Serviceberry season

On the other side of my computer screen, perched on a narrow branch right outside the window, a robin is balanced, stretching her neck out and down, nibbling on serviceberries. Before I’m done writing today, I’ll watch a chipmunk scramble across one of the shaking branches and reach his little hands out for a lipstick pink berry.  

Last year at this time, I watched the same thing, and the year before, too. We’ve been in Canada for three years now, and we’ve started to learn the rhythms of our house. We have come to expect the baby duck parades in the late spring and the burst of peonies in June. Our metal crank apple peeler is ready for October. 

We’ve grown accustomed to the less charming patterns, too. The wall cracks that grow in the front room during the coldest days of February. The dry air that splits our lips in January and the thick July humidity that fills our basement dehumidifier twice a day. 

Last summer, I spent weeks tracking down a smell upstairs — placing bowls of baking soda in the corners and lighting matches — only to realize that the smell of the lake seeps through the vents. And sure enough, around June 15th of this year, the smell oozed in again. Oh, you’re back, I thought. 

I like knowing our house this way. These rhythms mark the years. Last year, as the robins gnawed on serviceberries, I was interviewing my first round of disabled parents for Unfit Parent. Now, I’ve written a draft. I still have plenty to do, but it’s heartening to note that progress. 

When I sent my draft off to my editor, I considered the process of writing this book so far. I’ve shared in an earlier newsletter how I’m doing this work while disabled. Basically, I break it up into between one and three 20-minute increments every day. I never write more than one hour per day. But, that hour takes many hours to recover from. 

What’s that adage? How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. In my case, it’s one bite per day. There are two hurdles to this approach. One, it can feel unrewarding to get so little done each day. There is not much of a dopamine rush from completing a few paragraphs or cleaning up a few pages of citations. Two, to write a whole book in this way, by a deadline, I have to write in less-than-ideal circumstances. 

When I’m up at night with nausea, I still wake up, take my medicine, and write. When the air was so thick with smoke that we could hardly see across the bay, I turned up the purifiers, stuck in some earplugs, and wrote. When Khalil wants to watch The Little Mermaid, I say I’m sorry, but I have to work, and then I lock my door and write. Every single day there has been at least one very good reason not to write, and, except for a few instances, I wrote anyway. I have spent a great portion of the last year recovering from writing. 

There’s an element of hustle culture here that I don’t love, but it feels like a disabled slant on hustle culture. Plodding culture? Trudging culture? If I stop trudging forward, I’ll never finish. I feel grateful that none of the obstacles have been insurmountable. To have a year of minor indignities and inconveniences is a gift. 

I’ve only now remembered another element of serviceberry season. A robin just landed on the railing outside my window and faced me. “Hello,” I whispered. 

It stomped its feet. It looked me in the eyes. 

And just like last June.

It took a shit.