After Erika Fromm interviewed wee UD for a job as her assistant at the University of Chicago, she wrote a brief note to herself about your 20-something blogueuse, at which UD peeked —

V STRONG EGO

— and I’ll admit those three little words have rather followed me around all these years later. (Yes, I got the job and it was very strange – she basically invented hypnoanalysis…) I mean, it’s true that my VSE has blasted me through lots of doors in life (or as sour old Larkin puts it, I’ve repeatedly “burst into fulfillment’s desolate attic”), and that has more or less been a good thing.

Even this very day, when my headstrongism led me astray, my corrective action turned up some interesting stuff.

So for my meditation garden project, I bought a bunch of bulbs, which Xavier the Savior and his guys were going to plant for me. I knew in general that you plant bulbs in the fall, and I was way gung-ho to get them in the ground and start dreaming about the astonishing arrays of reds we’d get; but last-minute checking revealed that these particular bulbs, for my particular planting zone, must wait for early spring planting.

In my merry VSE way, I scoffed at and denied and ignored all of the impeccable sources telling me this, telling me something my freight train of an ego refused to hear, until, as the guys began climbing the hill to the garden, I finally put on the brakes and told them not to bother.

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I could store one set of bulbs for the winter – I put them in a cardboard box and found the closest cool dark place I have to a root cellar – but the other two needed indoor planting. And this meant finding soil and containers to place along some sunny windows. I found four orange plastic containers with the skeletal remains of some plant or other (mums?), and I figured the soil was probably pretty good, so I began digging, and instantly, from all of the containers, multiple large healthy earthworms ooched out. Each of which I lifted and tossed gently onto the lawn so I could bring wormless soil inside.

But those worms – the surprise of them working away all this time, eating, aerating – it got to me somehow. The invisible worm, That flies in the night etc.