Still March

Standing at the edge of spring

There are five days left of March. I did the math in the kitchen without meaning to. Coffee still too hot, and there I was, already counting, like it would help to know exactly how close it was.

Lady was watching me from the doorway like she knew something was about to happen. She always knows. Her whole body was a question.

This question was: Wanna go for a hike?

Before I could think of a reason not to, I found my boots and grabbed her leash.

The air felt different than I expected. Not cold exactly—past cold, into something else. Thaw and metal and something a little sweet underneath it, like the ground had been holding its breath since November and had finally decided to let it out.

The yard looked wrong the way March always looks wrong. Not dead, not alive. Everything a little washed out. The grass flattened into last year’s shape. Mud where the snow gave up unevenly.

Lady didn’t care. She was already pulling ahead, nose down, fully committed to something I couldn’t smell and frankly didn’t really want to.

I followed.

We went down the road first, the gravel still mostly locked in place where the sun hadn’t reached, loose and slick where it had. The ditches were running again, thin lines of water moving under leaves, making that steady, low sound of something moving.

A car passed once, slow, like we were A Situation, and then there was nothing but our feet and whatever the ground was doing underneath them.

At the trailhead, everything shifted. The light changed. The air changed. The sound closed in a little. The path narrowed and dipped under the trees, and it felt different there—cooler, dimmer. The ground wasn’t stable yet—soft enough to take a mark in some places, still firm with cold in others, like it hadn’t figured itself out yet.

My body had forgotten walking. Or maybe I had forgotten my body. The rhythm was there but off, like I was walking slightly out of sync with myself.

Lady circled back, checked on me, and left again. She moved ahead in bursts, then disappeared around a bend or behind a cluster of trees, then reappeared like nothing had happened. Each time she looked back just long enough to make sure I was still there, still participating in the walk she had organized.

The trail curved and rose and dipped in ways I remembered without thinking about them. A root. A low spot that held water longer than it should. A stretch where the trees leaned in closer and narrowed the sky to a thin strip overhead.

Nothing was blooming. Not really.

Under the canopy, it was even more obvious. Bare branches against a sky that hadn’t picked a color yet. The ground was all one layered brown—leaves, bark, old stems—everything pressed down into itself. I kept looking at things and not quite seeing them, like the way a word stops meaning anything if you look at it too long.

Lady flushed something from the brush. A sudden burst of movement—leaves, wings—and then nothing. She froze for a second, then dropped back down into her nose, back to whatever she was doing.

I don’t exactly know when April showed up in my head. Not as a thought. More like pressure. The way you can feel a room before you walk into it. Something in the air shifts. You just know you’re about to be somewhere else.

I wasn’t in it yet. I was still here. Still March. Still in this narrow stretch where everything is technically the same. But I could feel it.

April—the month Daisy died. And, impossibly, the month she was born.

It’s only been two years, which is both nothing and an eternity depending on how you look at it, and I’ve tried to get better at this. At meeting the month with some kind of steadiness, some practiced understanding of what it means that the same thirty days contain both things.

The month she first breathed, and… I don’t finish the sentence. I never do.

My body does it for me anyway. That tightening. That small brace that shows up before the thought even finishes.

Daisy didn’t stand at the edge of things. She went straight in. Shoes, socks, whole body. Cold water, wet grass, puddles, something messy she’d found and immediately decided mattered. By the time I realized what was happening, she was already there.

Whatever was in front of her—she went. No measuring. No bracing. No trying to get ahead of it.

I am standing at the edge of April. Five days out. Close enough to feel it. The door is right there and I know what’s on the other side, and I am standing here in the mud with my dog, who has already found something else to care about, who has no idea, who is so completely here that it makes my chest hurt in a way that feels both helpful and not.

We turned around and walked the same trail back, which isn’t the same trail at all. The path kept doing what it does—unfolding, holding something back. The trees were still bare. The sky still hadn’t decided.

Back in the yard, I almost stepped on it: a small green cluster of daffodils pushing up through the hill, not where anything should have been growing yet. The soil still heavy, matted, holding the shape of winter. Dead grass pressed in on all sides like it hadn’t gotten the memo.

It didn’t look like a beginning. It looked like something that had already started.

Lady sniffed it and moved on.

I stayed. For a second, I thought about stepping carefully around them, like it mattered where I placed my foot. Like I could avoid it.

Lady was already halfway across the yard, onto something else.

I stepped past them and kept going. I didn’t walk faster. I didn’t walk slower. I just kept going, which is, I think, the only thing any of us can do with five days left of March.

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🪱 COMPOST FOR THE SOUL

If you become a crocus in a hidden garden,
I will be a gardener, and I will find you.

—Margaret Wise Brown

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🐓 BACKYARD DISPATCH

Beak-a-Boo (I Am Not Safe)

Feather Locklear and I have always had a tenuous but functional alliance. I supplied snacks and scraps. He tolerated my presence. We had an understanding rooted in corn niblets, coffee grounds, and plausible deniability.

That rooster is gone, and in his place is a feathered extremist. Yes, he has attacked me before. But this is different.

Over the past week, Feather has launched a sustained, highly personal campaign against my body. He lowers himself, widens his stance, fixes me with one wild, unblinking dinosaur eye, and charges like a duelist who believes I’ve insulted his honor, his lineage, and his country. Yesterday he came at me from underneath the coop; this morning he waited until my hands were full with eggs, which felt not just tactical but petty.

I am being studied. Anticipated. Hunted.

Which is why, when James runs into the yard like a small, unsupervised event, I brace for escalation.

A three-year-old boy does not walk. He arrives. Fast.

“CHICKENS!” he screams, already running, a fist of niblets clenched but not deployed in any recognizable way. The hens scatter immediately, flapping and reorganizing themselves along the fence line like a dropped deck of cards.

Feather does not scatter.

Instead, he turns slowly and deliberately, and I feel it in my body, because this is where it happens, I think—this is where the extremist meets the chaos goblin and we all learn something new.

James runs straight at him with no strategy, no adjustment, just velocity and a deep, unearned belief that everything will be A-okay, shouting “COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!” as if this is a shared language and not a declaration of war.

Feather lowers his head, and I prepare for impact.

But at the last second, Feather stops. Not startled. Not confused. He lifts his head, tilts it slightly, and stands there facing James like he’s encountered something new and is choosing, for now, not to destroy it.

Then Feather… dips.

It’s not quite a bow, but it’s also not not a bow. His whole body lowers and softens in a way I have only ever seen immediately before violence. Except this time there is no violence. There is only acknowledgment. Reverence, perhaps.

They hold there, the two of them, at an absurd, electric distance, James close enough to touch him—which he does not do, because apparently even chaos has limits—and then James says, very simply, “Hi.”

He opens his hand and lets the niblets fall straight to the ground, not scattered or offered but abandoned entirely, and Feather looks at it, then back at James. And then something impossible happens.

James steps forward.

Feather steps back.

I have never seen this in my life.

James immediately loses interest and turns his back, announcing “Done. BYE, CHICKENS,” before walking away without a single glance behind him, and Feather lets him go, just… lets him go.

Something in me shifts. Feather has been reformed, I think.

So I straighten, I soften, and I take one calm, measured step back toward the gate like a person who has finally cracked the code but still needs to go to the bathroom.

Feather spins and charges at my calves with the full force of his beliefs and spurs. There is no hesitation, no ambiguity, no reconsideration—just immediate, targeted violence delivered with complete moral clarity.

Behind me, James loses his mind, laughing so hard he can barely stand, as if this is both exactly what he expected and the funniest thing that has ever happened.

“AGAIN!” he shouts.

Feather stops exactly where he intends to stop, calm again now that order has been restored, and stands there watching me with quiet satisfaction while James continues to laugh.

“Again,” he says, and runs for the gate.

I follow.

On the way out, James kicks the back of my leg—deliberate—and laughs harder.

Behind us, Feather crows.

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🌱 SOW WHAT NOW?

The Germinatrix

Welcome back to my underground seed laboratory/bunker. Conditions are optimal. Here are the highlights of what we are, perhaps too ambitiously, sowing this week.

I started eight tomato varieties.
I am fine.
EVERYTHING IS FINE.

Tomato ‘Sun Gold’: Golden child. Eats like candy, overproduces like it has something to prove. Splits if you look at it wrong.

Tomato ‘Green Zebra’: Refuses the binary of ripe/unripe. Tart, bright, a little unpredictable. Wears stripes. Thrives in a salad bowl.

Tomato ‘Honey Drop’: So small. So sweet. You will eat forty of them standing over the sink and call it lunch and feel no shame.

Tomato ‘San Marzano’: A Roman cathedral disguised as a vegetable. Long, lean, deeply committed to sauce. Not here for your fresh tomato salad nonsense.

Tomato ‘Black Krim’: The Heathcliff of the nightshade family. Dark, complex, brooding. If eaten at the right moment, may briefly convince you of fate.

Tomato ‘Brandywine’: Heirloom aristocrat. Needs staking and patience, but produces a tomato so good you almost forget every inconvenience.

Tomato ‘Chianti Rose’: The tomato equivalent of good lighting and a well-timed compliment. Makes everything around it look better, including you.

Tomato ‘Black Cherry’: Small, dark, dangerously easy. You will stand in the garden shoveling them down until time loses meaning and you have forgotten why you came outside.

Nicotiana ‘Lavender Cloud’: A drifting thought that refuses to resolve. Smells better the later it gets. Moths love it more than light. You will, too.

Scabiosa ‘Black Knight’: Velvet the color of a secret. Definitely knows something incriminating about you.

Celosia ‘Spring Green’: Chartreuse optimism bordering on threat. Texture somewhere between brain and coral reef.

Strawflower ‘King-Size Silvery White’: Dry, papery, already halfway preserved. Could be mistaken for a receipt from a very elegant afterlife. Haunting, but in a useful way.

Echinops ‘Ritro’: A blue spiked orb that looks like it was designed by someone who hates softness. A medieval weapon that learned photosynthesis.

Shasta Daisy ‘Alaska’: White petals, yellow center, zero surprises. Looks like it just got hired to represent “flower” in a textbook. Has the best name of any flower.

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🥀 THORNS IN MY SIDE

Surveillance State

I bought a small wooden box for bluebirds and, in under forty-eight hours, it destabilized me as a person.

This was not supposed to be an existential project. This was supposed to be a simple invitation to the natural world: if you would like to live here, you may.

There are rules for bluebird boxes. The hole must be exactly one and a half inches in diameter. The box must be mounted five to ten feet off the ground, facing east or southeast, away from tree cover, away from shrubs, away from anything from which a raccoon or squirrel might reasonably ruin your day.

I learned all of this in one sitting. I printed it out. I stood in the yard holding a sheet of paper like I had been tasked with zoning regulations for an entire species.

At some point during this process, I joined the North American Bluebird Society, which implies the existence of meetings, bylaws, and people who know far more about bluebirds than I am emotionally prepared to encounter. I am now part of a governing body.

I also decided it would be nice to be able to watch the bluebirds. To show James the whole thing—how it starts, how it happens, how they leave.

This is where things took a turn.

I purchased a solar-powered wifi camera designed specifically for small wooden boxes intended for birds who have no idea they are being observed. It connects to an app. There are settings. There are notifications.

There is a live feed.

I mounted the camera inside the box and immediately became concerned about the angle. Would I be able to see the bird, or only the concept of a bird? I adjusted it. I re-adjusted it. I stepped back. I stepped forward. I opened the app. I closed the app. I opened the box. I closed the box. I repeated this sequence enough times that the box itself began to feel like it had developed a personality.

Somewhere in here, the project shifted from:
it would be nice if a bluebird came!

to:
why the fuck hasn’t a bluebird come yet?

It has been one week.

I’m checking the app every hour as if something could be happening in there at any moment. I created a fully monitored, carefully calibrated avian living space and am now refreshing it like a social media feed. I’ve now watched approximately two hours of footage of nothing happening inside a small wooden cube, which is, it turns out, its own genre.

I have, in the pursuit of witnessing life, created a live feed of absence. Apparently, this is what hope looks like now.

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🎧 BEET DROPS

The The—“This Is the Day”

Just in case something actually happens today.
(It won’t.)

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Stay dirty,

x bex