Garden Hustle

If anyone ever told me I would be approaching 60 and starting a new chapter I would have laughed out loud. I have done most everything I ever imagined. Traveling the world and finally having a baby are the top two.

I lost most of my business income 3 weeks into COVID. After nose diving into depression and self loathing I picked myself up. Sometimes I still visit sadness but just to say a quick hello.

I started planting, creating, selling from a place inside me I never knew existed. I don’t do it for the money; I do it for the oxygen.

For now, I have a new hustle. It is called living, growing, inspiring based on the cards I have been dealt. I think I am holding the two Jokers. I am good at getting better.

I pray my hustle inspires others and thank God Momma raised me to stash money in my bra.

Waiting on Superman

The only constant are my prayers. Everything else about the past year has bordered on a shit show. I don’t have one book out of this, I might have three. Though I really only want a testimony.

Depression, family illness, taking in a homeless girl, losing my contracts, anxiety, starting an online business, a first garden, a garden cookbook, helping others by breaking my bread in two, three, fourteen pieces.

I want this to be over. I need this to be over. I will be 57 this year and I can’t imagine not having joy in my corner again. I am used to being on top. I am not used to throwing caravan parties for twenty one year olds and god-forbid two upcoming graduation celebrations.

I am not just feeling sorry for myself, I am feeling sorry for ALL of us. This includes a nation held in suspense by a silent killer. The worst kind. My family is bursting at the seams to move beyond this while also being too in love with one another to make a false move.

Inaugurations spent at home. Zoom meetings that went nowhere. Virtual hugs. Air kisses. Elbow shakes. The shit show that has no immediate curtain call.

Well it had been awhile since I purged my thoughts. I had to. My sadness vessel was getting full again. And the thing worse than surviving this is surviving this in a million shattered pieces.

Soon it will be spring again. Just outside my window there is a garden calling my name. We will grow together.

Bored. Lonely. Afraid. Bored. Lonely. Afraid. These describe the good days. The good days because and other days I add angry. These describe days that I don’t talk about much. The days that it is best just to try to shift the atmosphere. Turn off the news. Pull the shades down on the images flashing across the screen of my mind. Put all my will into rewinding these confusing days and dreadful moments forever etched inside me. That is COVID to me. At the prime of my life that is what you, the pandemic have reduced me to. Bored. Lonely. Afraid. And sometimes angry.

But Alive.

I have always been in control. Bored lonely afraid angry replaced with lively enthusiastic driven optimistic. I lived in a world of good input good output. Expect the best out of each day..

March 3rd of 2020 started as any other busied day of my life. I had just returned from a DC trip and recently been invited to speak to high school students in Atlanta and give a speech to minority small business owners in another part of the city. Hugs, Handshakes. Pictures. Close encounters.

I remember one young Asian student wearing a mask when I spoke to her small group. She looked so unwell, pale, cough, frail. She said she had the flue. I politely asked her to keep her distance not wanting to get the flue myself. We stood close enough for a group picture but that was it.

Just under two weeks later, on the he evening of March 3rd, I was relaxing texting a friend while also playing Words With Friends. I asked my son to tell his father, my husband, I wasn’t feeling well. Over the next ten hours I became sicker than I care to remember. I made my husband swear a promise to me No Hospital. I had started hearing more of this thing called COVID and I knew just enough to plant that first kernel of fear.

At this time GA had less than 15 “reported” cases.

My feelings of lonely bored afraid would cascade from here. But first I needed to be fired. A COVID firing coming out of nowhere.