Squelch
A love letter to mud
Dear Mud,
You’re not pretty. No one writes poems about you. No one posts close-ups of your texture with a caption about resilience. You don’t sparkle like frost or drift elegantly like snow. You arrive as a smear, a mess, a situation. A problem to be managed. A reason to leave the good boots by the door.
And yet, every year when you return, I feel something in my body loosen.
You are the first honest thing after winter.
Snow pretends. Snow arrives and makes everything look resolved—the yard, the garden, the general chaos of being alive in a place with seasons. Snow is a liar in a white coat.
Mud tells the truth. It says: everything is melting. Everything is moving. Pay attention.
You smell like iron and leaves. Like last October, reconsidered.
I have been inside since November. Not entirely—I went places, did things, performed the motions of a person who goes outside. But really I’ve been inside, in the way you are inside a long winter: sealed at the edges and waiting. The ground frozen. The road either ice, or the memory of ice, or the threat of future ice. The whole world held rigid, and I held rigid inside it.
You showed up this week in patches—putty-colored divots in the road, potholes deep enough that cars had to weave around them. Not a triumphant return, just a quiet reappearance—here and there, in the low spots. The ruts where the plow pushed all winter. The shoulders of the driveway. The edges of the garden beds.
You are inconvenient—you ruin shoes. You climb halfway up the dog’s legs. You appear on the kitchen floor in constellations I can’t explain.
But you are also the moment when the ground stops resisting.
Without water, soil is just dust and memory. When you arrive, everything dissolves just enough. Beneath you, seeds are deciding things. Roots are beginning to stretch again. Worms are resurfacing after a long winter. The whole underground operation is waking back up.
Winter is a long sentence. Mud is the first comma.
Yesterday I walked the dirt road for an hour and a half in dense rubber soles. A person who didn’t quite trust being outside yet. I stepped around you at first, out of habit, out of months of training myself to treat the ground like something to be survived rather than touched.
But somewhere along the way I stopped performing and just walked. And then I stepped directly into you—the soft places, the ruts, the low spots where you’d pooled and darkened. I let my boots disappear to the ankles. I listened for the sound you make when the ground releases a foot and takes it back again.
Squelch.
It’s not elegant. It’s not pretty. But it’s alive, and it’s honest, and after a winter that always lasts about three weeks longer than it should, honest is everything.
Love,
Bex
🐓 BACKYARD DISPATCH
The Coneflower Caper
A few days ago I was standing at the kitchen window admiring the mud when Lady ran past carrying a milk jug.
At first I assumed she had located a piece of trash, which would be consistent with her hobbies. But then she ran past again, tossed the jug skyward, and the handwriting rotated briefly into view:
WHITE ECHINACEA—3/3
The jug had been placed outside for winter sowing approximately seven days earlier.
Now, Lady is technically a dog. A good dog. A dog who has lived on this property long enough to understand that the garden contains Important Things. But she’s also a creature whose guiding philosophy seems to be: “If it smells like dirt, it should be investigated with teeth.”
When I stepped outside, the scene revealed a small but decisive agricultural coup. The milk jug had been pulled from its position in the sowing lineup against the side of the house. The top half was missing entirely. Soil had been distributed across the yard in a pattern best described as “abstract.” The echinacea seeds had been returned to the earth with a level of enthusiasm that far exceeded the parameters of the original plan.
It’s possible the seeds will still germinate, wherever they are. Echinacea is a prairie plant. Tough. Adaptable. What the current horticultural literature does not address is the role of dogs in the propagation of echinacea.
Lady has been informed that the winter sowing program is not collaborative. She listened, head cocked at her familiar angle of comprehension.
Then she picked up the jug and ran.
The remaining milk jugs have been relocated to an undisclosed location.
The bottom half of the echinacea jug has been sent to a farm upstate.
🌱 SOW WHAT NOW?
Sow You Think You Can Grow
Welcome back to my basement. Outside, the garden is still mostly theoretical, but down here, grow lights are on timers, heat mats are humming, and optimism is running a few weeks ahead of the last frost date.
Meet the Ensemble
Onion ‘Walla Walla’: Suspiciously sweet. Excellent on sandwiches. Believes in living fast and caramelizing young. The golden retriever of the onion world.
Eggplant ‘Black Beauty’: High-gloss narcissist. Requires warmth and affirmation. Will reward you with lacquered fruit that looks like it belongs in a Dutch still life.
Pepper ‘Jimmy Nardello’: Long. Red. Deeply Italian about it. Fries sweet, exits dramatically. Believes in olive oil and destiny. Sentimental about August.
Pepper ‘Early Jalapeño’: Sets fruit early because someone in this garden has to be responsible. No drama, just heat. Less chaotic than Shishito, more “told you so.”
Leek ‘King Richard’: Tall, pale, and faintly medieval about it. A monarch who has recently returned from exile and is quietly plotting vichyssoise.
Snapdragons (multiple varieties): Loud colors, upright posture, a little gossipy—the garden’s theater kids.
Dusty Miller ‘Silverdust’: Silver, velvety. Looks like it escaped a Victorian séance and woke up in a planter on someone’s deck.
You’re Gonna Make Me Cry: Onion Update
Some of my onions have surfaced! Others are taking their sweet ass time.
A few are still wearing their seed hats like confused giraffes. The rest have shaken them off. When the seedlings reach about four inches tall, I give them their first haircut—like the ones on the left. Onion seedlings benefit from a trim.
Vegetables, like humans, need boundaries.
Stay tuned for updates on this developing situation.
🦋 LEPIDOPTERA? I HARDLY KNOW HER
The Moth Report
The first moth of the year appeared on my bedroom window this week. Longtime readers may remember that I have a soft spot for moths.
For a moment I thought it was just a smudge on the glass. Then the wings shifted and caught the light—thin and translucent in the early morning.
It rested there quietly, wings open, as if the season has already begun, and this small creature was simply the first to notice.
🎧 BEET DROPS
Pete Seeger—“Passing Through”
A gentle reminder from our friend Pete that seasons move, the ground thaws, and we’re all just passing through for a little while—mud on our boots and all.
"Mud is the first comma." I mean.