Last summer, July 4th, I had the ultimate loving-my-property day. Since then, I can’t feel anything positive for my yard, trees, or garden.

The day started with watering my new perennials and shrubs, puttering, and general yard maintenance. Friends I hadn’t seen in a long time stopped by with their dog on their way to a holiday excursion to a state park and we sat on my patio under my big sun umbrella. I was so proud to show them around my tiny property, and that my patio was such a comfortable place to spend a few hours with them. When they left I spent the rest of my afternoon pruning shrubs and trees and reveling in my newfound ability to have an active day now that my doctor had unraveled yet another piece of my chronic fatigue syndrome and related issues.

That evening, though, a sudden deep, pulling pain in my leg alerted me to a tick that was in the process of embedding itself right next to my 26-year-old hip surgery scar. In my pain and worry I didn’t manage a clean removal. And though I cleaned the wound as best I could, it stayed red and swollen for weeks — maybe even months, but after a while I wasn’t in a condition to notice or remember.

Meanwhile, extra stress at work and extra pain rippling through my family had been digging itself deeper and deeper into my brain for a long time, building and reinforcing insecurities, piling on grief.  Plus, illness can mess with brain chemistry.

Everything started falling apart.

It took various creative and supportive healthcare professionals and an incredibly loving and supportive family to get me through the next 2 months, including relocating to my parents’ home for almost all of August. The antibiotics completely messed up my guts, and the mood meds made the rampant anxiety worse before they started making it better.

Now it’s the last day of April, 10 months after that one lovely day. I think I’m back to about where I was a year ago, back to building strength little by little, managing the chronic fatigue that feels more like its familiar old self than the raging angry animal it became in the months following my illness.

But my hair developed noticeable grey in that first month of being horribly ill, and apparently I lost all sense of connection with my lovely yard.  Months of guilt about having my neighbors and my family do all my yard work throughout the late summer and all of fall, coupled with nearly a year of feeling utterly overwhelmed by even the idea of having a yard to take care of, and my yard no longer feels anything like the haven it was for me in my first year of owning it. I don’t imagine my trees or gardens flourishing. I don’t lay out future perennial beds in my spare time. I haven’t wanted to even look at my little raised-bed vegetable garden.

In the past months there’ve been several points where it became clear to me that the trauma of last summer’s illness was greater than I’d let myself realize in the moment. The sprouting of grey hair was the first, and this odd mental block about my yard is the latest.

I guess it was a big deal. I hope I can learn again how to love my yard and gardens. And you can bet I’ll wear bug spray to guard against ticks when I’m out in my yard this year.