Tears of elation, really: among the animal nerds, I am with my people.

Yesterday was all about clippin' and flippin'. Compost, that is.

From the sidewalk, I'm sure I was a sight: bed-head, flannel robe and tevas, gloves and clippers -- but probably all the passers-by are used to it, expect to see us in various states of (un)dress, happily playing in the dirt.  I like to think they give us the Eccentric Green-Thumbed Neighbor pass, in return for the glory of this plot of land, cultivated and shared year after year.

While YES, I've had spring fever for a while now, nothing gives me the incipient summer madness like this early morning light.

This is when I start dashing outside before 6, to see what wonders have transpired overnight, to check before it's hot-as-blazes on who grew and how much yesterday.

And always the question: are the bees flying yet?

And for weeks I've been bare-eyed to meet the day, knowing that otherwise within moments I'd be Alice Cooper.

No more.

To say the last four years have been painful is an understatement.

And so her death, finally, was a relief in many ways -- relief that she no longer suffers, relief that her 6-year-old daughter no longer witnesses her wasting away, relief that my family at last grieves in earnest instead of wracking our brains for how to fix the broken.

For me, the Country Mouse, naturally on that day a week ago, I found solace in the dirt.

Carla Marcella Trélaün Tocci

January 16, 1969 – April 22, 2013

Our beloved Carla rests with the angels. After a long battle with glioblastoma, she left this world peacefully, her devoted husband Sidino by her side.

A San Francisco native, Carla went to the French American Bilingual School, Everett Junior High, Lowell High School and San Francisco State University, where she earned her BFA in Painting and Ceramics. She delighted in her French heritage, working for many years as a server at La Folie, combining her love of language and fine food. Carlita was an artist through and through, whether it was her buche de noel covered with perfect little meringue mushrooms, marzipan animals,  and frosting swirled like bark, or baskets of delicately perfect Christmas cookies, or painting, or ceramics. She had the enviable ability to do everything well.

And by weird, I mean fuzzy and unable to do jack-shit.

pensive, on a juice cleanse

The news this morning was the same as yesterday, that we're counting in hours now. My baby sister has hours left, at most a day.

But since Carla has defied all of the medical wisdom to date, has stubbornly and repeatedly illuminated at every turn the limits of our understanding of the miracle and mystery of the human body, who knows? We could be at this a long, long time.

But really, I doubt it. 

Sure, we're old, but not THAT old.