Bed of roses

Driving home on one of Welllington's rare stunning days this week, I decided to stop by the rose garden. I timed it perfectly - in the middle was a trailer heaped high with rose petals and spent roses. The prettiest pile of rubbish in the world. Round it stood half a dozen people helping themselves to all the roses that weren't too far gone, while the nice park woman urged them to take as many as they wanted. So of course I joined them. The best ones to take were the red and white floribunda clusters. I put them down on the cafe table to admire while I had my cold juice.

Then I took them home, put them in a vase by Harvey's photo, and felt happy all evening.

Christmas busy-ness

My neighbour has rallied, thank goodness, because (I'm purely selfish about this) I like having her to dinner and to talk to and go out with. On Thursday we managed to catch the last of the spell of glorious weather and get down to the rose gardens. It was probably the wet winter followed by the dry warm spring, but Wellington's roses are magnificent this year - even mine, which get minimal care and attention (though they do get very well pruned, thanks to a kind expert friend). Here's Jude the Obscure - it lasts hardly any time in a vase, but its fat round apple-scented blooms are worth bringing in even for just a couple of days.
       My main preoccupation this week has been sorting stuff out. Or rather not sorting stuff out. I'm extremely good at avoidance behaviour when it comes to difficult tasks like this. It's partly because I knew it would involve dealing with lots of nostalgic reminders of the past - papers, photos, cards, and the last small hordes of things that belonged to Harvey, like his hairbrushes. . His computer was finally taken away this week. I know it's a hopelessly melodramatic, overblown comparison, but turning it off for the last time felt like turning off life support. And I found a tape of a radio interview he did in 2004 for his garden memoir, This Piece of Earth. I didn't think I had any recording of his voice.
      So now it's nearly Christmas again. I'll be with family this year, including a great-nephew enjoying his first Christmas, while visitors mind my house. I've made the pudding I'm taking, but I haven't sent a single card or done much shopping. I must admit that the Christmas buzz I used to really enjoy is missing, but I suppose that's only to be expected. Meanwhile there's also lots to do in preparation for the food memoir launch next March, such as writing articles and getting to grips with social media (I know, I've written about this before but I mean it this time). Watch out for a whole new clutch of useful buttons appearing here and over on Something Else to Eat.  

Passing through

My friend and neighbour is in hospital, though we hope she'll be home tomorrow. I didn't need to visit her as she had family there, and I was glad of it, because she's in the ward where Harvey died.
        Some days the past crowds in. I spent the morning going through his computer files to make sure we had saved them all before they're deleted from the machine. Such a wealth of writing.
        I also set about disposing of the dresser - thanks to my new cupboard, I don't need it any longer - and was silently apologising to Harvey as I made the phone call. He would never have agreed to it going.
        But he would have loved my Taranaki garden trip, though he would have been deeply envious of their volcanic soil (we had the same kind in Mt Eden where I grew up), where everything grows magnificently. One of the loveliest things I saw was a commercial planting of flag irises, in every imaginable iris-colour combination..

I don't covet the grand gardens, I know how much work they involve, but thank goodness there are people who like to spend their time creating these marvels for near-non-gardeners like me to enjoy. It's very soothing just to wander round gazing at them and not thinking about anything else, past, present or to come.

Labour of love

I'll have people with me this week, so the next post will be the week after. By then I'll be making the Christmas pudding (see Something Else to Eat), as well as learning (at last) how to deal properly with the full range of social media and chat about my food memoir when it comes out next March - it's already featured in a Listener article.
              Last Monday, Labour Day, was the 25th anniversary of my younger son Patrick's death - he would have been 43 now. As you can imagine, I knew it was bound to be a difficult day. So I took the precaution of asking a very good friend to come and spend it with me.
              First we went to Patrick's tree in the Botanic Gardens, then to Harvey's plaque down the road in the Karori Cemetery rose garden. We took the two lovely little bunches of flowers that my neighbour had brought over specially for me that morning.
              Patrick's tree is so tall now (like him) that we can only just reach high enough to lodge the flowers in its lower branches. As for Harvey, I'd seen earlier that the little in-ground flower holder I'd put there for him before (and will replace) had vanished when they redid that rose bed - you may recall it was ailing earlier, now it's been beautifully replanted. So I rose to the occasion, took down his favourite whisky glass, and set it in the soil to hold his flowers. When I told a friend that night, she said, "He'll be saying, Well, here's the water, but where's the whisky?"

The ghost in the machine

Harvey's computer has been sitting in my spare room for about 18 months now. I moved it upstairs soon after he died. I knew that in a sense it was his afterlife. I also knew I'd have to deal with it at some stage -  go through everything on it, decide what should be kept, save it in some form, remove everything else and dispose of the computer itself.

          He'd been so well organised that he'd published his last book of his own poetry in his last year. I knew there wouldn't be a lot there that he hadn't already used. But the one thing I knew I had to keep was the entries for his diary, some of which I hadn't yet read, because he had never printed them out. He'd stopped keeping it after he started his blog (and of course, after he was no longer able to go out or do anything much except write, read, think and talk).

           It took me quite a long time, but I finally realised I was never going to sort all this out sitting at his computer. It has a curved screen I don't like, and his keyboard doesn't suit me. It's in a room that's too light, so to use it you have to keep the blinds pulled. And soon after he died I did something wrong and the whole contents had to be rescued and the software reinstalled. I was immensely grateful to the friends who helped with all this, but since then it doesn't seem to run very smoothly. So I just ignored the problem.

           A while ago I met a student who was carrying round a box about the same size and shape as an old video recording. She said it was an external hard drive, it cost about $150, and she could keep a whole computerful of work on it. 

            This week I bought one of these boxes and got my lovely computer man to transfer all Harvey's documents, pictures and emails into it from his computer. It worked very well, and it took up only a tiny fraction of the two terabytes of storage available. (Lovely word, terabyte, it sounds like a large friendly animal of some kind, maybe a sort of combination of a dog and a small dinosaur...)

              In theory, we should then have been able to delete everything from Harvey's computer and erase his user name. The final curtain. But at the last minute I got cold feet. I was very grateful when my computer man suggested I could just leave it for a while, until I'd made sure (by looking on my own computer) that everything I wanted was safely stored away. Strange, isn't it, how dealing with machines can be so emotional. But for writers, especially, their machines now feel like a part of their soul.

               I can now deal with everything that was on his computer much more easily, and I certainly will...soon. The other thing I have to do soon is decant everything out of my computer into the box, where my words can sit companionably alongside Harvey's. I need to do this because I'll soon have to get a new computer for myself, partly so I can learn to do all the flash social media stuff to promote my ebook. It will be out in March, and I'm told that the next Listener will have an article on ebooks in which it figures - I was interviewed this week.. My first food memoir media appearance!

Working

As in everything I've done to feel better (I even went for some walks! Yes!) and everything my on and offline friends have done to help me feel better, is working very well indeed. The further down you go, provided you don't get stuck there, the more you seem to rise up when you recover.  Of course next week I may well feel completely differently, but so far - so good.
       And also as in actually working - I've had a raft of paid and unpaid writing to get through these last two weeks, all of it with deadlines and relatively difficult to do, and nothing is more absorbing or makes time disappear more effectively. I was so immersed last night that (admittedly after a very late lunch) I didn't have dinner till 10 pm. It was one of the times (few, but probably increasing) when I did for a moment think that there are advantages to living alone.
        It was so late that I thought I might as well take my dinner to bed and go straight from eating it to bedtime reading. I'm temporarily between review books (see my What I'm Reading sidebar), so I resorted to an ebook instead - I've got a couple that I downloaded but didn't read straight away because other things took precedence. It's very good to have them handy when I need them.
        Here's the Warrior Woman print Harvey brought back from Kyoto for me, with an apricot iris that opened from a sheaf of buds I was given. It's shrivelled away to nothing now, but others have taken its place.

How are you?

When people ask "How are you?", I don't really know what to say. The truth is that no matter how many uplifting pictures of flowers and gardens I post here, or how many lovely supportive comments everyone makes (and I do appreciate it, please keep doing it!), I'm just not that great and there are times when I really can't see the point of anything at all. Yes, I know I haven't been well and I've just finished the antibiotics, etc etc. But I can't escape the reality: I am on my own, and some days I don't have the faintest idea how to manage my life even till bedtime. And writing this blog to say so is sometimes the only way to avoid going to bed and staying there.

PS: For the New Yorker jigsaw site I mention in the fifth comment below, go here. Really silly, but It works for me...

Lying low

I've been lying low in both senses lately. Last week I had a dear friend visiting, and for once it was fine (though very cold). We fitted in tulips and seaside cafe lunches and generally mooched happily about. Last Thursday would have been Harvey's 78th birthday, so it was lovely to have her here for dinner - especially as she was the person who originally introduced us.
      But then she went home and I collapsed again, still dogged by what I thought was just the stubborn aftermath of a cold. It's been five weeks now, so I finally went to the doctor, who told me what I really have - the adult whooping cough that's been doing the rounds.
      Now I'm on the right antibiotic and feel as if I'm starting to improve at last, though I still don't have much energy and my taste buds aren't properly restored yet - wine is the acid test, so to speak. I've resorted instead to regular nightcaps of Harvey's whisky with lemon cordial and hot water (sugar is the one thing I can taste properly). But I reckon what I need most is a good long spell of warm sun, and there's no hope of that for a while yet.
        Instead I'm devoting myself to giving my food memoir one last going over before I hand it back to the publisher, Awa Press. And I had a nice little boost this week. I entered a story for the Grimm Fairy Tale competition (the first one I've ever written), called The Three Cheeses. It was one of the five also-rans singled out for praise by judge Kate de Goldi, as "a clever riff on the trialling of suitors within comtemporary foodie culture". You can read the winning story in the latest Listener, and Kate's report is on their website here. On such eagerly gobbled crumbs is a writer's life sustained...
        Here are this year's tulips. Nothing like the glorious ones in the botanic gardens, and not quite how they looked on the packet - it didn't show any white ones -  but never mind.