In The Blink of An Eye - In Ictu Oculi

A scalped specimen of hydrangea, looking down into where the
branches should be.

I finally found someone to help me with the heavy gardening chores.  He is just starting out and eager for business, so I get someone to cart around soil and mulch and do all the gardening work that my aging body prefers not to do.   That's the good news.

The bad news is:   he has a great deal to learn about old fashioned garden plants like hydrangeas.

Proof of his ignorance is pictured above.   Dear Readers, I am sure if you know anything at all about hydrangeas, you know that most varieties only bloom on old wood.  Say goodbye to old wood;  say goodbye to blooms.  For years.  It's as simple as that.

While I sat in my kitchen bingeing on season three of Shameless, a decade or more of old wood and all  the blooms that would have brightened my garden all summer long were snipped away.  Not a single bush escaped this fate.  If the weather had been better that day, I might have been out there supervising, and maybe, just maybe, I could have saved my hydrangeas from this fate.

In ictu oculi.  In the blink of an eye, all of it, gone.

I was dumbstruck as I wanted to use words like:  catastrophe, tragedy, idiot, moron, but I settled for: no, no, no. Didn't he realize I have been carefully tending to those hydrangeas for years, adding coffee grounds and tea leaves and aluminum sulphate in the soil around the roots, watering every night religiously in the heat of the summer so they would not want for a drop of water.  Now, they were all gone.

He says, no problem, they grow back, oblivious to my point that they won't BLOOM and that's why I grow them.  Maybe with the language barrier he didn't even understand what I said.  He's a nice guy, well-meaning and hard-working.  Too hard, maybe.  I am ok with a messy yard in April if it means it will be glorious in July.

Apparently in the NJ suburbs where I live,  messy yards are verboten and that's all he knows.  To him, they are ugly brown stems in need of removal.  He doesn't know what's in my heart; the memories of the hydrangeas of my childhood, giant mounds of deep green leaves covered with blue flowers, planted by my great-grandparents smack in the middle of their Brooklyn yard where I played happily as a small child.  He doesn't know that what I reach for in my own humble attempt at a garden is a mere hint of the security and beauty of the childhood that I know I can never touch again, except in my mind and heart.  He doesn't know that with his clippers, he just pushed it even further away than it already was.  What could you possibly say in the presence of a gulf so wide between us?

I know it is totally silly and I knew it at the time but I just couldn't stop obsessing over these plants.  Finally, I went online and ordered four varieties of hydrangeas that DO bloom on new wood and made myself feel a little bit better.  I will get blooms on my new hydrangeas this year and eventually those clipped hydrangeas will bloom again.  Time and money come to the rescue, as they do most of the time.

But then last Sunday something happened that time and money can never fix.  My beloved Tara was killed by my dogs while I was outside in that very same garden I fuss and fret over.  Another blink of the eye that I want back with every cell of my being and can never have back.  A few unguarded, careless moments on my part, and my little hen is gone forever.

I know that people who don't live with birds don't realize that each one has a unique personality, just as dogs and cats and all living things.  She was my five ounce green bird nazi.  She ran my household with her demands and her calls.  You never had to wonder what she was thinking or what she wanted.  She was bold, fresh and demanding, but she was mine.  I fed her with a syringe when she was a chick and had she lived, she would have turned eleven this year.

Undoubtedly, I was her favorite human.  She never wanted anyone else if she was within earshot of my voice.  I planned on spending the rest of my days with her as Hahn's macaws can live to 40 years old.  We would be two old, tough hens living our last days united in our arthritis and affection.

But that was not to be.

In ictu oculi.  In the blink of an eye, she was gone.

She loved me and trusted me and I let her down and she paid a horrible price and now I'm paying a different kind of horrible price.  I clipped her wings so she couldn't fly and when she needed to fly to save her own life, she could not do it.   She died while I chatted outside, totally unaware what was happening inside.  I cannot and will not describe for you the scene when I realized the mess on the kitchen floor was not the stuffing from a pillow, but my dear Tara's feathers.

In ictu oculi.  The blink of an eye, and a lifetime of regret.

So many times in the past I had merely bent over to scoop her gently off the floor when she fell from her stand and a gate was the only thing standing between her and the killing jaws of four dachshunds.   But I left her alone and somehow, she fell off the stand, the gate opened, the dogs lurched, and I wasn't there to rescue her.

She had the right to be safe in her own home, and I failed her.  I want with all my heart to turn back the clock and put the dogs in their crates before I walk out that door.  I want to take back that blink of the eye that robbed her of thirty years of life and make it right, but of course, that can never be.

When I am done punishing myself, and I will eventually,  I will set her spirit free and treasure the time we had together.  But right now, I am holding tight to both her little birdie spirit and my big human regret.

In ictu oculi.   In the blink of an eye....

It is something we need to be reminded of over and over again because we treasure the illusion of permanence.  We need the illusion of permanence.  Big things, little things, in-between things, in the blink of an eye, it is gone, as we will all sooner or later be.  Gone.

So renew your commitment to live in the moment, really LIVE.   Love and cherish all the people, and animals and things that give your life joy and meaning.  We never know when they or ourselves, will be gone in the blink of an eye.

In this season of Lent, we are reminded that from dust we came and to dust we shall return.  I used to believe this was a pretty crappy fact to be reminded of every year, but that was youth talking, when death and loss seemed so very far away.

Now, with six decades on these treads, I see it differently.  I am reminded that not only our happiness and joy, but also our pain and sorrow are like dust to be blown away in the sands of time.  When things feel the saddest, or most unfair or exhausting, I think, what will this matter when I am dust, and sometimes it helps to keep me from getting swallowed up by despair.

Tara, I will love you always, and I am so, so sorry.  I hope to see you again one day, and let you hang out on my shoulder, your favorite place to be.  I am fighting hard not to get swallowed up as I long to hear you call for me and to feel your soft and warm birdie body under my neck.  So long for now,  my feathered friend, until we meet again.

In ictu oculi.