I’m assured by the Worms that the apricot will probably survive the freeze. It never occurred to me that it would suffer in last weekend’s cold snap, because it was thoroughly leafed out. I called in to As the Worm Turns this evening, and learned that apricot trees all over the valley suffered the same fate. All the leaves are dead. Above, I noticed they were drooping the second day AF (after freeze); below, yesterday, beyond drooping they are drying up, along with the embryonic fruits. Lance and Lulu have never seen this before either. We all moved here roughly thirty years ago plus or minus. An orchardist called in right after I did, and reported that they lost everything, peaches, grapes, you name it. Everyone is optimistic, though, that the trees themselves will survive, and we’ll know more later if they’ll leaf out again this year.

It was time to strain the lilac blossoms from the sugar on Sunday, but they did not want to sieve. They must have been too damp when I mixed them in, and they weren’t pretty so I didn’t want to keep them in with the sugar, so… I brought my science mind in and dumped the whole jar into a pot with half as much water. The blossoms floated to the top, I skimmed them off, and boiled until…

Voila! Lilac syrup! It’s as thick as honey, I could have taken it off sooner, and it is just as sweet as honey, too.

My dear friend and teacher Cindy would have turned my age tomorrow had she not died almost two years ago. She left behind one bereft daughter, some precious friends, and many grateful and grieving students. As I usually do I sublimated my grief about her illness and death until it started to surface late last year. I find myself thinking of her more often, her insights, lessons, and example informing my work and life more consciously than I acknowledged at first. Everyone has their own way of grieving, and even my own is unique to each loss, but in general I tend to close down around it for awhile and then it seeps out over time. I do a lot better with it now than I did twenty years ago during my Decade of Loss during which my mother died.

It’s been 22 years since she lived her last spring. Really, time flies whether you’re having fun or not. Even before she was sick, I cherished this picture of her. It’s an old print that suffered water damage, which I scanned and optimized. She was younger then than I am now. She and her sister and their old high school friend Lucy (with husbands tagging along) had met for a long weekend reunion at some woodsy resort in West Virginia. Here she’s reclining on the bank of a creek with her cocktail, looking as happy and relaxed as I’ve ever seen her. I thought of her as I grieved Cindy this week, and felt compassion for her daughter who was so much younger than I when she lost her mother. All these feelings swirled up as I was reading this article that came in The Atlantic email yesterday, “On Losing a Daughter,” which brought to mind a dear friend whose daughter died just over a year ago, leaving three young children. I can’t imagine a worse grief for a parent, except I can and it’s one reason I chose not to have children. Just in case. Reading of this woman’s singular grief, thinking of my friend who lost her daughter, imagining Cindy’s daughter’s emotions as her mom’s birthday approaches, my own grief for my mother surged. All the grief of mothers and daughters swelled and swirled together in me. And the recognition that this little whirlpool of these particular mothers and daughters is a drop in the bucket of global grief, mothers and daughters just one current in the vast, bottomless ocean of human griefs.

Anniversaries can be hard, especially birthdays and death days. The grief cascade actually started last week when John’s birthday came around and I thought about him a lot, missing him, missing Boyz Lunch, and feeling for his surviving partner. And then the anniversary of Todd’s death just a year ago came a few days later, and my heart was with his surviving partner. And then out of nowhere came a wave of grief for Michael, who died that same horrible summer of 2020 when Raven, Ojo, Diane, and Auntie also died, and everyone’s world changed with the massive Covid casualties, especially those whose loved ones died of it.

And the grief this week just keeps coming. A dear friend had to euthanize her dear old big dog last week. He had lived a good long life but that is cold comfort in the moment when the utter absence shocks and wracks and keeps on shocking for days, weeks, months. In my awareness of and compassion for her grief, the loss of Stellar the Stardog rocked me again, in gentle waves, much calmer than the tempest that accompanied his passing.

Griefs can’t be compared. But they can crack our hearts open to empathy, compassion, and more love, with time. And they have no timeline other than their own mysterious meandering path, with steep hills of struggle, long lulling valleys, and all terrains in between. I still mourn the sweetest black cat Ojo, and have come to a revised demise: as Paul suggested last fall, it’s far more likely that he was killed by a great horned owl than by a mountain lion. I was reluctant to accept that hypothesis, but given all attendant conditions it does make more sense. It doesn’t help the grief quotient, though.

I worried this morning that I might have lost his sister Topaz. We’d started out the gate for a walk and she was right behind us. I didn’t look back for awhile but it’s not unusual for her to take a shortcut and catch up so I kept walking. Then I heard a shrieking screeching that stopped abruptly. Wren took off in a beeline back toward the house, and I followed with quick steps. She was nowhere to be seen. There was no evidence of foul play, but no sign of her. I stood by the gate and called in all directions, walked back toward the woods and called, nothing. If she were out there she’d have come. It was late in the morning for an owl but not necessarily too late; and there’s that little fox that’s been passing through frequently. The sound could have been a magpie screaming at a cat, a cat screaming at a magpie, a cat screaming at a fox, or a fox simply screaming. Or any number of other options. I was gonna be late for an appointment, so I had to keep moving. Maybe something had scared her and she’d run back to the house. I checked the front door, then the back. Whew! She was lying by the back door as if I were late for her. Whatever happened, it’s one of those rare circumstances where we actually won’t know more later.

But really I think the grief train started while I was reading Against the Machine. It came up in conversation with a dear friend last night who was responding to my post about it. Paul Kingsnorth broke my world view, I told her. That book shattered the last of my illusions, pulled the scales from my eyes, as it were. I’ve been grieving the world I grew up in, and thought we could still maybe save. I’ve been swimming in the grief of solastalgia for weeks, months, years. Earth Day is a great occasion to mention it. Solastalgia is “the experience of chronic trauma, longing, or hopelessness due to negative or distressing changes to the home or ecosystem you are still in due to the impacts of climate change, weather events, fire, or other environmental factors…. With solastalgia, the home you are longing for can’t be returned to—it is there but not the same.” I’m grateful there’s a word for it, and grateful that this feeling is being addressed in Tricycle’s annual online Buddhism and Ecology Summit, which I’ve been participating in this week.

And, in the midst of awareness from within this sea of grief, I am bouyed by profound, uplifting gratitude for the number of people I can call my dear friends. And each day I’m noticing and savoring beauty, moments of joy and laughter, and the company of animals both wild and tame. The ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows: Can I be grateful for all of them? Next post, a story about a black bird…