Summer

My hands forage for edible leaves in the thick forest of kale. I salvage what I can, leaving the rest for aphids and rabbits and worms (the worms always get something in the end, don’t they, whether it is the tender flesh of bunny or ribs of a browning leaf?). I encircle the stalk with my calloused palms and pull. The sound of separation, of cleaving, the arms of the plant reaching deeper and finally giving as I pull and pull and pull those exploratory veins from the earth. Roots ripped from soil lay in a tangle of delicate threads, moist bits of sand and clay and billions of bacteria falling onto flowers, onto plucked stems, onto the same ground below. Ashes to ashes, dirt to dirt. 

It is time to play Shiva.

As the sun seemingly stalls overhead, summer begins with destruction and life. It is time for the new. I clear beds of green and yellow and brown. I feed the compost with what we didn’t consume. I heap the beds with manure and work it into the hungry ground. Smoothing the bed, I untuck seeds from colorful packets promising bounty and from my fingers nestle each one into its new home. 

This is the business of life. 

This is the virtue of death. 

The work never ends, thankfully. My mind on nurturing the radicle, the shoots and leaves, the fruits of the vegetables' sun-fueled labor, the harvest, the flower and the disintegration. I am here to witness it all as equinox becomes solstice and we begin to fall again towards that equal time of light and dark. I walk through a sea of pale daisies that were once shorn fields of bright yellow dandelions and I wonder what will come next. There is wonder and surprise as I ease raspberries from prickly branches that were once covered with blooms. I marvel as the carrots push at their dirty blankets of protection and show proud shoulders beneath a wispy sky of deep green. I consider the immensity of the universe, what we think we know, what we think we truly are, as each seed becomes something entirely different from what it once was and has always been. 

I tear away the old rotting parts, I plant the new. I farm, I write, I cook, I sit on the porch and let the sun coax out the freckles on my nose. 

This is summer. This is a seed for what is to come. This is the nourishment of now.