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I mowed the lawn today for the first time in years.

Given my general interests and demeanor, you might think that's a euphemism for something at least slightly dirty. It is not.

There I was, with a half hour till my flank steak warmed up enough to prick it and rub it. There I was, with a front lawn that was becoming long enough that even I thought that perhaps enough was getting to be enough.

Last year was a bit of a home disaster.

I felt distanced from the building and the land; I was unsure of my future here. I'd never gardened before, I hadn't had a lawn to mow in 15 years, and I wasn't sure I was going to be able to put those kinds of roots down here.

Last year, the tomato plants got planted, but never staked. If you don't stake tomato plants, they creep steadily along the ground like the vines they are. I was "harvesting" tomatoes on the other side of the garden from where we'd put them in the earth.

Everything in fact, just grew how it grew. We watered it sometimes. Sometimes we forgot.

Eventually we got around to tying up the cosmos, but only because we were worried one of the small children in the neighbourhood might mysteriously disappear. It got cut back long after Halloween; I know this only because the dying foliage was thick enough to use as a backdrop for spray painting my luchador boots.

We forgot what we planted last spring. Just a week or so ago, taking a quick survey, we kept finding new plants. Lily of the valley! Cosmos! Sedum! Halfway through tearing out a mystery plant that smelled like something that might make good tea, I remembered that the neighbour across the street had given me some bee balm.

Last year, I never mowed the grass.

Partially because we didn't have a mower and never got around to either a discussion about buying one of our own or talking to the neighbours about borrowing theirs. Partially because our next door neighbour, whose 3 feet of grass joins our 12 feet of grass, likes a shorter lawn and cut ours when he was cutting his. Partially because I just couldn't manage to care.

Things around here have evened out now. Have gotten better. Not that I didn't like it the way it was; I did and very much. But I like it the way it is now, too. Everyone's getting more of what they were looking for. You can only be thankful for that.

This year, we've planted seeds and watered them.

This year, I'm not walking by the garbage on the front lawn and thinking Someone should take care of that..

This year, Shelley talked to the neighbours about their mower.

Which is why tonight, while I waited for my meat to warm up inside, I push push pushed the clanky whirring blades through the lush grass of my front lawn.

I have not been outside for more than 5 minutes in the last 24 hours. And that was only to the corner of the house to put out the compost and the garbage.

What I have done, however, is

• make 1 pot of lentils and barley
• make 1 bread pudding
• scrub 2 bathrooms
• mop 3 floors
• read 4 stories
• wash 1,000,000 dishes
• drink 2 cups of coffee
• read 8 blog posts

My house was filthy. Not by 20 year old boy standards or anything. But by my mid-30s anal-retentive lady standards? Ew. I haven't done any real housework since about the first week of November, right around the time I was getting into the thick of the novel.

And that's no big deal, I know, except it was wearing on me and making me feel weird. I like to putter. Making some things clean and putting other things in their right places fills me with a sense of satisfaction and there-ness that I can't get in another way. The laying on of hands, as it were, as if my house and I were both living organisms, symbiotic.

I was already feeling weird, too. Still am, a bit. Uncomfortable in my skin weird, wavery around the edges. A restlessness.

It was very strange to go from writing 2000-5000 words a day to writing none. I feel the withdrawal symptoms off and on: an itching along the insides of my fingers; too many thoughts too fast to write down.

Every time I thought of sitting down to write anything though, my writing muscle balked. Or rather, I pressed on it and realized it was clenched up tight in recoil after being used so hard. It's loosening up slowly now.

And as always, I wish it were getting more flexible faster.

The personal experience I have of crack use is second-hand and of thankfully short duration.

Way back in the way back, for 4 years, I dated someone addicted to alcohol. I'm not talking the kind of person who'd probably be very uncomfortable if they had to go for few days without a few beers. I am talking about a serious and pernicious addiction that worked in a brutal and not-quite-predictable cycle.

He couldn't manage school, kept getting fired, had a hard time finding a new job. When he was drunk it was a nightmare with both of us out of control. The time he spent sober I spent sick-stomached waiting for it all to start again. It made both of our lives a fucking mess, and it took me two years of breaking up, trying to be friends and then taking him back to get him out of my life once and for all. The final straw was finding him drunk in my apartment with a teenaged runaway who lived down the hall.

The penultimate straw was crack.*

When he told me about this new habit he'd picked up - in the bathroom of a bar where he was drunk was the going story - I was only moderately surprised. I already knew that something had been going on for a few months. We lived in the same rooming house, went into and out of each other's rooms at will. He was suddenly gone most of the time, reappearing for a few minutes here and there, barely stopping to talk, in and out, at random hours. The only thing I could imagine was that he was cheating; I couldn't track him down to talk about it.

One evening, wanting a book, expecting him gone. I unlocked, fast knocked, and opened his door. It caught hard a few inches in with the chain pulled taut. It was dark in the room. I heard bedclothes rustling. A shifting sigh. He came to the door and leaned his forehead on the frame. The rest of his gaunt face was shadowed.

I have something to tell you he said.

That it was drugs made sense to me.The Other Woman spectre had been looming further and further away. He'd cheated on me before** and hadn't acted anything like what was going on. This time too, he'd gone through all of his money and an awful lot of mine, always for "rent" or "prescriptions."

You wouldn't think I'd be relieved about crack, but I was. I'd been handling his current substance for years at that point. Fundamentally, I didn't feel like this was much different. The behaviour, yes, and the scariness factor, yes. But not the core truth of it. He was no more emotionally stable when he was using just one substance. I was no more able to hold us both afloat.

After that conversation through the gap, he went into an outpatient clinic specifically for crack users. To the supposed wonder and irritation of the whole group, he found it remarkably easy to stop doing crack. Though he was a liar of pathological proportions, this still rings true. The erratic behaviour stopped and we went back to the more predictable drinking cycle, at which I was at least fairly practiced. He didn't go through money quite so fast. But he was around a lot more.

It didn't take many more weeks of that before I got him gone entirely. So far in my life, doing that is the hardest thing I've had to do.

++

This post all started because of the house across the street. It's always been a bit scoundrelly, but I thought of the tenants sort of affectionately that way. If they were scoundrels and sometimes loud, they mostly kept to themselves and seemed smoothed over, fairly agreeable with anyone who wasn't themselves or their asshole of a landlord. I thought of them as Our Scoundrels.

New people moved in a few months ago, and Our Scoundrels moved out because of them. They and the people who come because of them are a jaggedy lot, spilling into the backyard across and up and down the street.

I found out just a few days ago that it's a crack house. Lots of us on the street are upset, not so much about what is going on but how disruptive it is to the tenor of the whole street. Me included.

All of that is what I sat down to write about, my concerns with what's happening, but with my own reactions as well. But what's above is what came out instead.

I hope to get to what's going on now over the next week or two.

*I know. You'd think that taking up crack on top of booze might have been last straw material. Apparently, my head loved that wall.
**Most notably while I was in the hospital after having tried to kill myself. I was bitter about it for a long time and now it just boggles my mind.

I have no lights upstairs! Take that, lizard brain.

Steve dropped by this afternoon and stood around ready to call 911 should I electrocute myself. And also to hold the fixtures up because it make me nervous to have them dangling around on just the wires.

But they're down, the one in Mac's Room and the one in my bedroom. That was a surprise, slightly, that one, but the advantage of being up early on Sunday morning is that you get first crack at the ceiling fans listed on Kijiji. So out to Kanata I go, to save several 10s of dollars on a used one.

Apparently, so Steve says, electricity is not magic, and follows fairly standard rules. Like, when the breaker and the switch are turned off, there is no electricity. Crazy, what.

I feel pretty good about putting the new fixtures in my own self.

It's been a flurry of action Chez Butch for the last few days. When M-C moved out she, of course, took some of her stuff with her. Leaving delicious gaps in the cupboards waiting to be filled.

Except you can't just move shit around, or, if you're going to be moving shit around, and hey, it's spring anyway, why not clean the cupboards as well as reorganizing them.

Then because you are standing on the counter to clean the top shelf of the cupboard, you will notice how dirty the top tops are. Not only dirty, but greasy dirty. You will be grossed out, and you will have to wash them down before you start anything.

This will make you think of the range hood, and how it must look if the tops of the cupboards look like this. It will turn out to be not so bad as you might think, mostly because you don't turn the fans on much because you don't much like the noise. Which is why the tops of your cupboards are disgusting.

Eventually, you will think it's a good idea to pull everything out from under the sink, because it's poorly organized under there, and why, for god's sake, are you incapable of throwing out a single piece of fabric, let me tell you that not *every* tshirt needs to become a "dust rag," nor do you need 4 "cleaning toothbrushes," and by the way, it is not 1932, and also you can stop hoarding elastics.

In the end, you will end up at bedtime with your dust rags all over the floor, the air stinking of orange degreaser and almost smoking lard, the last load of laundry half put away, and the wet load still in the washer.

Man, if I got as much done every day as I did today, I would be unstoppable.

Working backwards, I went out biking on the path for an hour or so, then salad dinner with Shelley and Steve, then replacing the brake levers on my bike with Steve, then planting tomatoes and mint with Shelley, then brunch with Shelley, Steve, M-C and Alex.

It was M-C's going away brunch.

Last night under the pergola, a bunch of our drunk friends around us, I headbutted her in the arm and said "You're moving tomorrow."

We both looked a little... sheepish? Surprised?

"Yeah," she said. "I was talking to The Wren earlier and saying that the only person I'd ever lived with was MH, and The Wren gave me this weird look until I was like 'Oh, of course, and Megan.' But I sometimes forget."

It's true. I've lived alone so often and for so long that I'm just used to being that person who lives alone, over the past 9 months would sometimes say that I did and then catch myself with shame-faced recanting. Take my word for it, people think it's odd if you don't remember that you live with someone.

I am not an easy person to live with. I know this because I am much like my father in some of the ways that made him difficult to live with. That M-C and I have lived together so long not only conflict-free but entirely amicably is something of a joyful mystery to me.

Not that I'll be unhappy on my own again; I'm suited to it. But I've gotten used to having her around, her chair rolling above my head as I sit at the Archipelago, the rhythm of her typing vibrating through the desk, her floor and my ceiling. Her giant laugh and distinctive hand clap.

There was dirt. And scabby grass. And what was once, in someone's estimation, a glorious water feature that we always referred to as the Mosquito Love Nest.

And then there was mess.

A quagmire of mud and worms and potato bugs and slugs and small rocks. Sheets of black vinyl, sulphurous when pulled from the ground. Big rocks glued together with weird hard foam that looks like poo.

We're working here on the assumption that it needs to look worse before it looks better. The idea is that we're just going to deck over the whole damn thing. Fuck this patchy grass bullshit. I grew up spending hours mowing the lawn* and I don't want to cut any fucking useless lawn if I don't have to.

There's a garden in the back and a strip along the side: this for useful plants. Kale and nasturtiums and for squash so far. Wax bean and sugar snaps too. Some flowers just for looking at, maybe some morning glories.

I'd love some sweet peas.

They were Poppa's favourite, he grew them up a ring of chicken fence every year. We'd cut them and poke their wiry stems into the holes of the special crystal dish my gran had for them, fresh on the table most of the summer, their thinning indoor scent competing with the hoya over the table when it was in dripping bloom.

But grass, I have no use for grass.

In the end, there will be no grass, just decking with planters on casters, a table near the barbeque, under the pergola. Cold beer in the shade on a hot summer afternoon. Good food growing behind our backs, while we doze with our feet propped up.

*Amy or Dave: How long? I'm remembering it needing about 2 hours each from the three of us, but that seems crazy.