Back on My Knees

I'll just check one thing

There’s a morning in early May when I go outside to check on something and don’t come back in.

I’m not dressed for it, and I’ve brought my coffee out in a real mug, which suggests I believe in my own return. I tell myself I’ll just take a quick look to see if any peas have come up.

I step onto the grass. That’s it—that’s the threshold.

The garden is not where I left it. It never is, but this is the first year I feel it in my body instead of just registering it. Things are already underway without me, which is either wonderful or a little rude, depending on my mood. The peonies are up—thick stems already a foot or two tall, red-green and lacquered at the tips. The columbine has arranged itself into those improbable, delicate structures that look like they belong in someone else’s garden. The poppies are unfurling in papery jewel tones like they have somewhere to be.

I crouch down next to something without deciding to crouch.

The ground is colder than I expect. I press my fingers into the soil and feel it give, just slightly, and then hold. I stay there longer than necessary, looking at nothing in particular. Or everything. It’s hard to tell.

At some point I set my coffee down, not carefully, just near me, the way you’d set something down in a room you intend to move through quickly. It will stay there for hours.

My hands begin to move without instruction. I brush soil from the base of something that doesn’t need it. I pinch off a dead bit of last year’s growth. I find myself holding a length of twine I have no memory of picking up. The first real task presents itself almost casually—a weed, or what I decide is a weed, though I pull it either way.

I pull.

The root comes up cleanly, and something in my chest answers to it.

Right. There you are.

The garden accepts all of this without comment. It doesn’t thank me. It doesn’t resist me. It simply continues around me, with or without my involvement. This is both comforting and slightly insulting.

My knees ache in a way they didn’t last year. There’s dirt under my nails, though I don’t remember the moment it got there—it’s just suddenly there, a small proof of something. My coffee is cold, but I drink it anyway. Forgetting it feels like part of the point.

The first real workday of the season is not about what gets done. Objectively, very little gets done. A few weeds, a few stems redirected, a stone moved, then moved back, then moved again to a third location where it looks worse than it did originally.

What happens instead is quieter than that. I re-enter.

The garden has begun in earnest, and now it will ask things of me again—small things, mostly. Time. Attention. The willingness to kneel down and not immediately get back up.

I pick up my empty mug and stand slowly, brushing the dirt from my hands in a gesture that is more symbolic than effective. The dirt stays. Of course it does.

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🐓 BACKYARD DISPATCH

The Son Also Rises (Against Me)

I went out to the yard with James, who is very three and already operating under the firm belief that chickens are both his colleagues and his birthright.

He knows all their names. Not correctly, but with conviction.

“Benechick!” he yells, pointing to Hen Affleck, which is how I know we’re in danger.

James used to collect the eggs. This was a brief, golden era that ended when he began approaching the nesting boxes with the energy of a small, well-meaning raccoon who just recently discovered doors and who may or may not have rabies. We are currently on hiatus from egg collection for reasons that feel self-explanatory but apparently require ongoing bribery and the strategic deployment of snacks on my part.

So he pivoted to his second favorite activity: watching me get attacked.

Feather Locklear, for his part, is fully in his spring era—which is to say he wakes up every day and chooses violence like it’s a vitamin. On this particular afternoon, he was circling, neck feathers up, wings slightly out—an Elizabethan collar, but make it homicidal.

I clock it immediately. I shift my body and lower my voice.

“Hey buddy,” I say, like a kindly old woman who has made peace with the fact that this is simply how she goes.

James, sensing the narrative lag, places both hands on my lower back and shoves me forward. I stumble one step into the exact radius of Feather’s ambitions. There is a moment where Feather and I make eye contact and both understand that something irreversible has been set in motion. Then he comes for me—a blur of feathers and fury and generational grievances.

Behind me, James is laughing—full, this-is-why-we-have-bodies laughter. I escape with my shins intact in the technical sense and my dignity absolutely shredded. Feather stands there, composed, like he just successfully defended his dissertation on tactical violence.

James immediately moves on. He wanders off to collect dandelions, which he presents to me later like evidence of a separate, gentler universe where I am not being hunted for sport.

I sit down in a square of sun off to the side, the light high and clean, the grass almost hurting to look at and warm through my jeans.

And Emily Chickinson comes over.

The first thing I notice is that her sounds are wrong for a chicken. They’re soft. Low. Almost private. Not clucks so much as murmurs, like she’s thinking out loud and I’ve been allowed to overhear.

She stands near me for a minute. Then moves closer. I don’t move. I don’t even breathe correctly. And then—like she’s decided something—she steps within reach.

I touch her back, just once, lightly.

She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t bolt or reconsider or turn it into a Thing. She just… stays. Which, in this yard, is the rarest behavior of all.

“Emily—” I begin.

She looks at me. Not the sideways, one-eyed, evaluating look the others give; not the common transactional glance of a creature deciding if you are food-adjacent. Emily looks directly, like she has placed me somewhere in her understanding of things and is checking to see if I’m still there.

And I am.

Somewhere behind us, James is talking to the dandelions, misnaming them with the same confidence he misnames everything else, inventing a world that doesn’t need to be correct to be real.

Feather Locklear is pacing the perimeter, ready to defend it again at a moment’s notice.

And Emily stays a minute longer.

Which is nothing.
Which is everything.

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🌹 BLOOM REPORT

Poppies opening like crumpled silk
Geum glowing like small weather
Fritillaria refusing eye contact
Bluebells loitering beautifully
Crabapple absolutely showing off

ka-bloom

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🌱 SOW WHAT NOW?

We have left the bunker. We are unsupervised. We are putting seeds directly into the ground and trusting both the soil and ourselves, which feels bold bordering on negligent.

Here’s who made it out in phase one:

Carrot ‘Rainbow’: Comes in colors that suggest whimsy but still tastes like a carrot, which feels like a metaphor for something.

Carrot ‘Candy’: Sweet enough to make you briefly believe you’re a person who snacks on raw vegetables without dip for pleasure.

Nigella ‘Miss Jekyll’: Airy, blue, a little aloof. Drifts through the garden like a well-dressed ghost with good intentions.

Nigella ‘Bridal Veil White’: Same ethereal energy, but now in white, which makes it feel ceremonial whether you asked for that or not.

Cornflower ‘Blue Boy’: A color so aggressively blue it borders on propaganda. Cheerful in a way that feels slightly unearned.

Stock ‘Ten Week Perfume’: Soft, a little old-world. You lean in “just to check” and suddenly you’re lingering hoping to learn secrets of love.

Poppy ‘Mother-of-Pearl’: Shifty, iridescent, impossible to pin down. A little chaotic, a little magical, totally beautiful. Oh, relatable.

If this all comes up, we’ll call it intentional. If not, we’ll call it a learning experience and immediately try again.

In related developments, the onion family (bulbs, leeks, bunching) and greens (kale, lettuce mixes, collards) have been moved out of the basement and into society (the ground). They are adjusting to wind, real sun, and the concept of unpredictability. Good luck, fellow travelers!

The potato plants are growing! The peas have surfaced!

Sometimes it just feels like everything works—a sentiment we will revisit when something inevitably humbles me.

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🌸 PETAL TO THE METAL

Woodland Fairy with Boundaries

I planted these fritillaria bulbs two years ago, very deliberately, after seeing a photo and deciding I wanted something a little less obvious, a little more woodland fairy.

They came up last year. I registered them, nodded politely. This year I actually looked.

Fritillaria don’t face you. Every flower hangs down, like the important part is happening underneath. You have to tilt them, or crouch, or catch them mid-sway to see that flash of yellow inside—brighter than you expect, like they’re holding something back on purpose.

From above, they’re all restraint. Soft, burnished, almost dull. From below, something else entirely.

They’re quiet, and smaller than they feel. Easy to miss if you’re moving too quickly, which I was, apparently, this time last year.

I like that they require a little adjustment. A change in angle. Not dramatic—just enough to make you aware you’re the one doing the approaching.

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💐 CUTTINGS

Ode to Emily Chickinson

Small brown vessel of unfathomable interiority,
what do you hear
just past the edge of the feed bucket,
just beneath the din of ordinary hunger?

I’ve watched you stand still
in a yard known for chaos
and make stillness look intentional.

You pause as though time
needs your permission to keep going.

Emily,
there’s something a little inappropriate
about the way you look at me.

Not curiosity—
that cheap, flickering thing the others burn through—
but recognition,
ancient, like it didn’t start here.

As if somewhere before this—
before feathers, before my inconvenient lack of them—
we agreed to meet again
under less dignified circumstances.

I come to you with my offerings:
grain, water, whatever is unraveling in me that day,
and you take it
with the composure of something
that has never once thought
it was the center of anything.

Which is why I think you’re free.

Yesterday they chased you.
You fled, yes—
but with the restraint of a poet.

You slipped under the coop,
into that low republic of shadow and consequence,
and there you were:

not hiding,
just elsewhere,
eyes bright.

Emily,
if I crouch low enough,
if I make my voice small enough
to fit inside your world,
will you tell me what you know—

or is the point
that you don’t?

Stay slightly apart.
Stay tuned to whatever frequency
keeps you soft in a place that rewards the opposite.

I will be nearby—
large, confused, carrying snacks—
trying to earn
even one more of your glances.

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Stay dirty,

x bex