Hell Dome
the giant letter H on the weather map was right over my neighborhood.
I want to write about my garden because it is the most satisfying thing I do lately. Challenging, but I don’t need to do much to yield results because I have put so much organic material in the ground after failing at gardening year after year due to midsummer droughts. I did nothing but throw cover crop mix around in 2021 and 2022 because my chest hurt all the time for no reason, and I worried I would die trying to rescue a tomato plant from the sun. When I finally went to the doctor about it, my chest x-rays were fine — healthy heart, healthy lungs. I had daily migraines, felt like I had the flu every day, like, muscle tone was gone, but tested well.
Before covid I wasn’t 100% healthy, my thyroid has always been an issue but I self-treated it with ashwagandha1. Long ago, I worked at a natural food chain and then a food co-op, fed my family fresh produce and homemade bread, rode a bike, walked, and took the bus (which sometimes involves running like hell to catch the transfer) for transportation, and that was how I fought my sedentary inclinations.
As news of the virus was starting to become more frequent and alarming I wrecked my bicycle when the pedal snapped. I needed to fix it and let my shoulder heal, so I walked to and from work every morning, a 4 mile round trip with many changes of neighborhood and scenery. As the sun came up I saw people leave their apartments to walk dogs, open the little store, push strollers, wait for the bus, scroll phones outside the Tex-Mex diner, sleepy eyed people, quiet mornings deep in thought, all of us in our worlds. We would soon recognize each other, nod our sleepy heads, make a little half wave so we don’t overwhelm so early in the day.
I wonder if the pandemic hadn’t happened would we know more about each other? The dog’s names? Would we give the babies birthday presents? What kind of breakfast tacos are popular with the business executives loitering outside the diner?
As we whispered rumors of locking down, I prepared orders for the university’s events like SXSW and campus recruiting weekend. Over the course of a week, we received cancellations, always after the food was made, until there was nothing to do but pack everything up. My co-workers and I shared everything left in the kitchen with the rest of the staff — ingredients, lunch bowls and sandwiches, cookies, pies, salads, all of it, cleaned the kitchen, locked the doors, and left forever. We lived on coffee shop commissary food for weeks when grocery stores had capacity limits and lines around the block for bread flour and toilet paper.
My family got sick. It wasn’t a mild case at all, it was hell and we were scared of dying and even more scared of the hospital, but thankfully we weren’t turning blue, so we wouldn’t have been able to go anyway. Recovering was challenging but our health improved over the next few weeks. When unemployment benefits kicked in, I used some of it to buy a mini pop-up greenhouse and tools and materials to do home repairs and build a little hen house. I wanted to design the yard using permaculture and rewilding principles, and was inspired by Mary Reynolds’ book The Garden Awakening. I learned a lot. The garden looked like a forest with the canopy trimmed just enough not to tangle in our hair as we walked around. I stretched in the morning, drank hot tea with honey, lemon, and ginger to help my throat heal, kept a water bottle by at my side at all times and filled it throughout the day. I measured and sawed lumber for several projects, started seedlings to plant in the Fall. I felt well enough to ride my bike, so I arranged for a no contact mobile bike repair appointment, the mechanic tuned everything, made adjustments, and fixed the pedal. It was good as new.
But I wasn’t.
Not far from home is a cemetery where I like to bike and take pictures of statues against summer clouds and flowering trees.
That’s where I was when my chest started hurting. I leaned on the handlebars of my bike for support, walking home in the July sun, exhausted and in pain, and I figured maybe I just needed to ease in, maybe I was just out of shape. It took a few days before I wondered if it wasn’t just heat and deconditioning that nearly killed me in a graveyard. I still don’t have the energy to ride my bike.
Everything in the greenhouse died while I tried to recover but I tried again in December 2020 to get ahead for Spring 2021. The polar vortex that froze Texas and knocked out the power grid killed those plants in February 2021, and nearly killed us too. My health crashed further. I barely remember 2021 -2022.
This year, orbiting the sofa while doing small activities and resting, I watch videos and read articles about desert farming. I try to accept that the growing season is different now and presents challenges that the old guys from the feed store in my childhood only faced a couple of times in their lives. It is every year now, the hole in the summer where everything green is eaten by grasshoppers or burnt to the ground widens, and it is the way it is, and something to learn to work around. I plant constantly, against all conventional advice, pack everything under a little spot of sun, jam homemade paper pots with leggy plants and the cheapest organic seed starter I can find into every in-between. Every few days, I poke deep holes in the ground for transplants so the stems root, pile up mulch so nothing dries out. We have water restrictions, so I water twice a week, and fill ollas made from clay flowerpots and old plastic oat milk bottles with holes drilled in them with buckets any time the soil seems dry.
I garden in vespertine hours with community cats and elusive foxes. It is over 100° for day after day since the end of Spring. I figure I have more time outside if I’m not cooking in the sun. Last night I sat on the ground between beds, listening to cicadas, playing with cats while planting small guilds, spot watering transplants so their roots join the roots of plants from days and weeks before. Hopefully dense planting is the answer, along with mulch, a clothesline in the hot part of the garden hung with sheer curtains and bedsheets, the solar washtub fountain that attracts the interest of vining plants nearby.
There are ways I guess, but they are slow and patience is a struggle. I couldn’t do anything last year. Sometimes if I do too much it takes a long time to recover, but I will go crazy if all I have going on is television and sleep. Maybe taking it slow and being as observant as possible will yield flowers, vegetables, herbs, roselles for red tea, and Halloween pumpkins. Maybe the garden will heal me before doctors can figure out what works.
I tried a lot of quack remedies and some of them work amazingly well, and none of them harmed me as far as I know. My health insurance deductable (when I had insurance) was $5000. Texas didn’t expand Medicaid, so ACA didn’t really help us much, and neither did our group policies. If I had a refund for the insurance I couldn’t touch, I’d be set for a year.