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The Rust Belt Ascension

The Rust Belt Ascension

Last updated on: May 18, 2023 at 5:23 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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The Rust Belt Ascension 2023-05-18T17:23:41-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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a vegetable garden

image via pixabay

I went to the backyard to watch the garden grow.

The potatoes are just barely poking up out of the soil in the planters. Watching potatoes is comical. They stay underground just long enough that you think you’ve made a mistake and they’re not coming. And suddenly– there they are. After that it’s like Jack and the Beanstalk. You can’t re-bury them fast enough. They sprout above the ground again the next day.

There are a few spikes coming up where I planted the popcorn. That’s got to be grass. Corn looks just like grass but takes ten days to sprout; it’s only been a week.

There is a blossom on one of the squash already, but it’s only a male blossom. We won’t be eating zucchini until late June.

I managed to get three heirloom tomato plants by skimming the grocery money: a Cherokee, a Mr. Stripey, and a Beefsteak. Red, yellow and red, and purple. I planted them in the middle of the garden plot where Michael couldn’t accidentally bump into them. He’s allergic to the vines.

No sign of the sunflowers I planted next to the corn, yet. I couldn’t afford to donate ten dollars to the heirloom seed bank to buy the great big towering Mammoth Grey Stripes, but I had some leftover Autumn Beauties from last year. We’ll just see if they sprout.

I will use the other sunflower seeds I got yesterday to grow plants in the community garden.

Maybe that will be it.

I’m so low on resources, I just don’t know what else I can plant to fill the empty spaces. We have nothing. We’re behind on everything. Even with all the wonderful help people gave toward the car, we have 98% of a car, half of rent, and no end in sight. And I’m exhausted.

Michael came around the corner with a great big pile of branches from those trees, the trees we should have trimmed years ago but the stalking neighbor wouldn’t let us do yard work. I don’t know when the landlord’s handyman is coming to get properly rid of them, but Michael cut off as many overhanging branches as he could so they’d stop destroying the porch. He’d come around “her” side of the house by the sink hole, so I thought it was the neighbor back from the dead. He started breaking the branches down: leaves and twigs on the compost heap, branches in a brush pile. I don’t know what we’ll do with all the brush. We can’t keep it here. Maybe we’ll have a bonfire after they’ve dried out.

Adrienne came out to watch the growing pile of branches. She is bored these days, because we’re finished with homeschooling. There will be an assessment this summer and a few standardized tests, and then she’ll be going to a public middle school. This is the right choice. I’m sure it will be good for her. I exceeded my capacity to teach math about halfway through the textbook this year and I don’t have the resources to treat dyslexia. Besides, she doesn’t have any friends on the block anymore and we don’t belong to a parish. This is a way for her to meet people.

Still, I can’t help but mourn for a dream that died. That person I wanted to be: the modest and loving homeschooling mother, homesteading on a nice triple lot with her seven beautiful children, beloved by a parish community that supports her, is not real. She’s never going to come true. This is the year she’s really stopped being an aspiration and become a fantasy, like the fanfiction Tolkien elf I’ve been making up stories about since I was twelve. That Mary Pezzulo is not possible. Adrienne Rose is a thousand times better than I hoped a child could be, but she’s not going to have the childhood I planned. Her younger siblings, the ones I longed for, the names I wrote in my diary for possible babies: Therese, Damian, Shirley Ann, Gabrielle, Mishael, Chaeli– they aren’t real. What’s real is this family, the one that I have, for better or worse.

Somewhere in all of this I realized it’s Ascension Thursday.

It’s been forty days since Easter.

I’ve lost track of days since I’ve only been able to go to church once. Today is the feast of when Jesus said “Surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age,” and then he up and disappeared.

I’ve never been sure how to celebrate this day, even back when I celebrated feasts.

Why isn’t this as terrible a day as Good Friday?

What do you do with the day the Lord disappears from your sight? I couldn’t tell you.

All I know is, I can’t MAKE myself go back to the sacraments. Willpower isn’t going to cut it. It will take something I don’t have. Either God will intervene to help me, or God will do nothing. It’s out of my hands.

All I know is, I can’t save anybody. I failed a whole family, a mom and her five kids. I failed my own family, the children that never came to be. I probably failed Adrienne by holding onto homeschooling a year longer than I should have. I failed myself. I am someone I never wanted to be. I am a failure.

All I know is, the potatoes are peeking up over the first layer of topsoil, and we might get some corn sprouts soon.

Maybe we’ll get the car back after the weekend, and go to the lake for a swim.

Maybe we’ll grow some colorful sunflowers, and maybe they won’t sprout at all.

Maybe that’s enough.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

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