Because it is spring, I want to begin things. I’m impatient in any season, but particularly when it feels like I’m wasting time—like there are fewer good mornings to submerge a seed into a bit of dirt, tap it down with a palm and a drink of water, and nourish something new.
Spring for me has often been a time of action. As a kid, it was when my dad would dispatch my brother and me to the yard to help him wrangle any crunchy leaves that had stuck around over the winter. We tromped down the dunes to the shore of Lake Erie and raked the sand; the fierce waves often flung garbage and other debris ashore, where it was blanketed by snow. We collected the crushed soda cans that fishermen tossed overboard as they trawled for perch, and gathered the wrinkled balloons that had drifted, maybe, from a long-ago picnic somewhere else along the lake. We scrubbed the outdoor furniture, where birds had left white, crusty puddles on their perches; we looked for spiders around the gazebo, and politely escorted them out.
A few apartments ago, in Brooklyn, I lucked into a garden-level place and a landlord who somewhat reluctantly agreed to let me coax life from the raised beds she had built. As winter wound down, I made a careful plan. I mapped the light and the nearby trees that could meddle with it; I consulted several seed catalogs and traveled to some half-dozen nurseries. I planted kale and chard and beans, dahlias and pale-pink tea roses the color of tutu tulle, a brigade of sunflowers marching along the wooden fence. I don’t journal about my own life, but I dutifully chronicled the plants: In tidy rows in a fresh notebook, I recorded when they germinated, when they seemed thirstiest, when I had harvested each of the things they had given. As spring turned to summer, I watered, I weeded, I bargained with aphids. I felt busy, but more importantly, useful; it was wonderful to grow something and share it. My ex-husband and I loved to host our friends in that yard, filling their plates with freshly plucked greens and their stomachs with things we had planned for and cared about.
I picked today’s poem, “Arriving Again and Again Without Noticing,” by Linda Gregg, because it reminds me of routines and agitated waiting. This is a moment when I feel helpless and don’t want to be, though it’s hard to know what to build, where to start, or how to hurry it along.
I don’t know what to plan for right now, because I don’t know what the world will look like in several weeks or months. There’s no indication that things will definitely “return to normal”—whatever that was, whatever it will be—as spring continues. Some officials have indicated that public beaches will likely be closed all summer, and there’s no consensus about when it will be safe to forgo our face masks; instead, the city’s COVID-19 text line has been barraging subscribers with reminders to suit up whenever we leave the house. Many epidemiologists worry that turning us loose back in the world would give small clusters or asymptomatic cases the chance to snowball into hotspots, and revive the pandemic even after we thought it had flatlined. It would be like strolling jauntily forward only to stagger backwards and smack our heads. I don’t want to sow seeds I can’t reap, but I don’t want to stagnate, either. Planning, like fretting, is maybe a way to wrest more control than anyone is owed or can reasonably expect. Still, I want it.
In the evenings, I’ve been spending a lot of time on the phone, holding it up to the cracked-open windows so that my far-flung friends and family can hear the chorus of sirens and the ceremonial 7:00 p.m. cheering and hollering and clanging of pots to recognize the workers on the front lines. To my interlocutors, I often describe what I see: the whipped-cream clouds; the molten sunset; the threadbare streets, which strike me as either eerie or peaceful, depending on my mood. By the time I get to the trees, with their soon-to-be leaves and their nascent flowers, people almost always tell me to be grateful: At least it’s spring, they say. At least there’s that. The loneliness, the quiet, the days indoors, they remind me—all would be gloomier with fewer hours of sunlight, and with drafts sneaking in through the screens.
I’m sure that’s true, but it also isn’t. Spring is a time to be outside somewhere, sweating under a midday sun, hoping and planning and building together. Earth Day is on Wednesday, and while I understand why environmental crises are getting eclipsed by the virus—I think it’s a question of urgency, triage, and what a single brain and heart can hold at once—being inside just makes me keener to sink my hands into damp earth with people I love, and imagine a world that is far less skewed.
Thanks for listening. This week, I’d love to know what little landscapes you’re building or planning to build, whether it’s a community garden working toward food justice, or something pretty on your fire escape. We could use all the greenery and goodness we can get.
Yours,
Jess
P.S. A few nice things:
I encountered this poem, “To be of use,” by the prolific environmentalist, Marxist, and feminist writer Marge Piercy, for the first time today, and found it both rousing and anchoring. (Thanks to Noah Rosenblum for sending it.) These words feel exactly right to me now, and I hope you find comfort in them, too:
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The whole poem is lovely; I recorded it below, simply and without other sounds.
In other news, if you are feeling lonely or bored, try getting to know your arthropod roommates. (These include your several-thousand face mites; I don’t make the rules. I did, however, write both that story and this sentence, so I readily accept the blame for the fact that you now know this.) For a dash of wonder without the gross factor, what about the delicious serendipity of finding a tagged butterfly among billions in Mexico’s montane reserves? And check out the inside of this ammonite. It reminds me of capillaries, or the stunning ceiling of Sagrada Familia. More great design: Brittany Luberda, my dear college friend and a brilliant decorative arts curator, recently pointed me to some intricate, abstract mid-century textiles by the British designer Lucienne Day. They’re incredibly beautiful, and really smart—Day capitalized on the appetite for chintzy home furnishings while also transforming it. Her prints are wonderful places to let your eyes wander.
Talk to you next week. Good luck out there.