It has been a hot, humid and crazy August. I can’t believe it’s over and September is already knocking on the door.

Sometimes I feel like the more I try to simplify my life, the more complicated things become.

This has been the rainiest summer yet, and my poor garden paid the price. In reality, though, it didn’t do too badly.

I lost most of the tomato plants, but we’ve been getting Black Cherry tomatoes and a few Cherokee Purples, so that’s a bonus. I like to grow beans—the kind you dry and eat with cornbread after they’ve cooked all day. I planted four different varieties, and only two lived long enough to produce pods. I can’t tell you which ones they were because the rain also washed the permanent marker off the label stakes.

I think there will be enough for a mess or two of beans.

The chili peppers and jalapeños, on the other hand, took over the entire raised bed. Some rotted at first, but as the plants grew, they seemed to thrive in the humidity.

So we have peppers.

Lots and lots of peppers.

We made pepper jam. A shit-ton of pepper jam, actually, so holler if you want some. I don’t think it’s too spicy, but it’s probably not for people with sensitive palates either.

Next year, I plan to use the raised bed strictly for herbs and let the peppers live with the tomatoes.

The elderberry plant has taken over the other garden bed. Did you know those “bushes” are actually quite invasive?

Me either.

I cut it back last winter and it came back twice as big, shooting sucker plants out as far as twelve feet from its original starting point. It’s too close to the house, so I’m going to move it farther up the bank this winter. Hopefully it survives and can continue multiplying as much as it wants—just farther away from the house.

On the plus side, I got enough berries this year to make elderberry syrup and didn’t have to buy any.

The Luffa Is Coming for Us All

My surprise favorite in the garden has been the luffa.

It has been ridiculously fun to watch it grow, and I really think it’s another one of those plants that will eventually take over the whole world if you let it.

The flowers are pretty, and the bees absolutely love them, so you know they’re doing their job.

Once the outer green shell starts turning brown, the blossom end can apparently be popped off, according to all of the YouTube videos I’ve watched, and the seeds pour right out the bottom.

No need to ever buy seeds again.

You can peel the skin off, which exposes the luffa underneath, and then cut them into whatever shape you want to use for washing your dirty parts and pans.

I always thought luffas came from the ocean for some reason. I guess because they kind of resemble coral.

I’m excited to see what the finished product looks like.

The Summer of Shit

Speaking of things I never expected to learn about, explosive diarrhea is dangerous.

Not only is it painful, but it can cause major booty-hole irritation and dehydration.

I am speaking from experience.

I thought I had some sort of bug, but it lasted about a week. Then Dennis got it, so naturally, having successfully given it to someone else, I felt better.

Then I got it again and started questioning my life choices all over again.

Turns out, it was our well water.

Some sort of parasite had apparently made its way into the well after the copious amounts of rain and flooding we’ve had.

Who knew?

So we flushed the well and bought some fancy filters with the hope that it doesn’t happen again.

Lesson learned.

I can’t help but wonder how many people died back in the day simply from drinking water contaminated with whatever-the-hell-you’re-going-to-shit-yourself-to-death parasite this was.

The water looked fine.

It smelled fine.

It was so not fine.

Chickens, Worms and Other Bad Ideas

We currently have twenty chickens, and I think there are three roosters in the mix, which means we have one more than we need.

So far, they don’t fight, but I bet come springtime it will be on like Donkey Kong again.

I did learn not to get rid of all the roosters.

It was a pain in the ass trying to find fertile eggs to hatch, and we ended up with a lot of duds and the weirdest mashed-up backyard flock I’ve seen in a while.

One rooster is a naked neck. Another is some sort of Polish something-or-other with feathers on his feet. The third looks like the regular old Foghorn Leghorn rooster from Looney Tunes.

With twenty chickens, you’d think we’d be swimming in eggs.

Alas, it’s hot as balls and they refuse to lay.

They’re also young, so they won’t really start laying until later in the fall.

The quail, however, apparently did not get the memo about summer. They don’t seem to care whether it’s hot or cold. They lay every day, and I swear some of them lay twice a day.

Several of the older hens are super broody. They will sit on eggs forever, but the roosters aren’t big enough to do the cock-a-doodle-doo-doo properly, so the eggs aren’t fertile.

Dennis and I colored fake eggs so we could put them underneath the broody little hens and tell them apart from the real ones.

There is now a bit of a contest here.

So which group of eggs do you think was painted better?

I’ll let you decide.

Since we have so many birds and critters, I also got the bright idea to grow our own mealworms and super worms to feed them.

Because apparently we didn’t already have enough things to take care of.

We grind wheat to make our own bread, we have plenty of leftover bran that we can use for food and bedding. I purchased a Squirm Stack from the interwebs, and we got busy getting busy with worms.

The mealworms are much easier than the super worms, which have to be separated before they will pupate and turn into beetles.

We did all that.

We waited forever.

Those fat, gross worms that jump when you grab them eventually turned into darkling beetles that were supposed to lay eggs, which would turn into more super worms.

Except all the darkling beetles died.

And they smelled bad while doing it.

I don’t know what happened. I still need to email the worm nerds, but the whole process was pretty icky for me.

The chickens and possums love them, but they are a pain in the ass to raise and keep going.

I think I’m going to turn their little condo into a mealworm condo.

Unless I can figure out why they died.

And Then There Were Possums

Ugh.

Speaking of death.

It’s been rough in the learning-how-to-be-a-possum-rehabber department.

I was given eight little babies and told to feed them 3 mL of formula every four hours and keep them in the incubator.

So I fed them.

Popped them in the incubator.

Four hours later, two were dead.

Huh.

Weird.

I fed the others and put them back in the incubator.

Four hours later, three more were dead.

Well, shit.

I called the person training me. She didn’t know what the issue was, so I started doing a YouTube deep dive.

That’s when I learned I wasn’t supposed to give them full-strength formula. It was supposed to be diluted, or they should have been given electrolytes for the first twenty-four hours if they were dehydrated.

It was my first litter of tube feeders, and I wasn’t sure what a dehydrated possum looked or acted like.

I learned the hard way.

Two more died before I finally got my shit straight.

Then there was one.

Dennis named him OG because he was the original gangster.

Like Ike, he is now super-duper friendly and likes to ride around on my head.

I eventually got eight more babies about his size, so now I have nine.

All but one are out of the incubator and eating eggs, chicken, yogurt and vegetables in the outside enclosure.

The one still in the incubator is Scoots.

Scoots got her name because her entire back end doesn’t work.

I sent a video to the woman training me, and she said she didn’t know what was wrong and that I can’t save them all.

I’m seeing a pattern with her.

Another rehabber told me how to drop a rock on her so it wouldn’t hurt.

I just can’t do that.

Possums are prone to metabolic bone disease when they don’t get enough nutrients. Their bones can become soft and painful. None of the others have shown any symptoms, so I thought maybe Scoots was paralyzed or had some sort of nerve damage.

I was of the mind that she could still have some sort of life.

She has a hard time moving herself around, and Dennis and I even made her a little cart out of Legos.

But today I noticed that she doesn’t have the energy to pull herself around anymore and doesn't want to.

She just wants to sleep.

I hope she passes peacefully.

What We Remember

Speaking of passing peacefully, I’m still volunteering at the nursing home.

I met a woman named Maggie Mae—same name as our Maggie Mae, except she doesn’t kill chickens or play in mud.

She served in the Navy for twenty years, back when it wasn’t exactly cool for women to do so.

She has a sailor’s mouth and tons of cool stories.

At some point in her life, she had a bleed on her brain and underwent surgery. Since then, every day is a new day.

She is seventy-eight years old.

Maggie remembers that she has kids, but she doesn’t know how old they are or where they are now. She remembers her years in the Navy and working at a bank afterward, all the way up until the day she took medical leave for her surgery.

She doesn’t remember me when I walk in.

She doesn’t remember my Maggie’s name.

But she is always happy to see us and always happy to tell me about her Navy days.

She tells me about her dog, Izzy, who looks like mine.

She asks where Izzy is with a hint of fear in her voice, as if she expects a bad answer.

I always tell her that Bonnie, who used to be her neighbor, is taking care of Izzy.

My lie is rewarded with immediate relief.

She sighs, remembering.

She doesn’t remember that Izzy died five months ago.

I told her once.

Seeing that foul-mouthed, proud Navy woman cry was more than my heart could take.

So Izzy is with Bonnie.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

On another wing is Agnes.

At ninety-one years old, she has seen some shit, but she won’t tell me about anything that isn’t positive.

She talks about her children and grandchildren, who visit her often.

Agnes knows what day it is. She knows who I am. She knows where she is and exactly how many days she has been there.

She shares a room with another woman who is very vocal, and I swear they put the two of them together because Agnes was the only one who wouldn’t complain.

Agnes lived with her daughter until a fall caused her to break her back and her neck.

When you’re ninety-one and you break your back and neck, I guess they just say, “Well, shit, kid. You’re out of luck. Sorry.”

So she lies in bed, pretty much in a zero-gravity position, with broken bones and absolutely nothing to complain about.

She spends her days watching television and the hydrangeas blooming outside her window.

Agnes has been there for more than six months.

She knows she isn’t getting out.

She knows there isn’t a damn thing she can do about it.

And she chooses to be positive anyway.

Inspirational indeed.

It makes me wonder:

Would you rather be completely cognizant of what’s happening around you, or completely blitzed out in a nursing home situation?

I honestly don’t know which one I would choose.

Dying on My Own Terms

I recently completed a death doula program.

Sounds cool, huh?

Like I can wear a cape and fangs and carry a poking stick.

A death doula—also called an end-of-life doula or death midwife—is a trained, non-medical professional who provides emotional, spiritual and practical support to people who are dying and to their families.

Dying has always been a mysterious thing that nobody really wants to talk about.

But we are all going to die.

So maybe we should at least get to decide how we want to go about it.

I became interested in this mostly from the environmental side, but I’ve come to realize there is something incredibly comforting about having a plan for death.

It takes away some of the scary unknowns and powerless feelings and replaces them with dignity and respect.

I always thought that when we died, we had to go to a funeral home, get pumped full of chemicals, stuffed into an expensive coffin or burned to ashes.

That was just the way it was done.

Turns out, it isn’t.

Families handled their own dead and dying long before funeral homes became a multibillion-dollar global industry.

As a society, we celebrate laboring into life but tend to shun the idea of laboring out of it on our own terms.

I’m still learning the ins and outs of all of this, including the laws, but I’m increasingly convinced that talking about death doesn’t have to be morbid.

It can actually be comforting.

If you don’t have a death plan and want to talk about it, let me know.

I’m still figuring it out too.

Maybe that’s the point.

And Finally, a Little Luck

The little orange kitten went to his forever home.

He is living his best life now and is no longer terrorizing me.

His name is K.C. these days, but honestly, I think his name should have been Lucky.

There are no other cats where he was found, and there is a fox den nearby.

I’m glad so many of my friends are animal lovers, too.

It makes the cat-dispersal system much more equitable.

And after everything else August threw at us, I’ll take a little bit of luck wherever I can get it.

Maybe that’s what August has really been about.

Learning that things rarely go according to plan. Plants drown, water gets contaminated, chickens refuse to cooperate, worms die horrible-smelling deaths, baby possums break your heart, and sometimes a ninety-one-year-old woman lying in a nursing home bed has more perspective than the rest of us put together.

And yet, there are peppers in the garden.

There are eggs under broody hens, tomatoes still ripening on the vine, a ridiculously friendly possum riding around on my head, hydrangeas blooming outside Agnes’s window and an orange kitten sleeping safely in someone’s home instead of a fox den.

There is life everywhere, even when it looks messy and imperfect and occasionally smells terrible.

I suppose that’s enough.

Goodbye, August.

You were a lot.

Thanks for reading and for being here.

I know I tend to wander all over the place, but thank you for wandering along with me. Thank you for caring about the garden, the animals, the ridiculous things that happen around here and all the people who somehow become part of my story.

Life is weird and messy and sometimes heartbreaking, but it’s also pretty damn wonderful.

I’m grateful I get to share a little bit of it with you.

Until next time, take care.