patbertram

[patbertram]

Detachment

As you can probably tell from my lack of posts for the past couple of months, I’m losing my emotional involvement with my yard. Usually spring offers plenty of gardening photo opportunities, but lately I tend to just look and pass on by rather than document the beauties I see. Oh, I’m still doing the yard work, still waiting to see what blooms, still taking some pictures, but I’m doing so at a…

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Tulip Envy

In a garden, as in life, envy is not a good thing. One can appreciate the object of that envy, though one must be sure to be grateful for what one has, not what one wishes one had. That’s cryptic, I know. Or rather, it would be if not for the title of this piece. Tulip envy. Yep. That’s the truth of it. I was at a friend’s house the other day and was gobsmacked by the sight of her tulip garden.…

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Just One Word

  Tulips! *** Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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Fifteenth Anniversary

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to post a grief anniversary blog this year. It seems as if after a certain number of years, one should stop counting, but we do always count birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and other milestones, and Jeff’s death was a huge milestone date for me, so perhaps counting is still acceptable. If that’s the case: today is the fifteenth anniversary of that painful date. To be…

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Subverting Stereotypes in The Wheel of Time

Last night, I spent a considerable amount of what should have been sleeping time looking for bad reviews of the last three books of The Wheel of Time series. After the death of the real author, the series was finished by a stand-in author, who did an execrable job, and I wondered why none of those books rated less than a three-star review on Amazon. One reason, I discovered, is that a lot of…

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Occupying My Mind

This March seems interminably long, though I don’t really know why. I’ve had spurts of activity, such as the celebrations for my house anniversary (six years!) as well as an occasional visit with friends. I haven’t spent much time outside, and there really hasn’t been any reason to. After the first shy crocuses showed their faces, there hasn’t been much change in my yard. Some of my grass is…

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Look What I Found!

I was walking around my yard today, enjoying a bit of sunshine, and look what I found! Such a glorious ending to a few not-so-pleasant days. Oh, I’m fine, there’s nothing really wrong, I’ve just had to deal with changing my primary email address as well as wherever I used that email for online sites. This change wasn’t by choice and I’m not happy about it, but it was necessary. A few years ago,…

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Whatever Comes to Mind

I’m trying to get back into blogging, starting with perhaps one blog a month, but the problem is the same one I’ve had ever since I stopped blogging every day — nothing to say. That didn’t stop me all those years of being a dedicated blogger — I just wrote whatever came to mind. And what’s coming to mind, after seeing those dashes in my first two sentences, is that supposedly, if you see a lot…

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Update

After an early heavy snow, followed by normal than average temperatures, we’re now in a deep freeze. Later in the week, the temperatures will get above freezing, although only fleetingly. And then all too soon, it will be time to work out in my yard again. I enjoy these months of respite from the struggle against weeds and sun-dried grass, but I miss the daily gifts — the flowers that come up…

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What's New

I seem to be on a blog streak lately: every two months on the 8th without fail I’ve managed to find some words to post. Perhaps bimonthly three times in a row isn’t much in the grand scheme of the world, the galaxy, the universe, but it’s a lot for me. I’m lucky in that there isn’t much to write about. I lead a quiet, sane life (at least it feels sane to me) without a lot of trauma or excitement,…

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Here I Am!

Can you believe it? Here I am, and it’s only been two months since I last put in an appearance on this blog! From time to time, people contact me, wanting to know how and what I���m doing, which makes me realize that I need to post an update more often. I’ve had a note by my computer reminding me to do a blog for weeks now. I don’t know what the issue is — I suppose it used to be that I wrote to…

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Lily Forest

Ever since I heard of lily trees (a cross between an oriental lily and a trumpet lily) and how tall they grow (an average of four feet), I wanted to grow a forest of lily trees. To that end, I’d been planting a few lily bulbs every year, and this year, they decided to really pop. And oh, my! What a lovely mini forest! The lilies are large and vibrant, with lots of dark pink light…

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What I Am Doing

Obviously, what I am doing right now is working on this blog post, but beyond this moment, I am sure you can guess what I am doing — working on my yard! And beyond that, I am sure you can guess what else I am doing — recuperating from all the work. I never realize how old I am until I start aching, and then, it’s hard to believe I was ever foolish enough to think that just because I could do some…

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Fourteen Years

I’d stopped writing about grief a while ago — I stopped writing about anything, actually, except for an occasional post to give long time readers an update on my life. I certainly hadn’t intended to write anything else on the subject, although for many years, I felt it was my mission to document my grief so that others who were going through the same thing understood the truth: no matter how…

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Momentous March

There isn’t much in my life anymore that I want to or need to commemorate. There’s been nothing spectacularly good or spectacularly bad — just life. Living day by day. Enjoying being alive, or at least being at peace and accepting of what comes. I read, play games on the computer, exercise a bit, try to eat right, visit with friends occasionally. Just . . .live. If there is any month, though,…

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New Calendar

When I broke my three-year streak of blogging every day, I knew days would go by without my coming here to give you an update on my life, but I never expected that months would go by. I thought I would do a quick something for Halloween. Then when that day passed, I certainly thought I would participate in Blog4Peace as I have done for the past decade, but that day, too passed unacknowledged.…

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Being

Do not adjust your screens. This is not a test. I am really here. Well, virtually here. As much as I used to enjoy blogging every day, I now enjoy not blogging. I like not having to pay attention to all the thoughts parading through my mind, like not having to pick the most salient one or the most provoking one or the most emotionally driven one to explore in a blog post. I’m just letting the…