Joy Murray

Stuck

July 20, 2021Posted in degenerative disease, disability, gardening3 Comments

I’ve mostly adjusted to life using wheelchairs. I love them — my power chair and manual chair. I can go many places but not everywhere I want to. The power chair can handle a lot of different surfaces, but does best on flat paved ground. Of course, it does well on floors and indoor surfaces.

If it hasn’t rained too much, I can get around on grass, so I can get out and see my garden.

It’s been raining often lately, but it’s still quite warm. I’m seeing mushrooms pop up and they delight me. I want to take photos of them, but often they are in places I can’t get to.

A neighbor’s garden got an extra bit of zen from mushrooms (I was able to get close because this is close to the driveway)

A few days ago, I saw huge yellow fungus that had grown up overnight under the oak trees across the street. The trees are surrounded by an island of mulch. I went to see if I could get close enough to get pictures. There were about six big yellow blobby mushrooms. I tested my wheelchair on the edge of the mulched area, and it seemed to be able to move okay.

I flew across the mulch and got a few photos of two, then turned to get another.

I don’t know what kind of mushroom this is — a brain mushroom?

Then I wanted to go photograph the others and tried to move the chair. And it didn’t move. The wheels dug into the mulch, which was damp from the rains. I tried different speeds and pushed my weight around at different angles, but the wheels just spun.

I was stuck.

I felt like such an idiot. I also felt an acute sadness at not being able to follow my whim and capture pictures of these wonderous bits of nature.

I phoned my son and he was home. (I have a list of helpers I can call and he’s first on the list.) He came in about 10 minutes. It seemed a long time to me because my sense of stupidity and loss seeped into my entire being. I started to cry a little bit.

When my son arrived, he disengaged the motor of the chair, and pushed and pulled it out of the hole I’d dug myself into. He took time to marvel at the mushrooms. A young woman jogged by, but stopped to see if we needed help. She asked if the garden across the street was mine. It is. She’d seen me sitting on the porch.

“I always love walking by it. It makes me happy.”

It makes me happy, too.

My son walked with me across the street and made sure I was safely in the house. He didn’t chastise me for my foolish pursuit of images.

I sat out on my porch for awhile, surrounded by plants I have full access to. I’ve photographed them hundreds of times. Every year I still get a garden. The whole world isn’t accessible to me, but I have a good space.

This is disability pride month. I’ve seen people with disabilities online showing their amazing lives and ways of getting around. I’ve see people with disabilities let nothing get in their way. But I know they struggle, like me, with limits and barriers that no amount of pride or strength will break down. It’s not bad. It just is.

Within my limits, I know I have a lot of riches. I doubt if I were able bodied, I would have developed the eye for detail that made me notice the mushrooms. I couldn’t take the time to nurture my porch garden. The reason I love and respect plants so much is that they are rooted, immobile, but they grow, bloom, fight and flourish from their one small place in the world.

I thought about my list of people who will come help me when I get in trouble, need rides, get stuck. When I feel the limits of my life are unbearable, this circle of friends (I include my kids in the circle) come to put wheels on my troubles and we move forward together.

Friends are the best assistive devices. Friends are accessible. There is always an accessible bridge between our hearts.

I bought this celosia the day after I got stuck — something more to see up close while the mushrooms continue their lives at a distance

~~~

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On Libraries from Gwenn Seemel

July 18, 2021Posted in Uncategorized2 Comments

Everything I know I learned from the library. It was a refuge during my fractured childhood, and is still a place that expands my mind when the world seems small and mean. During the Covid quarantines it was great to be able to check out ebooks.

Here’s a link to a post by artist Gwenn Seemel on how libraries keep civilization civil:

https://gwennseemel.com/blog/2021/0715-civic-sharing/

Summer Daze

July 9, 2021Posted in UncategorizedLeave a comment

I love it when I’ve spent enough time looking closely at plants that they imprint on my brain and when I close my eyes, the shapes are present in the darkness. The stalks and veins, the rippled edges, the aura of growth. I compulsively take pictures of plants and that forces me to look closer at their shapes. For me, this is such a soothing thing. I identify with plants because they grow even though they’re rooted.

My son told me he was out walking and over heard three young men who looked very much a part of urban culture, sagging pants, expensive shoes, oversized shirts.

One said to the other two, “Have you ever hugged a tree?”

“Whaaat?”

“I hugged a tree the other day, and it felt like so cool. I mean, I felt really good afterwards, like I was high.”

“That’s cool man.”

“Yeah, mane. I guess those hippie-fucks were right.”

My son told the story to me after the magnolia tree next door got “trimmed” by the city — a straight brutal cut taking off half the tree so the power lines would not be damaged if a branch fell in a storm. They lopped off the lower limbs too, the ones I could touch and photograph from my wheelchair. It hurts me in a way that is unreasonable for a city dweller. But my son’s story cheered me up, glad there are tree huggers growing within the city. I just wish hippie fucks were in charge of training the city workers in tree trimming. That we had a city aesthetic that respected the beauty and necessity of trees.

My neighbor magnolia (over 100 years old, I think) is still huggable. I can’t hug it because the roots prevent my wheelchair from getting close enough. But I sit under it’s remaining limbs and I’ll still collect it’s pods, though the branches are now to high for me to photograph it’s flowers. There are other beloved magnolias in the neighborhood I can visit and touch. My neighbor tree will survive and maybe one day, some distraught young person will hug it, or climb it, to be still and let nature hug them.

It’s been a hot week, but it started raining last night and continued through most of the morning. It let up for a bit, the sky still gray and rumbling. But I got out on the porch and took these pictures.

*Variegated canna leaf with a Purple Passion plant in the back ground, and a little heart shaped leaf from the moonflower vine*

I took these yesterday, when it was hot and the sky was a clear hazy blue:

*Red Dragon’s Breath, Purple Salvo, and 4 headed dragon, guardian of the porch*

Almost every time I look at the pink hibiscus in the yard, there is a bee curled around the stamen, hidden deep in the flower. This photo caught one about to alight and find delight and sustenance in the brief bloom: