buried treasure

i sat down in the early sun to make my list of vegetables i want to plant for the coming season. i could easily jot down 15-20 different vegetables, herbs and flowers but as always, referred to my grandmother's old copy of "growing your own vegetables" book to jog my memory for less-common varieties. i have referred to it many times in the past, but this time i found a treasure buried within the final pages. it was an old rushmore state bank statement. it was creased and yellowed. on the back in my grandmother miriam's handwriting, i unearthed the sweetest little treatsure of a note written at the top, along with notes on how to amend her soil, and names like "kentucy wonder" beans and "mortgage lifter" tomatoes....


spring is nature's apology for winter......




were these her own words, or some old wives tale she had heard along the way?


in her perfect cursive, i saw into her inner world. i could feel her sadness. and i realized it isn't just my pain i am carrying. and i also began to fully feel just how much i am living her life, her mother's life, and her mother's life. one so drawn to creating a home, a way of life, but also one so consumed by the burdens of this work. i can picture her on some long march sunday feeling just like me. a mixture of hope and dissolution. a desire to plan for the coming season and to "dream" but also so tethered to the ground. what is this, this feeling that is passed down exactly? and how?



i couldn't shake the sense she was with me all day. i ached to talk to her. i ached to know how she survived. i felt her there, even as i walked along prairie creek, the sun so close i could almost touch it. the snow hanging in lovely rounded mounds over the creek below, looking like the curves of a pregnant body. i wondered how long before the sun would touch me. how long before i would become alive again. in the silence of the valley, i heard the running water and thought "ah, spring!"

and i did feel as though nature was apologizing to me for all it had done, and all of me that it had buried this winter.