Mikey Valentine

Six years ago today marked seven years since Lu and I were severed from her biological father. Kicked out of 5, rue Pampario, our tiny stone home on the corner with the green shutters, three triangular rooms stacked up tall and narrow, and the sickening thud of the stroller wheels as they bopped down the front steps and out into the street. He locked the door and wouldn’t let me take my coat, her diaper bag. He was drunk, and I knew he’d be sorry in the morning, but a line had been crossed. It was over.

So, six years ago today, seven years from the day we were cast out by that hotheaded French redhead, and having forged a new path together as a family with Mikey, the one we call Lu’s real dad, we visited, for the very first time, our true forever home. Maison BLUM!

BLUM! It is Yiddish for flower, and a homonymic wink at Ulysses, and the same to the Bloomsbury Group, and to blue (like the roof of our house, and our favourite colour), and an acronym alluding to all three of our names. It was our house. The place where, down the road, in the little cemetery with the white clapboard church - Powerscourt United - I wish one day to be buried.

High melodrama, I know, and usually this blog is not the place for that. So far, I’ve reserved these pages for the lighthearted, the fioritures on flora, the poetry that comes to me in short bursts here and there as I plant my seeds or tend my beds. But I really can’t imagine a world in which I’d have ever had the leisure to think on such things and to delight in them if it hadn’t been for the love of my life. Lu’s real dad. The guy you all know and love. You know, the one we call Mikey.

Mikey wasn’t so sure about the place at first, but then again, if it hadn’t been for my insisting, he wouldn’t have gotten our dog Sadie, and given how he now loved and adored her, I knew it was another one of those situations where he’d have to thank me later.

I mean, it was an old house in a lost corner of Québec. An old house in the woods, in sore need of a paint job, in the middle of February, at twenty below and with snow drifts waist-high that we waded through (Lu and I wearing tights) down to the cliff, to the sight of the river.

Poor Lu cried on the way back to the house through the forest, she was so cold, and wet. I nearly cried, too. What a fool I was, dressing her and myself in our Sunday best. But of course we hadn’t realized just how real the whole thing was, yet. Up until then, it was only a dream.

Lu’s biological father and I were big dreamers. We spent many hours laid out in the sun on those white boulders by the turquoise sparkle of southern French watering holes, drawing plans for our future gardens, deriving great pleasure from the evocations of all the ins and outs of how we’d get by in our life lived in the margins, mostly jobless and fancy-free, discussing the merits of goats and sheep, debating the feasibility of a scheme we had to pinch a few municipal garbage bins to set up for our compost. He was good at fixing things, and I at finding things for free, and in the annals of our eighteen months of coexistence, there are things we can both be proud of.

It’s a rare thing in this life to have someone who’s willing to follow your dream, to make something new with you where once there was nothing. At our wedding in 2018, Mikey and I danced to the song ‘81 by Joanna Newsom, and part of this song goes:

I found a little plot of land in the Garden of Eden

It was dirt and dirt is all the same

I tilled it with my two hands

And I called it my very own

There was no one to dispute my claim

I don’t think Mikey grew up dreaming of growing potatoes or catching mice. He wanted to be Michael Jordan for a while, and then, realizing he’d maxed out at 5’8, he did what any reasonable young fellow would do and got into the guitar. But despite the glitz and glam of his successes in the music industry, he seems happiest when he’s sipping a cold one by the river after bathing in it, clean of the dirt of the day, whether cobwebs or garden or sawdust.

Over the past six years, Maison BLUM has changed me and Lu and Mikey. We’ve transformed in ways we never imagined thanks to the privilege of stewarding the little plot of land we call our forever home.

I think back to the young woman I was when, thirteen years ago today, I was cast out of my southern French hellish Eden, and how I so feared that it meant our exile from the country, how desperately I grieved (and for how long!) the sight of sheep from out my window. To get by as a single mum without a full university education and a driver’s licence effectively meant I was bound for a city, and this was cause for great lament.

It is thanks to Mikey, and his joy in my delight, and all that he’s done to make a dream reality, that I get to tell the young woman I once was that everything will turn out more than fine.

Just you wait and see, young woman. Watch him chop wood, carry water. Oh, the gardens you will grow!

Even the woman I was six years ago, in her outfit unfit for the weather, the snow! I tell her: things just keep getting better.

And maybe age and its sorrows will - no, surely age and its sorrows will make quick enough worms of us all, but it isn’t for their permanence that we love our gardens or our lovers. It’s for how they make us glow. Year after year, through all our and their changes.