LATE BLOOMER (messy diary response to a A World in 3 Endings)

I dreamt about a nipple last night, and woke up to a new blank feeling. Downstairs, making strong coffee, I broke a glass in the dishwasher - the second this week. Minuscule shards everywhere, 2 lodged in my flesh. Quick blood greeted me.

Now I am writing from my family's porch next to an empty box with an elbow macaroni label on it. The yard is wild, with traces of my attempts at maintenance. Wet bluebells, curved in prayer, kiss the perimeter of the small square of dirt I’ve been working each day. For 30 some years my mom has planted and re-planted this plot with the care of a depressed Gaia-worshipper. She saves sprouted apple seeds from moments of spaced out snacking, lets things be tangled as they are, plants something new once in a while,  forgets she did until it pops up elsewhere. Our messy yard of piles stands out in this now rich neighborhood, where landscapers still show up to work the daffodils and tulips and gravel despite the stay at home order. 

For the last many years the plot has made me ashamed -  I’m not sure of what - my mom or myself, all the ways we are the same, all the ways we are different. I’ve passed it briskly, yearning for popping color, edible pods, the gratification of order and bounty. After years of avoidance, I started to dig in the plot about a month ago. I cry and I dig. The root matrix is deep and intricate, I have no idea what’s what. I hack away, feeling blasphemous, compelled by a supposed devotion to earth with somehow little respect for the knotted veins I hit. I buy starts at the co op, find seeds in my mom’s dusty baskets, burry them, truly confused as to what a 1/4 inch looks like or feels like or is. I plant a pomegranate tree - or is it a pomegranate bush -  I do stop to smell the lilacs, eat the bolted turnip greens, remember the fruit trees that grew here when I was a kid. My mom sends my brother down the block to retrieve a free rain barrel and hose. A fat robin lands on the broken gate and stares me down. Young professionals walk by in masks and earbuds. 

Sometimes when you dig with the drive of catharsis, you break a noble root in two and it bleeds, and the color takes your breath away. Sometimes you strike an earth worm, or kill a baby vole.  Has anyone whose ever tried to grow things or tend land not killed blindly in the process? You can send your child to utopian dried bean schools, like the ones J and I went to in Seattle and SF, where they try to teach you to save insects, to be precious stewards marching with cupped hands towards the long-skirted teacher to offer her your goodness.  And still one day you will be so sad, feeling as though you cannot love or be loved, feeling the vague shame of your life clouding all your senses, and you will take a pitchfork to the earth which is actually a pile of dirt a man laid atop a cement structure long ago, but has still somehow returned herself to herself - dense with life, death and the in between - and you will use all your strength to sever her into many pieces, convinced you are doing it out of that same goodness. 

Goodness like you want to feed your aging family and grow medicine and feel the pride of cultivation - and you think of your ghost neighbors from Troy, angry men, John in Lansingburgh and Dick in South Troy - also managing their little plots, protecting them from the wilds of her, her children with their flying basketballs that threaten the integrity of flower pots, her wet snow that comes and comes and comes despite the precise and determined ejaculations of the snow blower that futilely demand her to stop coming. 

And you don’t miss those men who you hated to hear yelling in the streets at every one and everything they feared, you are grateful to be so far from them in this Western land of ocean winds and gentle garbage, that place was killing you and they were killers too, but you also love them as they are you as they are me driving into earth heartbroken homesick hands dry and bleeding as I am lost but still wake up each day searching searching searching, heavy with the dreaming of a nipple, propelled from my bed by the need to know what happened outside while I was gone.