Bulbs left out by a neighbor. I’ll find out next year what color these are.

I was clearing out rosemary from the garden plot next to my apartment and trying to give it away online when, on Saturday evening, walking to the local supermarket, I chanced upon a bin half-full of gladioli bulbs. A stalk with withered blooms that had lost all color was the only clue for identification.

Some neighbor’s excess made a perfect match for the space my pruning had opened up. I didn’t take all of the bulbs, just five or six. They were in the ground by nightfall.

This would be a perfect little homily about how the universe provides — sharing and caring — except that later that evening I remembered that a cat had shit in my garden, several months earlier.

Instead of moving it, the cat’s owner had tried halfheartedly to cover up the poop — whether out of ignorance or malice I do not know. Thanks to the Internet (which is really great for questions like this) I learned that when a domestic animal has defecated in your soil, you should wait a full year before eating anything from the garden. That was kind of a bummer, especially because I had just planted a bunch of seeds a few weeks earlier.

But… oh well. They call it permaculture for a reason. I had forgotten all about those events. Just kind of got in the habit of container gardening.

The rosemary is at the far other end of the garden plot and it’s been almost six months. The herb only rarely comes in contact with the soil. Nevertheless, we had a lot of rain this spring and the plot slopes downhill.

Infinitesimally low risk is not no risk, particularly not when other people are involved. I was faced with the awkward task of messaging back the three people who had asked for some of my rosemary and explaining that they couldn’t have it after all.

When you have chronic anemia you pretty much always feel fatigued and sickly, so I was able to beg off for health reasons while still being perfectly truthful.

Still don’t know what I’ll do to fill the remaining space. I was thinking of maybe putting in some chrysanthemums or another fall annual.

It occurs to me that this is what we as women do. When nothing else is attainable we at least try to make things pretty. This, for me, is the essence of femininity.

Maybe it’s also why I make my living as a graphic designer. It’s hard to say.

This statue was placed in my garden about a year after I moved in, I don’t know by who. She presides over all of it. Beauty and ugliness, flowers and cat shit. I feel lucky to have a home and garden. Wish I could give more back.

I know some people who use GitHub’s Gist feature like a blog. I myself have only written one public Gist in my life. Here it is, first published on May 2, 2017:

https://gist.github.com/tessgadwa/47fedfaa053cb1d8f0b9d0aef82b565f

Project Eva was for a worthy cause — evangelizing open source.

I quote,

“The chief Gnostic error is to believe that the rest of the world can remain in Hell.”

“The world cannot survive half slave and half free.”

If the tone seems a little bombastic, bear in mind that I had recently left Christianity behind. Or to be more accurate, taken a several years hiatus. Considering that I once wrote a book on the topic, that was kind of a big step. It’s not surprising I looked to something else to fill the void.

Five years later, I believe that while FOSS is powerful both as a practice and an ideology, it is not the be-all and end-all of solutions, for three reasons:

1. Security vulnerabilities.
2. Decentralized systems tend to propagate and amplify bias.
3. Difficult to make economically sustainable.

I have written at length about numbers two and three, and experienced number one firsthand. That is not my point today. I am not sure that every system needs to be open source, or that the model translates across disciplines to areas such as engineering or the arts. I am not sure that it doesn’t.

I am also in a different place theologically than I was a few years ago. What strikes me now are the similarities between the communitarian principles and values of FOSS, and those of early Christians. I would love to start a coding organization for people of faith — but it’s going to have to wait until my body recovers. Right now it’s all I can do to work and cook myself meals.

Just over 14 years ago, on July 7, 2007, my life changed forever. What happened?

A microburst.

7.7.7

In the space of fifteen minutes, an unusual weather pattern took down three trees in the backyard of our home in Charlotte, North Carolina. One of them landed on a neighbor’s truck.

It seemed like every other summer thunderstorm. We didn’t even lose power. Until we ventured outside and saw the damage. Until we talked to the neighbors. Who were not happy, to say the least.

I generally avoid trying to befriend or even casually get to know my neighbors, and these people were the reason why. They seemed like the ultimate cool couple: the guy was a musician (although he worked for a bank) and his wife was a freelance photographer. She had accompanied me on my regular restaurant review column, to Meskerem, the new Ethiopian place in town. We had hung out a little bit socially and I was hoping they would get to be our new “couple friends,” in our neighborhood, instead of a 40-minute freeway drive away, like my in-laws and most of the book club that formed our core social group.

She was livid at the demise of her pickup truck.

“You should have taken better care of your trees!” she told me.

What could I say? They were alive and healthy. Until they weren’t.

One of the unique features of the property, and one of the reasons we’d bought it, was the patch of forest at the back of the lot, bordering on a stream and a right-of-way. In theory, we could have built an artists’ studio or a mother-in-law apartment out there. In practice, we were happy to just let the woods be woods.

That was the last time I talked to those neighbors. After that, they built a spite fence (homemade, out of chicken wire) to divide our properties. I was left to deal with the insurance claim situation — and the expense and logistics of removing the debris. My husband was a busy corporate lawyer. I managed all of our finances, all of the taxes, all of the household issues — from ascertaining that the copper wire had been stolen out of our exterior HVAC units to putting pressure on the Kingsdown Mattress Company to fulfill their warranty after documenting that our California King pillowtop mattress had sagged measurably in the middle (the dreaded “taco” effect).

I did all of this cheerfully, until 7/7/7.

That is to say, July 7, 2007. I used to read a lot into the significance of that date.

Now, not so much.

The angry neighbors. My feelings of isolation and abandonment. My husband’s affair.

I wanted to believe that there was a higher purpose in our separation — that everything happened for a reason.

If you are a recruiter or a prospective employer, this is the reason that my Career in Tech didn’t really get started until Age 32. Up until that time, I was freelancing and homemaking — expecting to be a full-time mom, announcement in the next family holiday newsletter.

Sometimes plans don’t go as expected. I always thought there was beauty, meaning, and purpose behind that. Maybe there still is. I don’t know. Maybe my husband was meant to be with the woman he left me for. She was beautiful. Jet black hair. Trim physique. Yale Law School grad. A coworker. Also married. She lured him with a Margaret Atwood novel. My command of Dan Simmons and William Gibson could not compete.

The affair started a few months earlier, while they were traveling in Alabama together, on business. The hotel accidentally sent them the “couples package” — roses, wine, and chocolates — even though they were were staying in separate rooms.

Ten or eleven years ago I would have told you that everything happens for a reason. That I was destined to be an entrepreneur. Or raise children with somebody else. Now I really don’t believe in destiny — or if I do, it’s not the type that you can read from a three-digit sequence.

Now I think we find our meaning and purpose elsewhere. Namely, in how we react.

The wisdom to know what we can change and what we can’t. The courage to act if we can.

That’s the only meaning that endures, after the acid bath of time has stripped away the rest. I think somebody made that into a poem. I think they called it the Desiderata.