Posted on by Amy Suardi

The Summer of Love and Death

I walk to yoga in the park. It’s only 8:45 in the morning but the air is already ringing with the steady rattle of cicadas. It’s the moment of tension in an opera right before the stab, or the kiss, except this thrumming will go on for hours.

Under a generous beech tree, we spread out our mats. A man sleeps on a bench by the path. The teacher helps a cicada off her mat with her sandal before she starts the class with a round of Om. 

A massive cohort of cicadas called Brood X is emerging in D.C. and across the central and eastern U.S. from Ohio to New York. They are not the August singers. These periodical cicadas only come out every 17 years, and when they finally emerge to mate, their life will be almost over.

After school Diana and her neighborhood friends collect cicada exoskeletons. Still clinging to tree trunks and fence posts all over our neighborhood, they are shadows of the nymphs who lived under the earth for 17 years. Now they have transformed themselves into black winged beings. The girls make piles of honey-colored shells and stick them to their shirts like broaches.

We do cobra and cow poses under the beech tree. Its branches reach out to give me shade. The grass underneath bends to hold me. Grips and grooves in the dirt help my feet find balance. In the studio I wobble — here I am a dancer.

By 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the steady ringing has given way to a searing razz. Entire trees are on fire with rattle. Flames of cicada song lick the sky, even though the air is still on this late May day. 

On schoolday afternoons, neighborhood girls extend their hands to cicadas in the grass. Diana names the one on her arm ‘Beauty Orange-Eyes Rose’ or ‘Beau-Beau’ for short. And this one, she tells me, is called ‘Matilda Angela Hope.’

What is one of your favorite sounds? was the question we asked at a family meeting this winter. “Frankie’s claws clicking on the floor,” said Diana. “Frankie purring,” said Luke. For Mark it was the sound of the dishwasher, Sofia the whispering in her A.S.M.R. videos. I said mourning doves in spring, but I wished I had thought of my husband’s answer: cicadas.

By now, cicadas litter the sidewalks: crushed, mangled, or partly eaten by birds or squirrels. Alone they are small, but together — in the tens of billions this year — their music has become the air itself.

“Cicadas breathe with their butts,” Diana’s friend explains. “That’s why they can stay alive without their heads.” 

I find two cicadas touching, butt to butt, on our driveway. In a month or so, their babies will hatch. They will burrow into the ground like their parents did and feed on tree sap for another 17 years. And then, it will be their turn. 

For this pair, all that will be left after their striving is to let go. Let go of the bodies that brought them together, the bodies that sang, that flew, that loved. Let go and return to the nothing and the everything.

It’s 92 degrees in the house and sweat is beading on my husband’s forehead. When I ask him if we should turn on the air conditioning, he says, “No, it’s nice to hear the sound.”

Eventually we give in, sealing ourselves into a box: smooth and predictable, pleasant and very quiet.

In the morning, I will open the windows to hear them again, and when I walk outside, the song of cicadas will tell me, You live in a place humming with aliveness. Here there is harmony and heartbreak, synchronicity and chaos. And underneath it all, a deep majestic order that requires nothing from you to unfold in perfect timing. Nothing from you, except maybe for you to feel it, to know it.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

Another Daughter Leaving

Virginia and I walk to the Indian place on the corner for our bi-monthly lunch date. They seat us at our favorite booth by the window, and I gaze across the table at her. She looks down, puts her napkin on her lap, and sneaks a glance up at me. She has made her eyeliner in a cat-eye style I remember doing, and the hair around her face is pulled up into a half ponytail. Matching her gold hoop earrings is a necklace that says “Milano.”

She’ll be off to college in 3 months. Only a few weeks ago, I felt crumpled by the task of raising a teenager. I’m not doing it right. I know nothing. I’m harming her instead of helping her. Now over Baighan Bharta and Aloo Palak, we talk about religions and the Enneagram, manifesting and desire, choosing college classes, and the time that I failed Physics for Poets.

What would the past 17 years have been like if I had been less fearful, and more loving? If I had not been ashamed of who I was? If pearls had formed around the grit of my regrets, and I had jewels to then press into her hands?

For Mother’s Day last week all I wanted was for everyone to go on a family picnic at the dairy farm. It was the first Mother’s Day that not all of my children were there. Sofia is in New Mexico working on a farm, and next year, Virginia will be gone too.

Standing on that pasture under the cold May sky, I felt smaller. Smaller in the way that you do when you take off a heavy wool parka that you don’t need anymore.

I tried to be who I was supposed to be — strong, sure, un-confusing. Then motherhood became a shield that helped me hide all of who I am.

The waiter with the shiny head and jovial eyes brings us a take-home box, and as we pack away the eggplant and tomatoes, the spinach and potatoes, Virginia tells me how every morning she goes over what she’s grateful for. “But if you don’t say why you’re grateful, it doesn’t work,” she tells me. “It just becomes a list.”

Who am I to her now, who is she to me? Once dancing in the roles that life had cast us in, we are now characters leaving the stage. I who made rules, monitored, and enforced. She who needed guidance, protecting, guard rails. What remains is something that cannot be categorized or explained. No teacher and no student — maybe we have always been both.

“You don’t realize what power the top bunk has,” I overhear Mark saying one night in his room while he and Virginia are trying to pull a fitted sheet around the hard-to-reach corners. “Monsters can’t get you up here.”

“You don’t think monsters can fly?” Virginia says, as she tickles him and tells the story about how she used to hang from the top bunk to make faces at Sofia, and one time she fell off, laughing and crying at the same time.

When she is away at work one night, I find her pine green fleece jacket inside out on the window seat, and intertwined in it, a strand of her golden hair.

There are only so many more vegan grain bowls she’ll prepare for us, only so many episodes of Master Chef we’ll watch together, only so many mornings her sweet-sad pop songs will billow through the house.

When she gets home, she’ll fix a snack and go down to watch The Sopranos until after I’ve gone to bed. In the morning I’ll coast by her as she cooks her oatmeal before logging into her Stats class. When she leaves for work, I will have already gone to pick up Diana. We go on with our lives.

A wave crests, and then it falls. The day unravels, night comes. Endings and beginnings, leavings and arrivals: they’re all bound into one unbreakable thing.

Mothers and children, grandmothers and grandchildren, ancestors and unborn babies, inextricably tied one to another. There is no end and no beginning. Yet in the heaving, tumbling middle, it feels like we are living through a million deaths and a million births.

Art by Florence Harrison from The Early Poems of William Morris
Posted on by Amy Suardi

Flying Again for the First Time

When the officer in the security line looked at my photo, she asked me to pull down my mask. Then she looked at me for a beat, and as a minister would bless a child, she smiled and said, “Thank you. Have a wonderful trip.”

Dulles airport. I haven’t been with so many people all at once since the George Floyd protests. After eddying at the banks for a year, I am joining the river again.

I’m heading to Austin, Texas to meet up with college friends. Our 30th reunion will take place online, and my friends will curl my hair and help me with my Zoom background. It will rain the whole weekend, but we’ll talk non-stop and laugh until we cry, and it will feel like I’m reuniting with a self that I haven’t seen in a long time.

I had forgotten how fun it was to go so fast. One hundred and eighty-four miles per hour when the 747’s wheels lift off the ground. My body merges with my seat.

Above the clouds, there is only light. A field of ruffled cotton. Sun glints a diamond in the curve of the tail wing.

My arm still aches from the first shot. If it weren’t for the masks covering everyone’s faces, it would feel almost normal. I remember all the people in the terminal sitting in front of iPad menus, drinking, eating, and talking, while flames blazed on large-screen TVs saying, “Mass cremations in India continue.”

To come back to earth you have to go through the clouds. When everything outside is white, you don’t know where you’re going or where you’ve been. The plane shakes up and down, left and right. Your stomach falls, bags tumble, things slide down the aisle, and when the wheels hit the ground, your bones meet.

“United was the first commercial airline to deliver the Covid-19 vaccine to the U.S.,” a short film announces on the screen in front of me. Massive pallets wrapped in dry ice are loaded into the bellies of passenger planes. Men in fluorescent vests operate forklifts, and when the hold is full and a worker waves from the door before it closes, I start crying and I don’t know why.

In the grass by the runway, pink primroses sway in the wind, and rain splatters the windows.

Emergency alerts bleat from phones in the cabin. But it’s not about a hurricane: free vaccines are now available at all pharmacies.

I may think I’ve made it because I’m healthy or careful or lucky, but really it’s because I have been saved by the goodness of strangers. Harvesting the food, driving the trucks, checking the passports. Laying the pipes, testing the samples, landing the planes. My life depends on ordinary heroes.

“Thank you for coming,” I say, the night I return to D.C. to the taxi driver who wanted to quit for the night, but who came to the airport when he heard about the long line. Thank you for bringing me home.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

First Day Back at School

Thursday, April 22, 2021

8:15 a.m.

Today I bring Luke to school for the first time in over a year. In his backpack are Covid-19 test results, a signed daily health tracker, hand sanitizer, a bottle of water, his Eureka workbooks, and a packet of cheddar sandwich crackers.

He’ll be going to school for math and social studies two mornings per week. In our arms are stacks of library books to return and a flower from the garden.

We don’t see any other kids walking to school. No high schoolers pouring off the city buses, buying candy and chips at the CVS. No packs of middle schoolers, looking at their phones, shuffling down Wisconsin.

Just this 10-year-old boy with his red backpack and his middle-aged mother carrying a daffodil, waiting at the crosswalk by the cars lining up at the intersection.

8:25 a.m.

Two large white tents have been set up on the mulch playground, and kids are climbing the monkey bars. We look for the face that we’d only seen on an iPad rectangle.

Clumps of adults in dark coats huddle around children in front of the Pre-K classrooms, but where is the teacher who loves yoga and vegan food, whose parents immigrated from India and who’s passionate about social justice?

In normal times the morning assembly on the turf field would be thronging with over 750 kids and their parents. Today there are about 40.

We spot an orange 5-G sign and find the children, half covered with masks, that Luke learned to read and write with, the kids he’s sat next to in morning meetings, on field trips, at picnics, around lunch tables, in gym classes, and closing circles for the past 7 years.

The eyes of a boy whose mom I haven’t seen in a year catch mine for a split-second and seem to say, I know you.

8:30 a.m.

“You hold this now,” I say, handing Luke the daffodil.

Another 5th grade teacher comes over to a huddle of Luke’s classmates and I overhear her say, “… so excited to see you, but…” Luke hands me back the daffodil.

“A migraine,” one of his classmates explains to me.

8:35 a.m.

I give Luke a back hug before he and his classmates follow the substitute into the school.

9:03 a.m.

Unlocking the front door, our house smells like the breath of children and sunlight. A single boy sits in an office chair facing his desktop computer in the living room.

I lay the daffodil in the refrigerator on its side next to a can of cat food.

11:27 a.m.

The front door opens. Luke is in the foyer taking off his shoes, with wind on his eyelashes and his body swaddled in fresh air.

“I forgot to eat my snack,” he explains, as he takes another cheddar cracker out of the package.

First they had math on the smart board. Their assistant teacher was beamed in. “I raised my hand every time, but she didn’t see me.”

Music class was held outside. They sang 5 songs — Mr. W strummed his guitar — and they played Duck Duck Goose to the tune of Do Re Mi.

Friday, April 23, 2021

7:10 a.m.

I wake up Luke for his second day of in-person class. “Shhh,” I say, as he thumps and clonks and makes trombone noises in the bathroom. “No one else has to get up this early!”

8:24 a.m.

At the turf field, about 15 kids are standing or sitting cross-legged in a drawn out line behind the 5-G sign. They seem kind-of nervous, especially the boys.

8:28 a.m.

A tall woman with long black hair and a poncho walks toward Luke’s class, smiling so brightly it was like she wasn’t wearing a mask.

“Ms. G, you have legs!” exclaims a girl. Luke’s teacher gives elbow bumps, takes hugs, and offers to carry the backpack of a girl with a broken leg, and then Luke grabs the daffodil, extends his arm and says, “Here,” and her eyes meet mine and she waves.

He looks 4 years old. I am young too. The dullness of “I know how this goes” is splashed off. Everything is new.

8:34 a.m.

Luke walks back to me and says, “I didn’t know she was so tall.”

As Ms. G makes her way down the line, re-meeting every child, I notice the way her eyelashes curl at the tips, the way that one of her fingernails is painted with glitter, how the polka dots in her bow collect the sun. Against the turf and the sky as clear as water, she feels like a dream.

“Yesterday Mr. B forgot about snack,” a boy with a red knit cap tells her.

“Oh, don’t worry, I won’t forget,” Ms. G says. “Snack is the most important part of the day.”

I thought you could know someone through virtual meetings and photographs, newsletters and friendly emails. I thought you could know someone by ‘All About Me’ slideshows and the way their voice wafts through your living room every day.

Taller, yes. More expansive, more beautiful, yes, but there was something more. More alive. She was exuding aliveness. She was life.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

A Broken Circle

I had forgotten we had apple trees on the farm. The kids just run past the orchard on the way to catch a frisbee or run through a sprinkler.

When my grandfather was alive, the trees were so laden that apples would fall all over the ground and rot. They weren’t the kind you get in grocery stores. Small and green and covered with sooty blotch, they were perfect in the pies and apple sauce that my grandmother would make. We could feed them to the cows, let the birds eat all the high ones, and still there were plenty for everyone.

It’s spring break and we have come to Ohio to see my parents. Only Mark, Luke, and Diana could come — Enrico, Sofia, and Virginia stayed home to work. The speakers in the car went kaput during the first hour, so we passed the trip in the old-fashioned way: with inane songs and potty humor. “Icabod is itchy, I am too!” Luke sang from the way back. “Has it gotten stuck in your head yet?”

In April, most the trees along the highways are still wiry brushes, but some have been rolled in a colored syrup. Chartreuse, persimmon, or purple, pinpricks of color outlining the structure, revealing its secrets.

We hugged my parents with bare faces for the first time in a year. Around the dinner table, we sat close together eating every last spaghetti strand clung with my mom’s meat sauce. It was as if nothing had happened.

But time could be measured in the wrinkles around my eyes, in Mark’s stature, now taller than mine, and in the gait of my parents, slower, tentative. They showed us how they sit on a bench before dinner to watch the kittens prance in the garden, chase flies, and stand at the bottom of trees looking up at the birds. And I know they are in the sunset of their lives.

The apple trees in the orchard call to me. A band of angels offering armfuls of blossoms to the sky. Behind every open flower are three or four more pink bells, ready to unfurl. Each five-petaled flower is the face of a child.

After dinner while the kids are playing on the tree swing and my mom is clipping spent daffodils in the falling light, I decide to take a walk around the field. Constellations of fat yellow dandelions are scattered on the path, but it’s the few who have become blowballs that glow at sunset as if it were my eye they wanted to catch instead of the wind.

In August, a sea of soybean plants had risen in this field, and before that in a rare double-crop year, muscly wheat stalks heavy with berries were being harvested when we visited, 40 rows at a time, chaffed, and piled into mountains of gold in open trucks. 

Now on this quiet April evening, the field is striated with purples, yellows, and greens. Wide swaths of field balm, violets, butterweed, and wild onion have made the plot into a watercolor rainbow.

I’ve always been torn between the triumphs of human achievement and the unspeakable grace of what unfolds all by itself.

These bitter greens, once collected for nourishment or medicine, will soon be cleared so that we can inject seeds into the ground, the kind that will give us what we love and what we need. French bread and three-layer cakes, taco shells and dumplings, drywall and school glue, toothpaste and tires. 

One morning, I convinced the kids to help me walk around the perimeter of the lower pasture to pick up trash that had blown in from the highway. In summer, brush hides the Pepsi cans and Teddy Graham wrappers, Bedda Chedda packages, and dog food bags that we found. Spring’s bareness uncovers of the carelessness of man.

I tell my parents about the apple blossoms and how I’ve missed seeing them when we come in summer, how happy the trees seem to be. 

“Last year we only had two or three apples,” my mom tells me. She goes through all the things she and my dad have tried to help them. And then she says, “When Grandpa was alive those trees would be noisy with the buzzing of bees.” 

The next time I go to the apple trees, I hear the silence. A single honeybee is visiting. I take pictures of the blossoms again, but now their beauty is tinged with sadness.

The collapse of bee colonies is a sign of our modern blight, the sickness of the world. We have lost our sense of interconnectedness. Nature has become a resource we use to get what we want. Our domination is so complete that we will find ourselves alone, actors in a play we have decided is about us.

At the greenhouse by the cheap gas station and the bait shop, my mom asks the kids to help her select seedlings of cauliflower, brussel sprouts, cabbage, and broccoli.

She won’t need that many because she’s replacing one of her vegetable beds with a pollinator garden of butterfly bushes, Joe Pye weed, and cone flowers. When the owner sees her considering a packet of milkweed seeds, he laughs and says, “My grandmother used to make me go pull that up!”

The problem starts when we forget that everything is sacred. As long as some people or things on earth are revered and others are not, it will be hard to see the bees and the trees and the weeds as holy. Splitting the world splits us inside and we walk around broken, looking for something to make us whole, not knowing that we have been whole all along.

I had bad dreams one night, and as I prepared breakfast for myself the next morning in the cottage, I thought, What if I walked through my days seeing everything as sacred? The pasteurized homogenized milk in my coffee. The genetically-modified industrially farmed corn in my cereal. The dirty sock on the floor, the bricks in the big house, the glue in the particle-board bookshelf.

That sun-bleached potato chip bag forgotten by the side of the road — it’s sacred too. How could it not be when everything has come from the earth and everything will return to it?

On the day before we leave the farm, I put on my gloves to look for trash along the upper pasture. On the way, I visit a lush apple tree as beautiful as a statue, a barn that used to shelter the herefords that my grandfather kept, and the stone gate by Lower Twin that I knew when I was a child.

Collecting beer cans, McDonald’s cups, and ice cream tub lids is a way I can participate. One day this place will be ours to care for, and it to care for us.

In the pasture, I see what look like bones in the grass. The remains of a tree stump has been weathered by rain and whitened by sun. Filling its cavity and encircling it are choirs of purple dead-nettles, a plant once used for treating wounds and healing tuberculosis. In England it’s still called archangel.

When I treat everything as sacred — the faucet water that rinses my hands, the contact lenses I put in my eyes, the toothpaste that cleans my teeth — I slow down. And it becomes easier to do the hardest thing of all — to see myself as sacred. Even the white hairs that shine silver in the bathroom mirror. The skin on my calves that crinkle like crepe as I pull up my socks. I am part of everything that lives and dies.

I don’t feel so helpless anymore. And I stop worrying that I don’t know how to complete the circle. When I find the holiness in everything, I find the beginning and the end. I have a feeling that this knowing is all I need.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

When Home is Not a Place

Sometimes the most modest things call to me — an oval beveled window in a vinyl door. A porch with a hand-made dog gate. A wicker settee under a tree.

What if this were my home? In that little nook at the top of the stairs, I’d write like my heart were a river. If that were my hammock, everyone would be my friend. In that cottage, peace would stay.

We have come to Annapolis to celebrate Enrico’s 50th birthday. From the brick patio behind this house built in 1834, I see a bird has made a nest in a windowsill. I catch glimpses through the glass door of Sofia browning butter for a chocolate cake, and Virginia, roasting carrots and crisping focaccia.

A ship horn blares. Country singers harmonize. And a hot rod revs along Duke of Gloucester Street.

Here the sidewalks are carpets of bricks undulating over tree roots. Moss spreads over stone walls. Pear blossom petals drift over children playing behind a school.

But under this holy sky, a private haze persists. My shortcomings hound me. My mistakes are never far away. There’s always something else I need to do.

Here in Annapolis row houses are shoeboxes stacked in shades of turquoise, pink, royal, and sage. Midshipmen and women in navy suits with brass buttons and white peaked caps wander among the weekend crowds.

We treat our selves as if we were structures that need constant rehabbing, renovating, adding on. Addresses speak of our value. New walls promise starting over.

The lights in the house hum as taupe stratus clouds spill across the once-clear sky. At the run-down house next door, Budweiser cans lie abandoned on a mirror shard. A paper lantern has fallen under the magnolia. Diana calls to me with wet hair and pajamas, “Dinner is almost ready!”

I am blessed. But if I look out into the world, there’s always a prize I’m missing. I am cursed.

When I get tired of myself, I rest.

In the channel of the heart, in the center of the body that grows up and grows old, there is a refuge. A place where love is unending and the search is over. I know if I can stay here inside, I will always be home.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

Hiding but Hoping to Be Found

My eyes flicked open. The clock on my bedside table read 4:15. We had decided we would do the egg hunt after quiet time.

“Mama?” Luke called from the kitchen. My dreams patterned over the sheers blowing into my room. They played with the wavy shadows cast by the window mullions. “Mama?” The screen door opened and banged shut. “Mama?”

“Don’t look!” I heard cousin Julia say to him in the backyard. “Or I’ll hide it again!”

He called my name from the basement, from the foyer, from the stairs, and then the calling stopped.

I didn’t want to be found, but I wanted to be looked for.

The day had started at 6:45 with the 4-hour leg of lamb sliding into the oven, and the crescendo of garlic softening, giving away its perfume.

A blue striped oxford for Mark, khakis for Luke, and a hand-me-down lavender dress for Diana that needed ironing. Three dozen eggs to be hard-boiled, and late-night instructions for vegan asparagus soup: Could someone please buy raw cashews, lots of basil, and vegetable broth? Clutter that had been collecting for days, whisked away minutes before our guest arrived at 11.

It was Easter and Mark’s 13th birthday. A beginning and an ending. Our son is now taller than me, his lilting voice gone, his shoulders a broad gate.

After spring break, he and his younger siblings will most likely return to school two days a week. Virginia is taking more shifts to save up for college, and Sofia has been going on camping trips in preparation for her big one.

After every pulling together is a drifting apart. When schools closed last March, we ate hot meals at noon around the big table like a farming family. Our separate ages, interests, and goals collapsed into a unity necessary to bear through the crisis.

Only scar-pink pistils remain on the weeping cherry that for one week was resplendent. But the fruiting cherry is beginning to swirl out round petals of white light. Little suns.

Life is an unrelenting tumble of grief and discovery. Losing and finding. Sugar crunching between the teeth melts on the tongue. Gifts bulging with possibility dissipate into tangles of ribbon. Blue button-downs are now crumpled in the laundry bin.

“It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.”

D.W. Winnicott

We hunt for plastic eggs, not because of the dime-store candies inside, but for the promise of finding. We want to be the one to spot the baby blue globe tucked in the car wheel, the dome of pink sunk into a tuft of spiky leaves.

To be unfound, or to be ignored, is a kind of death.

I like being invisible now, because another part of me is unspooling into the world. Through the sound of my voice, I find myself.

Under bushes, in the crooks of branches, tucked into log piles, I still like leaving eggs. Hoping someone will find them, and know me.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

When the Cherry Trees Bloom

An ambulance wails through the air warm enough to burst buds into blossoms on every cherry tree along our street. But the siren no longer unfurls dread from my chest as it did when the cherries bloomed last year. The sirens soaked the air with blood, terrifying as the blares in my midwestern town when a tornado was spotted.

It is said that when the mind weeps for what is lost, the soul rejoices for what is found.

In the taut stillness of spring last year, I felt held in the gasp of the entire world. I would see an ordinary nuthatch, hopping along the fence rail, and see that we had never been that different.

I was the nuthatch on the rail, the common violet in the grass, noticed for the first time. I was the purple magnolia weeping on the sidewalk. The puddle waiting to be stepped in by me.

More and more people tell me they are halfway or fully vaccinated. We are still wearing masks and staying home on Saturday night, but that will change. When the mayor announced that gatherings of 50 or less were allowed again, a bolt of panic struck. Who will protect the calm sea where I have anchored?

When the future opens, the present becomes a forgotten town we sail past on the way to glamorous ports.

A storm came this afternoon. The wind played jazz on the neighbor’s chimes. Dots of rain spotted the earth until they merged into a single color, louder than the birds.

In gardening it’s known that nature will tell you when it’s time. When you hear the tree frogs, it’s time to plant the peas. When the forsythia blooms, prune the roses. When the apple blossoms fade, tomatoes can be set in the ground.

When the cherry trees bloom, remember to live as if death could come tomorrow.

When the world is a jumble, be a daffodil, steady and open. When everything is too serious, see the raindrops dancing on the blacktop. And when you think life is deprived of majesty, notice the great old cypress after a storm, dipped in the sun’s glitter, talking big with the sky.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

When to Wear Gloves

My mother always wore gardening gloves, even when she drove a hand spade into the soft suburban ground to nestle her purple hyacinth bulbs. 

But I’m different. I don’t care that my knuckles get nicked or that my nails are ringed with half-moons of dirt. I want to make contact with the minerals and the stems, no formalities needed.

When the seasons collided in late winter and it was summer for a day, I barreled into the garden and raked and clipped and swept and gathered all the crumpled leaves, the flower balls, and slanted twigs. They had kept the ankles of the plants warm, but now they were wool socks on a muggy day.

After I hauled the remains to the botanical cemetery behind the garage, the backs of my hands were alive with red scratches and my fingers were christened with a dusting of glimmery dirt. 

But by afternoon a gash on my palm ached. That night I scrubbed out the dirt with a bar of Ivory, just as my mom would ward off poison ivy with Fels-Naptha laundry soap. 

Maybe it needed antibiotics, I thought, dabbing some on and going to bed with a bandage. 

The next day, the pink opening called to me with the only voice it had. I soaked it in warm water again, but at the deepest part, a speck remained. With a pair of tweezers and eyes sharper than mine, my son extracted an infinitesimal thorn.

I’ve never thought of myself as a warrior. Swords are for killing and shields are for raising barriers. But don’t we hurt each other every day without even trying? Don’t lovers protect themselves from what their bodies want to conceive? Danger comes in equal measure as beauty.

Nature has boundaries, and so must you. Coax the climbing roses, claw out the river stones, press the seeds in deep, but take care. Protect yourself so love can last.