Spring is here?
An old poem, revisited.
In our yard there are four pots of tomatoes. There’s also a smallish raised bed, cobbled together using leftover rocks and some plywood that will almost certainly rot by next year. In it, you’ll see too many plants crowded together — zucchini, sweet peas, eggplant, strawberries.
On the other side of the yard, flower beds. Unruly. Haphazard. Glorious. Wildflower seeds have erupted into a shock of green leaves punctuated by white and yellow dots. Lavender bushes send up arms of audacious purple as if crying, “Hallelujah!” to the blue, blue sky.
A chipmunk hippity-hops among the clover. So does a rabbit, stopping briefly to munch on some azalea leaves. Bon appetit.
A white butterfly (what Big Kid calls a “toilet-paper butterfly”) rests on a dandelion.
You will never convince me that dandelions and milkweed are weeds. Nothing that makes bumblebees and butterflies this happy could possibly be bad.
I’ve been wishing this garden into existence for years. Actual years. As kids, my older sibling and I grew veggies in the backyard with our dad. He would take us to the plant store to pick out cherry tomato seedlings and cucumber vines, and we each got our little plot in the back-left corner of the yard. Near the wild strawberries.
We never achieved much of a bounty, but it didn’t matter. The pleasure of turning soil with my hands, the smell of soil in the sunlight, the flavor of something still warm off the vine. They never left me.
When we still lived in Brooklyn, we had a tiny little yard behind our apartment. Lucky us! And I made the best of it. Planted daffodils, and hyacinths, and irises. Brought in hostas, and dahlias, and even an ill-fated rose bush. I spent a week turning the soil with a trowel so I could plant clover.
(As an aside, you would not believe what I found buried out there. Yeesh.)
Making things grow is a kind of alchemy, isn’t it? Dump some tiny specks into some dirt, add water and sun and get… food? Flowers? Every flower on a pepper plant is a miracle. Every leaf. Honestly, sometimes I get so caught up in the magic of it all I don’t know how I get anything done.
The yard we have in Jersey is bigger and, objectively, much better. But the yard in Brooklyn was my first earth-love; it will always have a place in my heart.
I wrote this poem when Big Kid almost two years old. Reading the words now feels nostalgic, and sweet, and a little sad. My toddler is no longer, a Big Kid is there instead. A wonderfully wise and funny Big Kid who I love! But that soft toddler sweetness is no more. Makes me extra glad I was able to find time to write during those days.
Without further ado, here’s a little something I wrote back in 2021, when we were a family of three living in a much smaller Chaos Palace.
New leaves
outside my window hint that spring is here but
the air is crisp and cool.
Yesterday, I taught my toddler the glissando of a cardinal’s call. My baby repeated it after me, pointing tiny fingers at a flash of red on a branch above us.
We made our way around the garden and examined the new leaves on a rose bush, the new buds on a daffodil.
Back when my little one was nestled inside me like a bean, I made the rounds myself. I whispered to my belly and the secret person inside all about the new leaves and the call of the sparrows. “Look,” I said, “the hyacinths are coming up.”
Spring is a time of promise, but promise of what?
Last year, I learned the names and patterns of new blooms, the call of new birds. Our baby took first steps on a tiled floor, many miles from our hardwood one.
How can we parse the gifts from the price they cost? A silkthread ties us to them, them to us.
New leaves outside my window each morning, framed against the buildings, the birds, the stray cats. Peering upward at the mottled sky.
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