The Honest Courtesan

We had another unusually-chilly spring this year, so I didn’t trust my tomato plants outside until this past weekend; if they can’t survive in the first week of summer, I’ll just have to throw up my hands in despair.  But though the temperatures haven’t been quite summery, even by Olympic peninsula standards, the days are as long as they’re going to get, and that means my seasonal anxiety is back.  As I’ve noted in the past, it isn’t nearly as bad since I moved to Sunset as it was in Seattle, probably because the quiet of the countryside counteracts some of it, while the noise and commotion of the city aggravates it.  But this year, it sneaked up on me because I’ve been attributing my emotional stress to grief.  It wasn’t until a week or so ago that I asked myself why that should be worse now than it was immediately after Grace’s death, or in the first few months afterward; I only just realized that as is typical for me, the anxiety runs under the surface and breaks out at weak points.  Expressed another way, the anxiety is acting as fuel for my grief, making it just as intense as it was in January and February, and more intense than it was in March and April.  But now that I’m done with Who in Review (and have even set up my store to sell autographed copies), I have time and space in my life to do some creative writing again.  I’ve already written two new stories for Lost Angels, with a third probably coming this week; it’s percolating through my brain, going through the alchemy by which grief, loss, and pain are transmuted into art, much like a compost heap transmutes organic garbage into humus for growing new plants.  When the tomatoes are ready, I’ll use some of them to make salsa from the recipe Grace and I developed late last summer.  And when Lost Angels is published, the pain I’m enduring now will have given rise to beauty I can share with the world.