Notes from this week

Pond life, chairs and the lucky kind of cancer (plus a bonus journaling prompt)

Thank you for your amazing messages last week. It was a big moment of release for me, to finally be able to give solid shape to a situation we’d been living through for half a year. I’m currently incredibly bad at responding to texts and emails, and hoping that everyone just gets it. Maybe they don’t. I’ll probably spend the next half of the year apologising. Actually, already: sorry. I just don’t have the capacity to reply at the moment.

Back in April, I decided to cope with my complete sense of overwhelm by digging a pond in the garden. It was a very literal displacement activity: the displacement of nervous energy into spadework; the displacement of soil across the garden. As soon as I’d dug the hole, it began to look to me like an open grave, but that was fine. I lined it and made a stony beach at both ends, using pebbles from an unloved patch of garden landscaping. I filled it with water and held my breath, expecting it all to seep away.

It stayed. The first visitors were hoverflies and bees. Then the garden birds began to bathe in it. I planted it with watermint, pennyroyal and flag irises, and kept on adding more stones, carrying them from one end of the garden to the other.

The dog thinks it’s an enormous water trough, just for her, and barks at the bees. Every evening, the surface turns silvery and reflects the sky. I couldn’t love it more.

H will have surgery in about a month. I don’t think any of us wants it to come any sooner. We are not really sure what life will be like after it. I am managing the wait by trying to meet his every future need in advance. The freezer is already so full that we have to start eating all the contents of the tubs and bags I’ve so carefully stocked, and I’ve become obsessed with buying chairs. The ones I ordered for the garden were too hard, so I also ordered a little mattress to soften each one. I have to be able to think of him finding a comfortable spot somewhere, drinking coffee in the sun.

He’s been in bed most of the week, so I’m not really sure if it will make any difference.