Keep Looking
Between foxgloves and coneflowers
The garden looks finished. It isn’t.
The coneflowers are blooming and the sunflowers are opening. Everything has disappeared beneath foliage. The beds look full instead of hopeful. After months of bare soil, tiny seedlings, and squinting at green things wondering if they’re weeds, it feels like the garden has finally become itself.
Then, somehow, the lupines have already become seed pods. At first they were impossible to ignore, sending up purple spires that looked almost theatrical against the fresh green. Now I leave some standing if I want more lupines next year and cut others back if I want tidier plants.
I didn't really notice when the bloom ended. I was busy looking at the foxgloves instead. By the time the last foxglove bells had fallen, the roses had already had their first flush.
August will belong to an entirely different cast of characters than June did, and September won’t look much like August either. The sunflowers will go to seed and slump and the finches will work on them and that will be its own kind of lovely, but it won’t be this. Soon it’ll be morning glory. Then zinnias and dahlias. Then asters. Then whatever comes after asters. Then the particular grey quiet of a garden that has finished saying what it had to say for the year, and the first hints that everything is preparing to sleep.
The garden isn’t trying to stay June. It was never trying to stay May, either, or April, when the ground was still holding winter and my hands went numb opening it all back up. The garden just becomes the next thing. Peony becomes lupine becomes foxglove becomes rose becomes coneflower becomes whatever’s next, each one fully itself for exactly as long as it’s supposed to be and not one day more, and then gone, without ceremony, making room.
It doesn’t insist that Tuesday’s first blossom is somehow more important than Thursday’s seed pod. They’re different moments in the same story, each worth noticing before the next one quietly takes its place.
I want June to keep being June. I deadhead and water and stake and fuss, trying, in some unspoken way, to hold a thing at its best moment a little longer than it wants to be held. I keep mistaking the peak for the purpose and change for loss.
The garden has no such ambition. Its greatest trick is convincing you that what you’re looking at right now is the whole show, only to reveal a week later that something else has been waiting patiently in the wings all along.
I’m trying to learn the difference between attention and grip. Attention is what you give the coneflower that just opened this morning, the one that wasn’t there Tuesday. Grip is wanting it to still be blooming in September. The garden teaches attention constantly, all season, for free, if I let it. It is far less interested in teaching me how to let go, mostly because letting go isn’t actually what’s happening out there. Nothing is being let go of—it’s just moving, the way it was always going to move.
I keep asking it to hold still anyway.
The garden keeps answering the same way:
Keep looking.
There’s something else opening.
🪱 COMPOST FOR THE SOUL
Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.
—Hermann Hesse
🐓 BACKYARD DISPATCH
The Silence of the Hens
Nothing happened this week in the coop. Nothing. Everyone is fine. Eggs are appearing. The water gets drunk. Everything is completely, unbearably normal.
Still, I went out to watch the chickens. I left with more questions than I came in with.
Hen Affleck was standing in the exact center of the run, not doing anything, in the particular way she does nothing when she is absolutely doing something. She didn’t move when I came in. She just looked at me the way a person looks at you when you’ve walked into a room and they were just talking about you. I filled the water. She continued to stand there. I said, “okay, fine.” She blinked. I walked away.
Emily Chickinson was in the nest box for an amount of time that felt medically significant. When she came out, she looked fine—which is to say she looked like someone who had just scratched four hundred poems about death into the walls of the coop with one talon. Once she saw me, she of course came right over and became underfoot in the sweetest possible way. She followed me around the yard with her usual expression of boundless goodwill, generally behaving like the only bird in this place who would remember my birthday.
Benechick Cumberbatch was in the dust bath. Benechick Cumberbatch is always in the dust bath. She was flinging dirt over her shoulder with such enthusiasm that it appeared less like hygiene and more like an attempt to return to the earth from whence she came. At some point it stopped looking like a dust bath and started looking like the destruction of evidence. She looked up only once, decided I wasn’t worth the interruption, and resumed whatever she was definitely not covering up.
Eggward Norton was fine. She was fine when I arrived. She remained fine throughout my observation. When I left, she was still fine. I suspect she will continue to be fine well into next Tuesday. Healthy. Pleasant. Entirely free of narrative. If she has an inner life, she has chosen not to burden me with it.
I waited.
Eventually she laid an egg. It was, predictably, fine.
Feather Locklear continued to patrol the perimeter as though personally responsible for national defense. Every so often he threw his head back and screamed at a cloud, a chipmunk, or perhaps the crushing weight of existence. At one point he flapped himself up the ramp to the coop and stood in the threshold surveying something in the middle distance with a blank expression. I watched him from behind the weird little pine for eight minutes. He didn’t move. Eventually I went inside and had lunch.
So that’s that. Everything is fine. Nobody needed me. The eggs are where eggs should be. Nobody is visibly unwell except for me. Feather continues crowing at ungodly hours, but that’s not an incident. That’s a personality.
I don’t know what they’re planning. I only know that five chickens do not simultaneously produce this much calm and become this well-adjusted by accident. The reason is not that everything is fine. The reason is that they’ve agreed, collectively, not to let me in on it.
I’ve decided to accept this.
I’m also going to check on them one more time before bed.
🌹 BLOOM REPORT
Asiatic lily ‘Corsage’ — Small, pale pink, freckled, unpretentious. The only lily I actually like. I love it without reservation, forcing me to confront the possibility that I've been assigning personalities to flower size.
Milkweed — Not planted. Never planted. Smells of vanilla and honey while taking on the very important work of feeding monarchs. The meadow’s way of taking care of itself.
Black-eyed Susan — Blooming out in the meadow weeks before the ones in my perennial bed. Nature continues to ignore my timeline.
Sunflower — The first round of last summer’s self-seeders are opening. This one arrived in rust and fire.
🥕 PICK ME DIRTY
In Which I Root Around Like a Truffle Pig and Find Answers
The lettuce continues to be wildly successful and outpacing my current rate of salad consumption.
I planted a mix this spring because I enjoy salads and because every seed packet promises a picturesque abundance that makes me forget I am one person with one mouth. Now I walk outside with scissors, intending to remove approximately six leaves from each plant, and I still return to the kitchen carrying enough lettuce to feed a respectable rabbit family.
Pictured: romaine lettuce, mizuna mustard greens, red giant mustard greens, and red leaf lettuce. A salad in waiting. I will now honor months of careful gardening with a generous pour of Paul Newman's Family Recipe Italian.
Which I guess brings me to the potatoes.
Hilling potatoes is when you mound more soil around the stems as they grow so the tubers stay covered underground. You are repeatedly piling dirt onto a plant while hoping that, somewhere beneath all that dirt, invisible potatoes are holding up their end of the arrangement.
It’s one of those gardening tasks that sounds straightforward, that is straightforward, and that I nevertheless managed to turn into an existential inquiry.
The other day I was hilling my Red Norland potatoes when curiosity got the better of me.
I brushed away a little soil.
Nothing.
I dug a little more.
Then my fingers hit something. Small. Round. Firm.
Potato.
Reader, I should have stopped. Instead, I continued excavating with the focus of someone who has found a body and the ethics of someone who has not. I rooted around in the fucking dirt like a truffle pig for ten minutes.
I just can’t leave a mystery alone.
It was perfect. Smooth. Pink. Approximately the size of a Jawbreaker. I held it triumphantly in my hand for several seconds before realizing I had, in fact, interrupted its entire childhood. It wasn’t finished being a potato.
The triumph gave way to guilt. I immediately ran to the kitchen to wash it, for reasons that now elude me—as though cleanliness was suddenly the pressing issue. I ran back to the garden and tucked it back into the ground.
“Go back to sleep,” I whispered to the potato, carefully burying it, which accomplished absolutely nothing horticulturally but made me feel like a much better person. I patted the dirt over it with gentle urgency.
Then I covered the evidence and walked away.
Meanwhile, the raspberries.
Harvested first bowl of summer this evening.
Picked barefoot.
Eaten almost immediately.
🪰 PEST SUPPORTING ACTOR GOES TO…
Something Rotten in the State of Denmark Massachusetts
Two weeks ago, an investigation was terminated.
This was, in retrospect, premature.
I want to be clear that I did not want to care about this. I have a garden. I have chickens. I have a child and a life and approximately forty things that I need to do at any given time, none of which are hornets. I did not ask for a three-part hornet story. I am simply a person who cannot walk past a thing without needing to know what happened to it, and the hornets apparently sensed this.
They built unauthorized structures on my house. They made sustained eye contact and buzzed in a way that felt personal. Then one of them turned up dead directly beneath the nest under circumstances I am not prepared to characterize. Then a second one stood at the nest entrance and watched me write about the first one, and I closed my laptop. I wanted them gone.
That should have been the end of it.
It wasn’t.
There are now six bodies on my deck. Possibly seven—one is in a position that makes an official count impossible.
I found them on a Tuesday morning with my coffee. They are scattered across the boards like something happened mid-flight and nobody stuck around to explain it. The nest, directly above, continues its operations without comment or apparent remorse, which I find both reassuring and the most suspicious thing I have ever witnessed.
I went inside and looked up whether bald-faced hornets have natural predators. They do. Then I looked up whether they experience anything like distress. The internet was not prepared to answer this definitively. I searched again with different terms. I cross-referenced several AIs. None of them could tell me whether these insects had tiny feelings.
So I went back outside and crouched down in my pajamas to take a portrait.
I understand this isn’t normal behavior—a person standing on her deck in her pajamas, crouching over a dead insect with her phone in portrait mode, after having googled its emotional capacity twice. A reasonable person would have swept them off the boards.
But look at that face.
This one had a face. It had a whole thing going on. It had opinions about my house that I disagreed with, but they were opinions. It built things. It made eye contact. Probably. It was, technically, a yellowjacket, which is actually a wasp, which means it spent its entire short life being called the wrong thing, and now this.
I have several theories about what happened. I am choosing not to share them at this time, partly because I still live here, and partly because the nest is still active, and partly because I made eye contact with one of them last week.
The investigation is ongoing, somehow.
🔍 DIRTBAG GARDENING CORNER
MacGyver? I Barely Know Her
Gardening books and blogs love to tell you what tools you need to garden. I have better news—you don’t. A surprising amount of gardening is just pointing at an object and saying, “Congratulations! You’re a shovel now.”
Can’t find the trowel?
Hands are just fleshy trowels with opinions.
No kneeling pad?
The earth. It’s where you’re headed anyway.
Need to tie up tomatoes?
The cheesecloth from that one time you said you were going to make ricotta.
Want a bucket?
Your kid’s sand pail. It now contains cow shit instead of seashells. Childhood is fleeting.
Can’t find the watering can?
A colander. You’ll figure it out.
Lost the garden hose?
Fill every vessel in your house and walk back and forth like a colonial villager.
Want to pound in a stake?
A rock. Or another, bigger rock.
Need to haul weeds?
Use the bottom of your t-shirt like a kangaroo.
No gloves?
The dirt under your nails is free exfoliation and also a personality trait.
Want a wheelbarrow?
Make three trips.
Need a plant marker?
You’ll remember what you planted there.
(Narrator: She did not.)
🎧 BEET DROPS
Future Islands — “Back in the Tall Grass”
One more lap.
I'm pretty sure insects have emotions and that a bee waved at me the other day.
One of your funniest