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As some of you may know, I have spent the winter in Italy, taking care of my Mum.
Winter and I don’t really mesh well; in fact, not at all. Add to that a large, charming, but old house which would never be heated properly (my Mum and I called the piece of hallway between the bedroom and bathroom “going through the North Pole”); a north-facing bathroom with only a bath tub but no shower; limited transportation; plus caretaking 24/7 for a kind, sweet and loving, but extremely emotionally needy person without ever having any real time or space (mental or otherwise) to myself.
Not to mention that I had not exactly arrived there after a three-month vacation in the tropics, but after a difficult year of challenges and heartbreak. Plus jet lag!
Let’s just say there were days when I thought I would explode. Or implode. Or die.
The upstairs bathroom was my refuge on cold days, as I could just shut the door and find respite for a few minutes. The garden was my blessed escape on warmer ones.
To be fair, not everything of my extended stay was unpleasant. There were good things, too, of course, good moments. It was being a prisoner of the non-stop 24/7 day-to-day with hardly any breaks that became too much.
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If any of you have ever been, or maybe are now, caretaking for someone, I know you know. Know that I see you, hear you and feel you. For as much as you can love someone, caretaking for someone takes a toll, especially when they are uncooperative and expect you to waltz in all cheerful and happy, wave a magic wand or hand them a magic pill and fix everything.
Since I left, four people are busy taking care of all that I did by myself for almost four months.
I am not a caretaker. I do it well, but it is not something that fulfills me in any way. It is, in fact, something that really tests the reservoirs of deep patience I have developed over the years. The practical aspects are not fun, but they become manageable with a bit of organization. It is the constant (unconscious) mental-emotional games that really drain me.
I am also an empath: I perceive everything. Therefore I thrive and recharge my batteries in solitude, not constant company and demands for attention.
I found myself holding everything in, doing my best not to explode, or implode, so as not to show my exhaustion and irritation. I would do my best to look at my sweet Mum and see the kind, worry-wort yet playful woman who had brought us up so lovingly, not the high maintenance child Princess (and now graduated to professional worry-wort) she has allowed herself to become.
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I would remind myself continually that she had been deeply wounded as a child, and she still carries the scars to this day – despite my best efforts to help her over the years. I would also remind myself that, as my brothers and I had lost our father (June 2024 – yes, that, too!), she had lost her husband and reference point for sixty-two years.
All the lectures and guilt trips that anyone from the outside might try to counter argue with, I gave to myself daily. Not that this changed anything, or helped me feel better.
Every day I would pray: “please don’t ever let me become like that; please don’t ever let me become like that.”
But then my history is different, my world so much bigger. I am grateful for that.
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As I am deeply grateful that my Mum is doing so much better, by the way, and would be doing even more so if only she put a tiny bit more effort and appreciation into her own wellbeing and life. Not a lot, just a tiny bit: like saying yes to something occasionally, instead of always no. Or worse, “Yes, but….”
She has some physical frailties and challenges, which she can manage well overall. Mostly it is her mental attitude that could use a refresh. I have been trying for more than twenty years to help her accomplish that. You know the old saying: “You can bring a horse to water….”
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Add to that my aunt next door (same house), who has always been a high maintenance, emotionally needy, manipulative empress, and now, at 94 years of age and riddled with her own issues, saw me as her personal savior and wished for me to be her caretaker as well. I won’t go down this particular rabbit hole as it would require a whole post by itself, more a book actually; no, a tome.
To a degree, she is more practical and invested in her own wellbeing than my Mum, and does not expect magic pills. She also loves me, a lot I am sure, in her own way. Yet, at this point, expecting her to change would not just be a waste of energy, it would be insanity. I gave up on that many years ago. Now I just dip into that patience I mentioned earlier, and handle the fallout as best I can. We all do, don’t we.
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By the way, I am allowing myself to write the above mini “rant” not in an attempt to show my Mum, whom I deeply love, or my aunt, whom I also love, in a bad light, and possibly collect some sympathy along the way, not at all. Things are what they are, and I am sharing the tormenting part of this experience in order to offer an honest perspective, and also because I feel it might help even just one of you, who might be going through the same thing, feel understood and validated.
And if you are going through something like this, please don’t be all self-sacrificing like I was: take some time to yourself, some days off here and there. Honor your needs, maintain your sanity.
Since I am talking about honesty, I have to add that I arrived in Italy with concerns of my own on my mind. Had this not been the case, who knows, I might have been able to handle all this intensity with more lightness.
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How did I survive? With the help of a few good friends (angels in disguise, really), and a determination I seem to continue to have in spite of all the challenges of the past few years. Sometimes I wonder where it is coming from. All that plus the support of Mother Nature: the Elementals, the trees in the garden, and the squirrels, the robins, the neighbor’s cat with his nonchalant visits, and even the hilarious and bossy crows and magpies, who would swoop by in low flight just so I might see them from the kitchen window and be reminded that “Hey, we are here! Got any treats for us?”
The calm, peaceful presence without expectations (except from the crows, ha!) of these beings was what offered me moments of relief, moments of ease and breath.
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I would step outside with space, peace and relief as my only expectations. No particular intention or focus other than to be, breathe and connect with nature. No particular Shinrin-Yoku Invitations on my mind either. When we are stressed, overwhelmed and exhausted, all the techniques we learn tend to fly by the wayside. It is a miracle if we can remember even one. I simply dashed out and trusted that nature would work her magic. And she did. Always.
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The property is located in a quiet area, with not much traffic, so peaceful and silent, especially on weekends. That in itself was very soothing for me, and no more so than on Christmas morning, when even the distant hum of traffic from the town below was completely absent. It was amazing to just be in that much silence, especially for someone like me who hears everything.
It was a silence that went beyond the physical auditory sense. It was a silence of the soul, mine and that of every nature being around me.
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My family has lived in that house for… oh, it will be fifty years at the end of September. The house, however, was completed in 1905, thus making it 120 years old. The garden is the same age, of course, though I believe that some of the trees, like the big oak in the lower garden and some of the chestnuts, were already in place, and construction, plus any additional landscaping, happened around them. Even what we added after our own renovations were completed is still fifty years old.
As you walk around, you can feel the old, settled energy of the land, of the trees. The whole hillside where the property sits was also built and landscaped around the same period, so it is a whole extended area that carries the same energy: it is very grounding, very calming.
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I could also feel my Dad’s presence, as he had taken care of this garden so well for years after he retired. His spirit lingers there, and we were all saddened to see that, while I was there, a powerful wind storm gave the final coup de grâce to the bird house he had built years ago.
The main structure and platform were taken care of by the gardener who came soon after the storm, but some of the pieces of stone that formed the roof are still scattered about. I considered picking them up, but then I thought they should stay scattered. Someday, someone will find these shaped pieces of stone and wonder: what is this? Where did it come from? And in some way, the bird house will live on.
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The first few weeks were particularly cold, more than usual for the area, so my forays outdoors were short. It was a cold winter of rain, wind and fog. I had hoped to see some real snow and capture some images, as I have not seen any in nineteen years. All we got was a light snowfall that lasted the whole of two minutes. By the time I had reached for my phone and ran outside, it had turned to rain.
As I adjusted to being there – and believe me, it was quite the adjustment – I reopened my connection with the trees, talked to the smartypants crows and tossed out some snacks for them.
Goodness, they eat anything! Pizza crusts are their favorite. I even watched a crow take a particularly crisp piece, jump on the edge of the fountain and dip it in water to soften it before eating it.
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Because I needed to go outside to properly open the shutters of the downstairs windows (remember, this is an old house), sunrise and sunsets were also moments of delight. If the weather was clear, I would linger, breathe them in, say good morning or good night, take photos. All so similar, yet so different. And as you can see in the many images of sunrises and sunsets the colors were amazing, sometimes wild!
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As December turned to January and then to February, I began to find refuge outside more and more, especially in areas where no-one could see me from the house and come and talk to me. I also walked around and trimmed the hydrangeas, the only plants I sort-of-know how to trim well enough. Of course, I would talk to them like I did with all the others. Buds were opening by the time I left.
On sunny days I would find myself a spot protected from the cold air and just sit, absorb the sunlight and be, observe, allow. A few times I even took my shoes off and placed my feet on the earth for a little while, allowing some of the tension and stress to discharge.
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I made a point of walking around to visit all the trees, including the copse where our dogs have in turn been buried over the years (image above, grouping of evergreen trees on the lower right): Cochi, Wolf, Armaduk, Igor, Snoopy, Rascal.
I would then walk up the hill (the property is on a slope, so there are upper and lower areas) and lean against a tree while exchanging glances with the one in front of me. Yes, a beech tree was watching me!
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For as much as I don’t like the cold, what I love about winter is the pause, the suspended animation, the perception of potential to come. You can feel it from the Earth, from the soil, from the core of the trees, and even from the moss. It makes me feel two things: that I am also allowed to rest and regenerate, and that there is also hope for my own return to life.
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Towards the end of February, each foray started showing little changes, new buds, new growth, sometimes barely noticeable. The lawn started to change color, and by and by little wild flowers began to pop up everywhere.
I even found little “treasures” here and there: pieces of broken glass that left me wondering, as there had not been construction on the property for fifty plus years; a piece of vintage ceramic; a couple of vintage screw hooks, and – the best of them all – the fluorescent green shell discarded by a June beetle, likely long moved on to another life.
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I was actually sorry to have to leave, as I would miss the new growth and the full shift into spring. I left my Mum in charge of noticing and observing, but it seems that every day, when we talk on the phone, she has some excuse why she did not go walking outside, or not for long. When I prompted her, though, she did say that the camellia buds have finally started blooming. Expecting a photo would be asking too much.
By the time I return in June, the trees will have full foliage, some of the moss will be gone, and the azaleas and rhododendrons will have completed their flowering. The hydrangeas will be blooming, though, so I have that to look forward to.
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I did consider staying longer, mostly to continue to support my brothers in caring for my Mum, as it has been a rough year for all of us. However, besides having commitments here, I really, really needed to get away, at least for a few months.
I sure learned a lot over the winter: about my family, about myself and both my strengths and my limits.
As I flew back to California about three weeks ago, I was more run down and exhausted than I had allowed myself to acknowledge. My body took care of that and slammed me with a massive cold, complete with a deeply painful sore-throat, coughing like a seal, and all followed by two, three, four migraines. I never get sick, yet this time I was forced to rest and flush out almost four months of stress. No, make that a year.
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In these recent few days, I have been picking myself up, dusting myself off and starting almost over, almost from scratch.
I have been reconnecting with the mini forest here in the foothills of the Sierra where I live, and the trees and plants I had “left in charge” before flying to Italy at the end of November.
My potted azalea, who has been blooming non-stop since last September, burst into an expanded bloom about two days after I got back. It felt like a “Welcome home!”
Next month, when it’s warmer, she will be ready to move from the pot into the earth. My rosemary plant, which I grew from a small cutting, was planted a few days ago.
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I hope you have enjoyed this post and found it helpful and/or inspiring. If you are interested in more of my stories, you can find them by clicking on the image below.
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If you are interested in the practice of Shinrin-Yoku and would like to know more, find a guide or maybe even train as one, you can find more information at this page.
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