, I pulled a chair up to the stove, sat down, and measured and whisked together the custard powder, sugar, and milk into the copper-bottomed pot I’ve had since I moved into my first apartment. I clumsily whisked and splashed and waited for it to thicken. When it did, I stirred in a capful of vanilla while A. got out our wee white bowls with the honeycomb pattern—“the bee bowls” as we call them, which pass for “the good china”. The bowls went on top of white saucers—bought at a thrift shop—and digestive biscuits were procured to go on the side. Looking at the scene, I was reminded of the kind of drunk cooking that happens when one is young and poor and it is very late at night. It gave me a pang of nostalgia to think of my own wilder days. Contextually, this could still be considered wild now though—reckless even— given that spontaneous “pudding”, as English A. calls it, this dangerously close to bedtime could mess up our sleep.

Before A. carried our custard back into the ballroom, I asked him to wait. I then opened the kitchen door to the sweet air and stepped onto the illuminated porch with its greenhouse roof, which is where we grow herbs and edible flowers. For most of my life, I’d have been lucky to even have had a porch garden—let alone the half-acre-plus garden I now have access to. I scanned the two dozen terracotta pots and galvanized metal containers full of plants and realized it was a garden in its own right. ‘I have made it to the garden today after all,’ I thought.

I considered picking a pink bellis or yellow calendula—or even a sprig of lemon thyme—but then settled on a ‘Tiger Eyes’ viola. We were already using the fancy dishes, which deserved to be paired with the most special flower. The viola is the wild ancestor to the pansy (technically, all pansies are violas but not all violas are pansies). ‘Tiger Eyes’ is a striking modern cultivar. The backs of the flowers are a deep greyish purple, the fronts are gold ochre (like our curtains) with tinges of burnt orange and cinnamon. The faces and markings are brownish-black. The markings look like petals themselves, as though carefully drawn on by an artist. Each petal looks like it could be an intricate butterfly wing—butterflies being like “flying flowers”, as the daughter of a man I know of once said. I plucked a single bloom and slowly made my way back in and floated it in my bowl. “Of course,” said A., “yours needed a flower.”

Back at the ballroom table, I peered at the viola’s pretty face with every spoonful of warm custard. ‘Tiger Eyes’ is exceptionally fragrant and the scent mixed beautifully with the vanilla of the custard, which went down like a hug.

When we were finished our custard, A. fetched the book I have been reading aloud some evenings. I stayed at the table and he tucked into the armchair in the corner by the front windows. The book is called Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence and is by a GP in the UK called Dr. Gavin Francis. I bought the slim book after reading about it on The Guardian’s website because convalescence is a subject A. and I are both concerned with, each for our own reasons.

One of the main points in the book is that, as the Guardian reviewer pointed out, “Not everything can be fixed quickly or easily and sometimes never quite completely.” This is true; A. has been experiencing the former and me the latter.

I read two chapters, stopping once or twice to yawn—though not because of the text. The last sentence of the last chapter I read was the author quoting another writer, Denise Riley, from her memoir about living with grief, which, in a way, is a lot like living with illness:

Your task now is to inhabit the only place left to you—the present instant—with equanimity, and in as much good heart as you can contrive.

And with that, we took our weary selves to bed, carrying all the goodness we could in our hearts.