I inherited from my parents two very different guiding principles. From my father, I got a love of industry. This is a tidy way of saying that I have enough energy to make everyone, and perhaps me in particular, absolutely crazy, what with my shifting border collie eyes and my insistence on constant motion. From my mother, I received an absolute and abiding fear of being caught without lipstick, for every time I walked past her in my formative years, she asked this question: Where’s your lipstick? Like a Pavlovian dog I was trained, and you can ask my friends: I swam wearing lipstick, I go to work wearing lipstick, I lift weights wearing lipstick. You can even ask my husband: I wear lipstick to bed, and I smear it on to garden.

Which is what I did Saturday morning. I found myself for the first time in years with a Saturday morning with absolutely no responsibilities, for I had tamped down my industry side and given up teaching a spin class. It was, in a word, delicious. There was an early breakfast at Chick-Fil-A and then a trip to Home Depot, my favorite store. I occasionally dream of the day when I will be that wrinkled, grey-haired, slightly freckled older lady in clogs and an orange apron, offering unsolicited advice in the garden department, slapping peonies and foxgloves out of people’s hands, explaining that those plants will die quickly and painfully in our near-tropical clime. And if you ever need (or even want) to purchase a gift for me, I invite you to stroll into your local Home Depot and select the strangest plant that you can find.

I did just that on Saturday, plunking down a small fortune — twenty-five dollars! — on an undeniably weird houseplant. It is enormous and slightly menacing, and it may very well kill us all. I have named it Audrey, after the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, and I keep a watchful eye on it. To be fair, Audrey keeps a watchful eye on me:

But honestly, what is beauty without a little oddity and a lot of imperfection?

I hauled Audrey into the house and installed her in bright light and hoped for the best, personal safety-wise. And then I read for a moment about how Matisse painted orange oceans and pink skies and blue grasses and yellow tufts of clouds. I looked at the painting that accompanied the text, and if I had not read the commentary, I am not certain that the oddity of an orange ocean would have struck me as strange. For the shapes were familiar and the objects well-known, and even if one does not bask in an orange ocean, it still beckoned from the painting.

With this in mind, I wandered into the garden alone. There was storm damage, which seemed insurmountable, and the garden could be described kindly as topsy-turvy. It was so overwhelming that I had no idea what to do, which is why I had put it off for so long. But I decided to start at the beginning and tend to the basics, like filling up a dozen lawn bags with downed sticks, branches, and dead plant material, and hauling large limbs out of bushes and shrubbery. It was pleasant work. The sun was shining, and the weather was lovely, and the birds paid me no mind. The dog snored in his favorite bowl of dirt. And I was all by myself.

It was a perfect time to think.

It is such a luxury to slow down and think. Hands active, mindless tasks, tired body, lipstick on. That type of thinking. I thought of so many things. Saturday was the 31st anniversary of the day I met Chris in a college cafeteria, an introduction by a mutual friend with the almost instant realization that I was going to marry him. (You’ll be pleased to know that I did not make that my lead-off remark.) I thought about how the house was ours but the garden was mine, and how the destruction and mess from the storm forced me to reimagine what I wanted it to look like. I remembered the funny dream I had of discovering a house built in 1280 in my 1920s neighborhood, of walking around its cavernous, ruined rooms in the dark. When I realized I needed to use the chain saw, I missed its biggest fan — my son — acutely and ached so much to give him a hug that my chest hurt. I thought about how much my daughter has come into her own this year. I realized how after a lifetime of trying to look pretty, of wearing lipstick at every turn, that I had never felt more beautiful than I was at that moment, in dirty khakis and an old straw hat, digging contentedly outside.

Buddy, the snoring dog, also weighed heavily on mind. He had had some health issues a few weeks ago, and although I did not know it then, I know it now: The new vet — the kinder, more compassionate vet that I sought out — has found a growth in an inopportune spot. It could be nothing. Or it could be something treatable only by palliative care. Buddy, of course, is blissfully ignorant, which is his favorite state. But I am painfully aware, living in a strange hang-time of six to eight days until I know for certain. It is a hang-time that has prompted convertible rides, with Buddy on a heated seat, his nose on my forearm, his fur ruffling in the breeze, his tongue lolling. It is a hang-time that has brought the careless and generous measuring of kibble, the occasional bite of chocolate chip cookie, the suspension of baths, the extra affection.

Between the lingering storm damage, the garden, the dog, the election, I have been a quieter, muted, more reflective version of myself this week. The introspection has been, at times, uncomfortable. I have thought about choices and perspectives, how Matisse’s orange ocean may delight me but bother another viewer to no end. I have remembered the genuinely rotten times that I have felt unheard and ignored, and I have been dismayed that large segments of our country feel that way now. When I voted this year, I did so outside of my neighborhood, where it is easy to assume that everyone feels the way I do, and I voted with people who were my neighbors only in a biblical sense. As I looked around, I felt comforted to be in the company of so many people who were calm, who cared so deeply, who showed up to lift their voices — even if their voices were different from mine. I have pondered beauty and imperfection, democracy-style: It is a beautiful system, even if it is an imperfect one, and to achieve an individual’s version of perfection would render it not a democracy at all.

I would be untruthful if I did not tell you this: I have felt very helpless this week. I have wandered around. I have visited the wisest curb I know — one that says, “DON’T FORGET TO LIVE TODAY” —  a message scrawled by God-knows-who in wet cement that I discovered on a walk with Buddy during his younger, healthier days. And I have wondered: what is there for me to do?

I think the answer is simple. Live today. Move forward. Do not be overwhelmed. Listen to the problems and concerns of the larger world. Look beyond your neighborhood to your neighbors. Step back and think. Embrace beauty and imperfection. Heed the call of the orange oceans, even if others do not. Remain kind and compassionate. Tend the garden. Take the dog in the convertible. Accept that no one person has all the answers. My mother would tell you to put on lipstick. My father would tell you to get back to work.

ALC

P.S. — In case you were wondering whether Buddy actually loved riding in the convertible, I offer photographic proof. Here we are, stopped at a stop light on the short trip back from the vet as the driver in the car next to mine is saying hello. I have discovered that nearly all dog lovers in the free world call unknown dogs “Buddy,” a fact that makes mine feel universally loved. And perhaps he is.