Schmother's Day

The SO made us reservations.

Not to his mom's house, which is where we usually end up on Mother's Day, and which is usually fine — I genuinely like his mom, which is not something everyone gets to say, and I know that. But this year he looked at the calendar and looked at me and made us reservations at the campground instead. Friday through Monday, even though we'd both need to work some Friday morning and we'd need to leave Sunday.

Chilly Saturday evening sunset, and a shoe, just in case you like that sort of thing.

Mother's Day is my least favorite holiday in the world. I want to be clear. I am not dissing mothers or motherhood or whatever other hoods. My particular circumstances in life, both now and in the preceding years, have made this NOT the best holiday ever, and I am not a fan of holidays in general. Long story. Much trauma. Nobody actually died, so that's a plus.

I have a mother who was pretty shitty at it, and I have a kid who barely speaks to me, and every year the whole month of May just sort of blows. This year I'm also processing friend grief that came to a head recently, and I'm not ready to talk about that yet, so I won't. But it's there. It was there all weekend, in the way that things are there when you're trying to just be somewhere and not think.

The SO got me a campsite by the water and three cards, one from him and one from each of the dogs. Because, he said, "You're a dog mom too". I have a good one.

Sam on patrol.

The first camping outing of the year, we opt for the closest campsite on the lake, which also happens to be my favorite. That way, if we forget something - and we ALWAYS forget something - it's only a couple miles back to the house to grab whatever it is. (This time it was toothpaste and the proteins I'd planned to cook for dinner and most of my sanity.)

Our usual site on the point was taken, so we had a different spot — still a nice view of the lake, still fine. Saturday was chilly enough to keep us close to the fire pit that thankfully we remembered to bring. Sunday took half the day to warm up. We had a neighbor with some kind of chocolate lab mix who was visiting from Florida, and about every four hours one of us got pulled into a twenty-minute conversation with him. Chatty. Friendly. Unavoidable. The dog was reactive, he said, but I'm pretty sure ours were worse. People think you have to have a friendly dog. I don't think that.

Sunday afternoon we took the new CoolCabana down to the beach area and set it up and had the whole place more or less to ourselves. The local sailing club was out — little sailboats dotting the lake, making their way past us with varying degrees of success.Unlike the day before, there wasn't enough wind. We watched them for a while. I cried some. Not about the sailboats. We talked some. Also not about the sailboats.

We came home Sunday evening tired in the specific way that camping makes you tired, which is different from regular tired and better, usually. We didn't unpack anything that wasn't strictly necessary. Pillows. Toothbrushes. Deodorant. DoorDash brought us Whataburgers. We watched TV and went to bed.

While we were gone, nothing waited for us.

The gardenia out back — the one that fell over in one of the freezes we had this spring, just tipped right over like it gave up — is flowering. I don't know how. It's still sideways. It's flowering anyway, just on the top — er, what's now the top but used to be the side?

The lilies I came home with when I left for cigarettes a while back are starting to bloom in the front yard. The onions are growing. The peppers are making peppers. The cabbages are doing whatever cabbages do, quietly and without drama. I forgot to plant one of the tomatoes and it didn't matter, because the garden doesn't care about my organizational failures. There's half a flat of marigolds still sitting in the plastic where I left them, and last year's wildflowers are coming back up through the weeds on their own.

The wild blackberries are taking over again, thorny and invasive and completely unbothered by my feelings about it.

There have been years in the past when the SO has said things like "the way you plant things" and "your gardening style". I think those have largely stopped because he's either figured out that it isn't really a style of any kind or he's figured out that the plants don't care how close they are to each other and the strawberries are going to hop themselves out into the yard and I'd have to literally dig everything up and start over every single year if I wanted it to look mildly organized and frankly, I'm not doing that.

Inside, the air layer cuttings in the spare room have new growth. The tops are growing water roots in their vases like it's their whole job. The monstera I built a trellis for pushed out a leaf so big it's almost embarrassing. Everything in the water prop tray is so thoroughly rooted I can't even pull the little holders out of the water anymore without risking the roots — which is, honestly, a good problem to have.

I didn't do any of that. I was at the lake, crying a little, watching people struggle to sail.

Everything just kept going.

That's the thing about this time of year — about any of it, really. The plants don't need you to be okay. They don't wait. The gardenia doesn't know it fell over. The lilies don't know about the friend grief or the holiday or the bifocals I picked up this week that are supposed to help me see both close and far at the same time, which sounds like a metaphor I'm too tired to finish.

Things grow. You come home. You eat a Whataburger and go to bed.

Plants that can live without you.