for Robert Daniel & Stephanie Marie
I can’t remember the words she used
they are hazy at their edges now,
but it was exactly this:
a reteaching, a re-membering
of the deepest spiritual kind.
At once, I’d forgotten and remembered, the truest nature of myself
how for 18 springs & all the summers and autumns thereafter,
I have been privileged, undeniably
-together with you, my love-
to have put more than most into an earth
who continues to spin and looks after all it grows.
Our first year, (as kids really)
when our cramped Cambridge sun room garden
became infested with fruit flies
we bought a “natural solvent” at a natural grocery store
and all the natural fruit flies died
every other last living thing with them
I worried it was an omen; all those yellowed leaves
and browned lettuces, audacious apparitions at best.
The next year it was but a single avocado seed
potted, sturdy outback of our South End tree house
“Avo” we called him, and we both drank whiskey
that wet snowy winter, when he died.
On the single side-deck of the Somerville apartment
it was mostly sprays of delicate flowers and sprigs of hearty kitchen herbs
we learned we both wanted more there too
and our Grayson Christopher was born the following May
Mother’s Day Sunday, by far the greatest thing either of us had
grown or tended to prior.
In Arlington we thought ourselves quite grown-up
(We have a baby!) (We’re getting married!)
but really our world was being remade again
and us right along with it.
Boothby Blondes and lots of verdant zucchini that summer
purple tomatoes and Japanese eggplant the next.
Moving to Colorado was a different kind of difficulty
a whole new way of living, of growing, of being
the dirt in Park Hill was thin and dusty
but we fancied ourselves “Zucchini Farmers”
that first Mile High summer,
we could make zucchini grow anywhere.
One fat round pot of cherry-red tomatoes
the summer we moved in with Aunt Kathy,
the last step before our first forever home
where the south facing strip of nothing
gave us the best San Marzano’s of our life
and our very first Tomatillos
in September with still too
many Persian cucumbers to eat
or share, I learned to make relish,
jars & jars.
2018 was the year we started taking less of what was given us
and doing more to build what we really wanted:
1st raised garden bed, out there still-
cold and sleepy with the third of November today.
Since then, four more beds; a corner, a container & 2 patches
and of course, our greatest harvest of 2019, our darling Waverly Pearl,
Of Quaking Aspen Meadows, came to be.
Since then, countless wildflowers, kale leaves, onion seeds and pumpkins
and even more that stayed soil bound,
never coming to sprout or bear fruit at all
only to tend and teach us patience and presence,
heartache and disappointment
and perhaps most of all,
the tenacious nature of our love.
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