Before, During, & After

A couple of weeks before our vacation, someone told me, “You sweat the small stuff.” I could have been miffed, but instead I thought: she’s not wrong.

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Also before our vacation, I made a somewhat complicated schedule of when I should water my plants—as in, not all of them all at once, but some right before we left, some of them days before, some of them a week before.

I call it complicated only because it would be easy for someone to say that the simplest thing would be to water the plants all at once. But simple isn’t always better. And anyway if someone said that, that would probably mean that the person didn’t understand me: how I work, and how I came to possess, shall we say, just a few plants (read: LOTS, I mean, not MILLIONS, but who’s counting anyway?).

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After our dog died in September, and after the health of someone I love took a turn for the worse, I started buying (more) plants: several orchids, a gorgeous variegated ficus (see photo ❤️), and more succulents: two of them being echeveria lemon lime.

I wanted life in the house.

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A couple of weeks before we left on vacation, I realized that nearly all of my succulents had some sort of blight. They’d all been in one room so that when two got it (it was those echeveria lemon limes! and they’d been so pretty!), the blight spread to the others.

I tried my best to save them: I cut off the diseased leaves, I repotted them with better soil, I quarantined the worst offenders.

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One of the succulents is my favorite plant: a kalanchoe. I had rescued this kalanchoe from the sad clearance rack at Lowe’s, and the kalanchoe had thrived under my care—extending its beautiful blue-green leaves, growing three times its size.

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Sweating the small stuff is about getting so caught up in little (unimportant) things that you miss the big picture. Or you miss the moment right in front of you.

And sometimes the moment right in front of you is, in fact, the big picture.

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It always takes me forever to pack for a trip because I am so careful in trying to select exactly what I will need, no more, no less. This includes toiletries: just enough shampoo for the days we are there, just enough lotion, the right amount of sunscreen.

I never (ever) get this equation right, but it doesn’t keep me from trying.

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On the first day of our vacation, my husband said he wanted to buy mouthwash. I kicked myself for not having packed it. What had I been thinking?

While at the store, I stood in front of the shelves of mouthwash for a long time, wondering what size we needed. I didn’t want to over-buy or under-buy. I didn’t want to leave mouthwash behind if we didn’t finish it, but I didn’t want to run out and then have to buy another whole bottle, which might mean wasting more. I tried to decide between two sizes of one brand, I then looked at the off-brands, and then I looked at all the options and tried to estimate how much we would use and how many ounces were offered in each and what was the price difference.

Eventually my husband wandered over, and I asked him to weigh in.

That one, he said, pointing to a bottle. He hadn’t had to think about it at all.

I think this is what’s called: not sweating the small stuff.

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On vacation, I read a book (Oona Out of Order) in which a woman, at age 19, begins to live every full year of her life, but out of order. She starts at 19, jumps to 51 (lives that whole year), goes back to 27 (again, lives that whole year), and then goes into her 40th and then her 39th year, etc. Her lessons becomes about acceptance and non-attachment, about knowing ahead of time that some people (friends, lovers) will be going out of her life, either by death or choice, and that instead of avoiding getting to know them in the first place (since she knows it won’t end well) and avoiding experiences, she should live for the moment that is right in front of her, find joy in the now.

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I’m scared to lose the people I love most in the world. But I know that I will have to.

Maybe not all, but some. Maybe not some, but even one is too many.

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A couple of days into our trip, I got grumpy because we weren’t doing things, and by doing I mean touristy things, seeing sites, planning excursions. But is that really what I wanted to do? We were sitting outside at a little cafe and eating ice cream. I was with a person I love (my husband). The sun was out, the day was before us.

I was missing the big picture. I was not enjoying the moment because I was focused on what it should be rather than what it was.

From then on, I relished whatever we did, and nearly all of it was uneventful to anyone else, but exactly what I needed.

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Time is such a gift.

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On vacation, my husband read a book that says suffering comes from three things, and one of those is not accepting change.

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On vacation, I started a book on how to find joy in sorrow, how to find peace and solace.

I’m still reading that book.

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If you thought this blog was about mouthwash or plants or even vacation, you were wrong.

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When we returned from our trip, I immediately checked on all my succulents, scattered throughout the various rooms in our house (due to my quarantining efforts). I even watered some (according to schedule). The plants were doing well—except for my favorite. Blight had spread to the kalanchoe’s biggest, best leaves. I wasn’t upset; I was downhearted because I knew I needed to let it go.

Such a small thing, a plant.

But I didn’t let it go entirely: I cut off everything but the top and pushed it into some soil. I’m still hoping it can be saved.

Is that who I am? For now, I suppose it is. I’m trying to let go, but it is slow.

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Am I Losing? Or Is this What Winning Looks Like?

Welcome to my annual blog post about acceptance and rejection in which I tally up my writing submissions from the previous year and tell you how many magazines and presses in 2022 said, We love your work, Shuly! and how many places gave me the big boot. 

If you’re new to my blog or have never been around in January, I should tell you upfront that my annual goal is always to aim for one hundred rejections. “Wait, what?” you newbies are asking. “You aim for rejections?”

Why of course. Life is filled with wins and losses, acceptances and rejections, and every writer knows that in the writing world, rejections are the most common currency. (Well, every un-famous writer knows this—I cannot speak for the famous writers since I am unknown except to my family and friends and people who friended me merely because FaceBook suggested it). 

I aim for one hundred rejections because I might as well make a game out of it, and because if I can get that many rejections, odds are that I will also get some acceptances. My typical rate of acceptance is 10% (which, if you’re not into math, means that if I get 100 rejections, I’m likely to get 10 acceptances).

Let’s start with a review of the last couple of years:   

In 2020, I received 88 rejections and 2 acceptances. I didn’t submit enough to reach 100 rejections, but with that track record, surely I would have. My acceptance rate was about 2% that year. Eek.

In 2021, I received 174 rejections (wow, that’s a lot), but I also received 30 acceptances. Woooo hoooo!!! That’s a 17% acceptance rate. 

And in 2022 . . . (here's the requisite drum roll) . . .

I received 43 rejections and and and . . . 3 acceptances! 

You’re probably asking, “Is that exclamation point because she thinks 3 acceptances is good or bad?” Actually, I never think of the numbers as good or bad, black or white, but I like to dig into them.

First of all, clearly I didn't submit enough to reach 100 rejections. I'm okay with that. 

Yet here’s the odd thing: nearly all of the 43 rejections came from literary magazines saying no to my individual pieces, BUT of the three acceptances, only one was from a literary magazine saying yes to an individual piece (thank you, Invisible City, for encouraging me to submit again after rejecting my work the first time). The other two acceptances were for…books of mine! Whole books! Books that had many of the pieces that were rejected by other places!

Those exclamation points mean: I am happy. One of those books (What the Fortune Teller Might Have Said) even won a prize.

My acceptance rate for 2022 was 7%, so I think I need to stop saying my acceptance rate is 10%. It apparently isn’t and hasn’t been for years, if it ever was.

The most important takeaway? Never give up on yourself or what you want or what you love. And if you’re a writer, write first for yourself. If you aren’t happy writing, then what’s the point? I loved writing every single piece I sent out into the world, whether it was rejected or not. And that, in my book (pun intended), is the biggest win.

Photo credit: Taylor Skaff. 

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A Tale of Grief, Hope, and Four Orchids

For most of my life, I hardly noticed orchids. Years ago, my husband was given one that must have been blooming when he got it, but if it was, I did not pay attention and have no memory of its color. That flowerless orchid has sat by our kitchen window for all this time, somehow not dying. My husband watered the bloomless plant with its slender leaves whenever he remembered, which was every few weeks at best. The truth is I didn’t keep track. I didn’t care. I had a whole house of other plants to water and prune and re-pot as needed. And I had our dog, Kibbi, who needed a regimen of medicine and had for many years.

Then this summer, one of Kibbi’s eyes got an ulcer, and my days became a schedule of eye drops three times a day, along with her familiar regimen of pills. She started wearing a cone. Around this time, I determined that my husband’s orchid needed re-potting. I became fixated on the idea of giving this orchid a new lease on life, and I tried to find a nursery who could do the deed. We finally handed the orchid over to someone with know-how and gentle hands, and she gave my husband’s orchid a better home, a green ceramic pot with slits down the side—no more plastic cup with holes—and she taught me how to mix a gallon jug with fertilizer, how to pour the concoction without reservation over the leaves and into the bark mix, how to let the plant drain til there was no liquid left.

“It’s healthy,” she said. She pointed to a teeny leaf just emerging. “See this? That’s a good sign.” This was nearing the end of July, and Kibbi’s eye was not healing, and she had been wearing a plastic cone for nearly a month by then, and we’d been putting drops in her eye like clockwork. My husband’s orchid became my obsession. I focused on that tiny leaf, and I watered the orchid with fertilizer every week as directed, and I watched that tiny leaf grow, becoming stronger and longer and more sturdy.

Meanwhile Kibbi was taking two steps forward, one step back. Our vet said to keep doing what we were doing. It would just take time.

At the start of September, we went to North Carolina to see my sister, and she helped care for Kibbi, who was still wearing a cone, still needing a laundry list of medications and eye drops. One early morning, my sister told us something we did not want to hear: Kibbi had been walking into walls. We knew what this meant: Kibbi’s one good eye had now gone bad. We made plans to see our vet as soon as we returned. Later that morning, still in North Carolina, while Kibbi—with her cone and failing eyes—stayed in the car, we ran into an upscale grocery store to grab coffee, yogurt, maybe some bananas. That’s when I saw the orchid display, so lovely. I wanted one. Then I looked at how they were potted, and I knew enough by then to grasp that the orchids’ situations were dire—there was no way for the orchids to drain when watered. All these orchids were doomed. Doomed! So I bought one, only because I wanted to save it. I wanted them all, but I couldn’t buy an entire display of orchids.

We took Kibbi to the vet as soon as we returned home. It wasn’t good news: her good eye had an ulcer too. She needed to see a specialist. I took the new orchid to the nursery and had it repotted into a proper pot with drain holes. I set the new orchid by our old orchid. The new orchid dropped its blooms within days. I continued on: I cared for Kibbi; I cared for the orchids. I looked for signs everywhere that things were getting better.

But they weren’t, not for our beloved dog. She had procedures meant to help but that involved too much pain, and there was no way forward without a great deal more suffering. We made the difficult choice: we said goodbye to our great love.

In the weeks that followed I spent a lot of time inspecting the old and new orchids, searching for signs of new leaves, moving the plants around to offer them the best light. Then in mid-October my parents handed over a flowerless orchid that had been gifted to them, and it had been so poorly potted by whatever store it had come from that nearly all the plant’s roots had rotted. I took it to the nursery. They said, “You can’t repot this now. You need to see if it can recover.” They took it out of its miserable medium and gave the orchid new bark mixture and told me to give it at least six months. In other words: orchid hospice.

Last week, I eyed the orchids at the grocery store. Showy, full of color, vibrant. Then I peeked into the pots and saw that all I’d be signing up for was more orchid hospice. But they needed me, didn’t they? I put an orchid in my grocery cart. I rolled a few feet away. I turned around, put the orchid back. I couldn’t risk that something else might die.

I know: it’s an orchid. But it was never about the orchid, you and I both know that.

A day later I couldn’t help myself: suddenly I was driving to the nursery, perusing the orchid display. These orchids were more expensive than the grocery store ones, but they were potted perfectly. “Grown responsibly from start to finish” the tag read. My spirits rose. And then there she was: a small orchid with big leaves and two stems crowded with lavender blooms.

A fourth orchid? Really, Shuly? But this one is blooming, I told myself. It’s so beautiful.

She sits on my desk now, right beside me as I work. Sometimes when I go into another room for a few hours, I take her with me. I never want her out of sight: she’s all flamboyance, and I am all fawning. I know that she, too, will eventually lose her flowers. But in this moment, she has it all—and she is alive. In this moment, so am I.

Photo credit: Yours truly. Photo is of the new beauty.

COMING SOON:
What the Fortune Teller Would Have Said:
a Flash Essay Chapbook

Winner of the 2022 Iron Horse Literary Review
Prose Chapbook Contest