We plant life while we ourselves slowly disappear

We don’t know if we’ll make it through this month, yet we bought plants for bees that no longer have enough to eat.
There have been many triggers over the past weeks, yet we still decided to continue both with the mouse-infested camper and with improving the garden, as if somewhere there still has to be some reserve left to fall back on, while we both already feel for a long time that there no longer is.
Every Sunday we take home whatever was contaminated by the mice from the camper to wash it, check whether another mouse has been caught yet, five by now, and we have now reached the point where only the contaminated bed still needs to be removed before Mart has to clean everything all over again, in one small window of time, while the rest of life simply continues and nowhere seems able to pause.
Last Thursday we went to an organic plant nursery nearby, just like almost six years ago when we could still walk into a supermarket almost daily or walk through busier places. But by now, as has been the case for years, it quickly became clear again that it was too much.
It became increasingly crowded, almost only older people wearing heavy perfume that immediately settled into my nose and throat, sharp and stinging, while Mart looked up on his phone which plants we should get and held onto Fannar, and I gathered the little plants with a small cart, becoming more and more aware of myself and how anxious I looked.
At the checkout it became even busier. Luckily everything was outside, so there was more air and space than indoors, but not enough to escape it, and even the few meters back to the car took a long time because we kept waiting for nobody to pass by for a moment, because of the strong smells and everything people carry with them that I simply cannot handle anymore.
Near the car stood the shelf with soil we had indicated at the checkout that we wanted to buy, and I lifted the bags into the trunk, after which I quickly dropped off a plant for my grandmother at the edge of the arboretum before continuing toward the Kromme Rijn just to be somewhere where nothing was expected of us for a while. A space that did not need to be maintained.
At home, work was waiting. My mother has neglected the garden for many years, so we maintain everything. Until a few years ago almost nothing grew there: two plants and a butterfly bush, with weeds between the tiles, and precisely in the places where there were no tiles, everything that tried to grow there was constantly removed. Ninety-five percent of the garden is paved, but because of the emptiness it felt like ninety-nine percent.
The small front garden has also stood empty for years, and whenever something did grow there, it was thanks to us. Over the years we started removing tiles and slowly creating space again for something to return: tulips, other plants, insects that could land somewhere again, and now we leave the “weeds” standing wherever there are no tiles while carefully removing them from between the paving stones, especially for my mother, so hopefully she accepts the “weeds” once they are in the soil.
But even that does not happen how and when we want it to. I can only work on the front garden very early in the morning during the weekend, before the world starts moving, before doors slam, cars start and people go outside, so last Sunday morning I cleared the weeds and yesterday filled it with soil and planted all thirteen little plants, in the short moments when everything was still quiet enough. There is no more time than that.
The back garden is different. There I can work either every day until around eight in the morning or right in the middle of the day once my mother has been gone for two and a half hours, but that means I have to work while everything happens around me: people from the apartment walking in and out of the garden, neighbours doing construction outside, someone mowing the field next to the garden after a table had stood there all day while someone worked with a circular saw, grass being mowed, parties a few doors down, a dog left alone for hours barking nonstop, and almost daily police helicopters flying over from the highways surrounding the neighbourhood.
There is no moment when it is truly quiet. And still we continued.
Early Friday morning, one day after the nursery, I removed the overgrown seven-leaf vine from the back garden to make room for the new plants, and in the afternoon we pried up tiles and filled areas with soil. Today, Sunday, after Mart returned from the camper and after walking Fannar, he picked up pots from someone who wanted to get rid of them, which I then quickly filled with soil before my mother woke up, so that at least something could begin to grow in the places where until now nothing could grow.
Mart ordered organic strawberries and flower seeds for bees, and we ordered a small cherry tree for the middle of the garden, in the place where another one once stood that my mother’s ex removed without permission. It was a little tree my mother had received from my grandfather when she came to live in this house at twenty-five. My grandfather died seven years later. It feels as though we are trying to bring back something that disappeared a long time ago.
Meanwhile I became unwell and felt PMDD settle over everything like a heavy layer, causing tension between Mart and me, apparently simply because there is no longer any room left to absorb everything that keeps piling up. And still we kept going.
The garden is becoming greener, yes. More life is returning, bees that can find something again, plants taking root in soil that at first did not seem meant for it, but everything we keep stopping into, time, money and energy we do not actually have, comes from a place where there are already shortages.
We are still walking around in winter shoes with holes in them. The car urgently needs maintenance. We know we will not make it financially this month. And still we stood there, choosing plants so that outside ourselves there would at least be something alive again, because we could no longer bear that even the bees could find nothing in the garden.
As if we keep caring for everything that lives, while nobody sees that we ourselves have long since stopped surviving.