Perennial Weirdo
Barefoot, bleeding slightly, fine
It happens every July, like clockwork, like a rash. Every trip outside becomes a disappearance. I step out to move the hose and resurface forty minutes later behind the tomatoes, damp, holding secateurs I don’t remember picking up. I am scratched, bitten, sweaty. There is pollen on my shirt, dirt on my knees, and still more ground into the lines of my hands.
Sometimes I catch my reflection in the window.
There she is, I think.
The garden witch.
Not an elegant garden witch who knows the medicinal properties of yarrow and keeps bundles of lavender drying above a wood stove. I am more of a regional nuisance. More swamp than woodland. A damp little woman muttering beside the potatoes, no longer answerable to indoor standards.
I stop wearing shoes. I eat peas from the vine and wipe musky tomato leaves across my shirt. I crawl beneath plants without considering what may already be living there. I step over chicken shit, into mud, through spiderwebs, and occasionally onto objects I myself left in the grass. I notice small wounds only when they begin leaving marks on something else.
Of course, my ferality has limits. The garden may have claimed my body, but it will never claim my seltzer. I am barefoot, but wearing SPF 50. I will drink from the hose, but only after letting the water run cold. I may crawl beneath the tomatoes, but if something touches my neck unexpectedly, I abandon the garden to its fate.
But outside, I become less governable. I stop caring about the sweat running down my neck, the scratches and bruises on my legs, the hornet sting on my back, or whatever has happened to my hair. I squat in the dirt until my feet go numb. I wipe blood on my shorts and keep moving. I follow butterflies farther than the situation warrants. I talk aloud to chickens, tomatoes, bees, but mostly to no one.
I’m not efficient. I get distracted by everything. A bumblebee disappears into a sunflower and I stop what I’m doing to watch. A green tomato has grown slightly larger and receives a full inspection and verbal evaluation. A praying mantis appears and I become unavailable for the foreseeable future.
Time outside does not pass in recognizable units—it passes in hose lengths, mosquito bites, and how far the shade has moved across the bed.
Eventually I return to the house barefoot, bleeding slightly, carrying a ball of twine, a handful of chives, five peas, two feathers, at least one flower I didn’t need to pick, and no memory of what happened. I find vegetables in my pockets and dirt in places dirt should admire from a respectful distance.
I make it three steps into the kitchen before remembering the hose is still running, the wheelbarrow is in the yard, I left my sparkling water balanced on a fence post, and there’s a leaf in my bra.
Back out I go.
The leaf stays.
🪱 COMPOST FOR THE SOUL
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
—Walt Whitman
🐓 BACKYARD DISPATCH
Murder, She Laid
The other day I opened the nesting box and discovered that one of my hens had apparently laid a grapefruit. It sat among the ordinary eggs with the swollen authority of a minor moon. The other eggs appeared to have arranged themselves around it in respectful silence. I carried the basket inside using both hands, washed the evidence, and transferred it to a carton.
Due process is the cornerstone of any functioning henhouse democracy, so I began by considering every member of the flock. There were only four possible suspects, plus a rooster, because excluding him would have caused a scene.
Emily Chickinson has never done anything wrong in her life. Any overturned seedlings, missing mealworms, or dead mice found mysteriously disemboweled beside the chicken coop were clearly the work of outside agitators. Emily is a poet. She has never knowingly participated in reality.
Eggward Norton isn’t interesting enough to commit to a project like this. She’ll lay the exact same medium brown egg every day for six years before fading quietly into the scenery.
Benechick Cumberbatch has the necessary theatricality but lacks follow-through. She would announce plans to lay the largest egg in Berkshire County, spend forty-five minutes choosing a nesting box, then become distracted by her own reflection in the waterer.
Feather Locklear is biologically incapable of laying eggs, although this has never stopped a man from taking credit for a woman’s work.
And then there was Hen Affleck.
Hen has the unmistakable look of a bird who has buried evidence before. She is broad through the chest, economical with her movements, and somehow always knows where the best niblets will fall. She has the loudest, longest clucks in the coop. If someone asked me to identify the most competent criminal in the yard, I’d answer before they finished the question.
I interviewed the flock.
“Morning, ladies. Anyone have a big day yesterday?”
Blink.
Scratch.
Scattered pecks at absolutely nothing.
Classic stonewalling.
I held up the egg.
“Recognize this?”
Emily blinked.
Benechick cocked her head.
Eggward existed, technically.
Feather crowed.
Hen took one step and froze.
Luckily, poultry science offers several methods for identifying which hen laid which egg. The simplest is to watch the nesting boxes and record who goes in and what comes out—a system requiring patience, concentration, a clipboard, and an amount of free time generally available only to people trapped in lighthouses.
So I spent the rest of the morning conducting surveillance. Nothing happened—just four tiny feathered sociopaths dust-bathing and eating discarded jammy toast. Every few minutes, one would drift toward the nesting boxes. I would quietly straighten in my surveillance pine, binoculars raised, trying not to shake the entire tree like a nervous black bear. The hen would notice me immediately, reconsider whatever she’d been planning, and wander off to eat clover.
At one point I became convinced I’d identified the culprit based solely on her vibe.
Then she moved.
It was only Eggward.
I abandoned the theory.
A Reddit thread suggested another investigative technique: assign each hen a different color of food dye, apply a small amount to the area from which eggs emerge, and identify the layer by the colored mark left on the shell.
Here, at last, was science. All I needed to do was catch every chicken, turn her upside down, individually color-code her cloaca, and then live with myself.
I imagined the scene: four flustered hens, a rainbow of food dye, and me crouched in the run performing forensic poultry gynecology because an egg was large. Somewhere between “forensic” and “gynecology,” I realized I’d lost the plot.
The case remains open. The suspect remains at large. Officially.
Unofficially, I soft-boiled the evidence and served it with buttered soldiers, thereby destroying the only physical evidence in the case.
Hen Affleck continues to move freely through the run. She knows I can’t prove a thing.
🌹 BLOOM REPORT
Nicotiana sylvestris — Long white trumpets that aren’t interested in your daytime schedule. At dusk they open wider and release a sweet perfume that makes walking the garden feel like you’ve stumbled into someone else’s dream.
Monarda (Bee Balm) — The hummingbirds found it before I did. Deadhead the spent blooms for another flush, but know you’re also renewing the lease for every pollinator squatting in this patch.
Anise Hyssop — Flowers for weeks, smells like a low-key breath mint when you brush past it, and is almost never without a bee hovering nearby. Plant it once and you’ll begin questioning why it isn’t in every garden.
🔍 DIRTBAG GARDENING CORNER
There’s a Sucker Born Every Tomato
Tomato plants have armpits.
I’m sorry you had to find out this way.
Look at the place where a leaf stem meets the main stem. Nestled in that little V, you may find a new shoot growing. This is called a sucker.
A sucker is not just another leaf—it’s an entirely new growing stem trying to climb out of your tomato plant’s armpit like a tiny chlorophyll chestburster. Left alone, it will grow leaves, flowers, tomatoes, and eventually armpits of its own containing even more suckers. It’s tomatoes all the way down.
Removing some suckers improves airflow and makes the plant slightly less likely to become an impenetrable tomato compound. Garden advice says, “Simply pinch off the suckers,” as though you’ll know which of the plant’s ninety identical green appendages is the unauthorized one. The key is location.
Main stem: legitimate
Leaf stem: legitimate
Tiny new shoot emerging directly from the armpit between them: xenomorph
Small suckers can be pinched off with your fingers. Larger ones may require “clean” secateurs and the calm resolve of Ellen Ripley approaching an airlock.
Do you need to remove every sucker? No, and relax. Remove the ones making the plant feel crowded or impossible to navigate. Leave a few if you like. Every sucker you keep is a potential future tomato, but also another branch demanding sunlight, airflow, and emotional labor.
If you can’t tell whether something is a sucker, wait a few days—it will either reveal itself as a leaf, a flower cluster, or a complete second tomato monster with armpits. Then do what feels right. By late July, the tomatoes will have made their own plans.
🏺 VASED AND CONFUSED
Sunflowers, cut before the garden swallowed me again.
A pitcher full of summer.
🔥 HOT OR NOT
Yard Witch Edition
HOT: Going outside for one small task. A charming fiction.
NOT: Returning ninety minutes later with a sprig of parsley, a dirty fork, and a new enemy.
HOT: A cold can of seltzer balanced on a fence post. The sacred chalice of the Berkshire yard witch.
NOT: Remembering it forty-five minutes later. Now it is raspberry lime broth.
HOT: Using the hem of your shirt as a harvest basket. A serf with a skincare routine and the posture of a guilty crane.
NOT: Discovering a spider in the shirt-basket. This is how empires actually fall.
HOT: Watering the garden in an outfit that cannot reasonably be called clothing. I have left society.
NOT: A delivery truck arriving while you’re bent over the hostas. The social contract has found me again.
HOT: Wearing perfume into the chicken run. A complex fragrance journey from bergamot to poultry dust.
NOT: Feather Locklear remaining unmoved. He prefers top notes of blood and grievance.
HOT: Squatting beside the raised beds for so long you lose circulation in both feet. Field research.
NOT: Standing up too quickly and briefly meeting God. He also wants to know when the tomatoes will ripen.
HOT: A butterfly landing nearby. A celestial visitation.
NOT: A moth landing directly on your face. A blessing delivered with the accuracy of a thrown shoe.
HOT: Finding a frog. Local celebrity sighting.
NOT: The frog jumping unexpectedly. I invited you into the narrative, not my personal airspace.
HOT: Wearing sunscreen. Basic maintenance on a haunted house.
NOT: Sunscreen mixed with dirt and sweat into a full-body roux. Crispy is imminent.
HOT: A praying mantis appearing. All appointments canceled.
NOT: It turning its head to look directly at you. Nightmare.
HOT: Dirt under the nails. This season’s shade is Fingerling After Dark.
NOT: Ten minutes with the nail brush and you still look like the groundskeeper in a prestige murder mystery.
HOT: Watering at dusk, hose looped over one shoulder, feeling extremely Ophelia.
NOT: Stepping on a slug mid-Ophelia moment. Scene cut.
🎧 BEET DROPS
Pete Seeger — “Green Grass Grows All Around”
I learned this as a child. These days I sing it to James and the tomatoes.
I love this so much.
Fun fact: my grandmother always wore tube tops when gardening. She abhorred tan lines. When I was about 6 she gave me a stack to wear when playing in the yard -- she didn't want me to have tan lines either.