Promise

A British researcher has come up with a mathematical formula for calculating what will be the most depressing day of the year. This year, it was January 24th. His formula is as follows:

[W + (D-d)] x TQ M x NA

These are the seven variables of the equation: (W) weather, (D) debt, (d) monthly salary, (T) time since Christmas, (Q) time since failed quit attempt, (M) low motivational levels and (NA) the need to take action.
Though the days technically start getting longer after December 21st, lousy weather patterns set in resulting in dark, cold days. About six days into the new year, people have already broken their New Year's resolutions to eat and drink less and quit smoking; the reality of debt incurred from holiday spending is kicking in and any yuks and feel goods from Christmas have evaporated. Statistics from internet search engine companies reveal that the most 'googled' word is depression. And so, I have taken it upon myself to do something about this. For the sake of all mankind, I have created a cabin fever reliever video. Well, no, not really. I created a video that I think will lift the lowest spirits of the depressed and downtrodden, but I didn't do it for mankind. I'm sure that surprises you to no end. I was asked to speak at the opening event of Brunswick, Maine's Longfellow Days. The program, a benefit for The Village Improvement Association was called Gardens Galore. The gala shindig was held at The Frontier in Brunswick, a wonderful venue for sharing food, art, music and film. I gave a short speech and then played the video. Click on the sunflower and you can see the show. There is a full screen option on the Picasa site that this link leads you to and remember, give it a minute to buffer. Kick back with a comforting beverage and have your volume up. I hope you enjoy it. Below the video is my speech and my poem, 'Promise.'

From Videos

"How's February working out for everybody? Are you loving it? February is a tough month. It's not spring yet, but it sure shouldn't be winter any more!
The Village Improvement Association has put together a lovely program tonight that should knock the winter right out of you. At the very least, maybe it will talk you out of moving to Florida until next week.
When I was asked to speak tonight, a coincidence occurred to me. Today is my father's birthday and it's also my father-in-law's birthday. So, the next time you're kickin' February to the curb, keep in mind that it could be worse. You could be giving birth!
I'm Robin Robinson. I'm a gardener, a photographer and a writer. My gardens are on the south end of Phippsburg on the east side of Westpoint. And if you can figure that out, you're Daniel Boone!
I also garden for other people in Phippsburg, Bath and Brunswick. Most of what I do is garden maintenance. It's a program I call Weeding For Dollars. I love to weed! It's how I make my obsessive compulsive disorder work for me.
I've been gardening for thirty years and I come from a long line of gardeners. I learned my love of gardening and flowers from my German grandmother. She was one of the original members of The Village Improvement Association. The hawthorn trees on Maine and Federal Streets were one of her projects. She knew them to be tough, city trees from growing up in Munich. She grew up tagging long with her father, my great-grandfather while he conducted his duties as the last head gardener to the last king of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm.
My grandmother is about to celebrate her 100th birthday in March. She used to complain that she didn't like planting the center aisles on Maine Street in Brunswick because she thought it was indecent to have her fanny in the air all day with Alfred Senter.
I don't mind having my fanny in the air at all and will spend all day like that through the summer.
I am a compulsive plant collector. I can always find room to jam in one more plant. When I acquire something new, my husband doesn't bother to ask me anymore, "Where are you going to put it?"
Besides my family heritage, the keys to my gardening success have been my perseverance, general disregard of all the rules, and I have grown everything at least once and killed everything at least twice.
I am also a photographer. I took up photography because karaoke just wasn't working for me anymore. At least that's what my friends all said. I love photography as much as gardening. I photograph anything and everything. I tell people I'll photograph anything that can't outrun me, but I especially love wildlife and flower subjects. I live on the ocean and have a greenhouse. The greenhouse is part of what gets me through February! That, combined with my gardens and those of my customer's gives me virtually endless photography subjects. I've accumulated a photography catalog of over 100,000 images.
I'm pretty sure that fact combined with my compulsive plant collecting makes me technically a hoarder.
I'm a writer. I have a blog or website where I am able to combine all of my hobbies or some would say obsessions. The blog is a compilation of my photographs and essays mostly about the natural world, but sometimes about people. I have found the internet to be the perfect place to share all of the things I love to do with the world. There is a handout available with the web site address.
Because I have a degree in poetry and I also hoard books, in my personal library I was able to immediately lay my hands on works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I have an anthology of poetry called The Household Book Of Poetry. It was printed in 1878 when Longfellow was still alive. The book was intended to make poetry about many subjects accessible to families and children. It has lots of authors, but of particular note to me was that there were twelve works by William Shakespeare and eighteen works by Longfellow. Longfellow was a prolific writer and an eclectic guy. He wrote about diverse subjects from kings in Sicily to seaweed, but he especially loved the natural world. I'm pretty sure that if Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was alive today, he would have a blog!
I've put together a video for you for tonight. It contains a partial poem of Longfellow's and a poem of my own. The photographs are all taken in my garden or from my gardens. I think you'll see that I love the wildlife that lives within the gardens as much as the flowers. There is music to accompany the photographs, all 100,000 of them! Just kidding; the video is only thirteen minutes.
After the video, I'll take questions if there are any. And thank you all for coming tonight."
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PROMISE

Robin Robinson

In the dark days of December,

When winter has ground me down

From across the room I look at you,

And I remember

Every year there is a June.

Spend your life with me,

You asked

While all the lilacs flashed

The rhododendrons passed off

To the roses

And the lupines bloomed,

Pink, purple, blue.

You spilled your words,

Like singing birds

And surely as a season's progress

I said yes, I do.

When the moon's cold in December,

And the frost holds hard to snow,

From across the room I'll look at you,

And I will remember

Every year, there is a June.

ARTIFACTS

Recently, I went on an archeological dig. Like most digs, I didn’t really know what I’d find, nor know what I was looking for. Like Justice Potter Stewart, when asked to define pornography, I figured I’d know it when I found it. And, like most archeological digs, there was a lot of time spent in the dirt doing tedious things without reward. I conducted my dig in Brunswick, Maine at the home of my grandparents, where they had lived for seventy years and raised my father.
My grandmother just turned 99. She never expected to have to leave her home, but she went blind and developed dementia. No longer safe on her own, I had to put her in a nursing home. She will never forgive me for that. Then I was faced with cleaning out her house.
I loved her house; it was like walking into a cocoon, always warmly familiar and unchanged. The furniture never moved; the wall art stayed the same. My grandfather had collected over 2000 books filling the shelves specially made to hold them. The music stand, where my grandmother had taught hundreds of children to play guitar, stood in the same spot, though arthritis had stopped her playing decades before. Her guitars stood sentinel and oddly, held their tune. Sometimes, I’d pick one up and strum it.
Born in the early 1900s, my grandparents were typical products of their times as children of World War One. After ‘The War To End All Wars,’ they lived through World War Two, The Korean War, The Vietnam War and the Great Depression. My grandmother also survived the German Revolution. They lived conservatively, even meagerly, though they weren’t poor. Saving money was their way of life. They fine tuned not spending to a thin wavering line between art form and illness. They may have been the founding fathers of the ‘Reduce, Reuse and Recycle’ campaign. Not a rubber band, piece of tin foil, string, plastic bag nor piece of paper that came into that house, ever went out. All of it was reused or saved in the event that it might be. They had good reason to believe in frugality, to scrimp and save in case they would need something later. Life had taught them that though times might be good in the moment, without warning, it would all go to hell.
My grandmother had declined gradually, but leaving her home was sudden. Fifteen years of depression, old age and blindness crept up and closed in around her. From the kitchen to where she slept, there were mere paths between piles of papers, clothing, plastic containers, dead geraniums, and god only knows what else. God, and now, me. Getting through it was a nightmare faced often by adult children. Additionally, for years my grandfather said if anything happened to him to check under the attic floor boards. Then, later, my grandmother said she had hidden a year’s income in cash in the house. I started in the attic which was full! I found bundles of letters from my grandmother’s family in Germany. Slammed across the fronts were censor’s stamps, swastikas and postage stamps bearing Hitler’s profile. Most of them had sections cut out or were struck through with black lines so the text couldn’t be read, letters sent from a war zone to the one person who got out. They are all in German; I don’t know what any of them say. But I can clearly read the ugliness on the outside. And sadness. I can only imagine the pain and fear that those letters caused my grandmother. My father always said that his parents didn’t love him. Yet, in the attic, I found packages of his school papers, drawings from when he was five. Who keeps that stuff if not a person who loves someone? It took me days to work through all the junk in the attic. Under the floorboards, I felt through the vermiculite insulation - for what? It took weeks to leaf through the books and sort through the piles, to examine the shards left from their lives. I found unfilled prescriptions for antidepressants. I found a stack of flight sickness bags from Iberia airlines circa 1975. I found 25 palm sized diaries cataloguing the day’s temperature, the price of chicken, the cost of fuel, but not one thing personal. I found Christmas cards from thirty years before. If I listed it all, it would be an endless enumeration of nothing. It was a terribly demoralizing, tedious archeological dig with no holy grail at the end. I had come to hate my grandmother’s house and everything in it, but I had to carry on. So, I commenced to the sewing room. The room was her sanctuary where she was assured of privacy. There was a large, built-in drawer stuffed full of hoarded fabric dating back to the early sixties. It was so tightly packed that it was the one place in the house where mice hadn’t traveled. I shoved my hand between layers to pull out a pile. Feeling paper, I pulled out a tri-fold brochure. Scanning the text and opening the folds, I shrieked, “Oh my God! It’s PORN!” Men and women were doing all kinds of stuff to each other inside that pamphlet; it was the hardest core pornography available! I had hit the mother load after all - my grandmother’s buried treasure!
I had hoped to find something that would make sense of the pain and confusion in my family. Or at least to find money. But, I didn’t. What I did get was this lesson: We are all going to leave things behind. No matter how old we get to be, we’ll leave when we least expect to. So, consider what you’ll leave, even if you don’t plan on going soon.
I hope my grandmother lives to be 100. I visit her regularly, but she doesn’t know who I am any more. There is a flicker in her eyes when I come, though. From deep inside, she still remembers to hate me. I wish she had died fifteen years ago, before her blinds were drawn against the sun, before I found her porn, while her house still smelled like cake.