As always, this time of year, I think I should do more on my website, more on social media, and I sometimes do. But the school year is busy, and then I don’t have the time. I let it all lie dormant.
Still, the current situation in our country makes me long to say something true, anything, because I’ve read my Animal Farm, I’ve read my 1984, I’ve watched what’s happening, and I know how often the lies will spill out claiming what is happening isn’t happening, or what didn’t happen did. I want evidence. I want testimony. I want a bearing of witness.
This is perhaps especially true for the place I’ve lived most of my life, where I can see what is changing and what isn’t. We are all so caught up in what is out there, over there. I want more about here, the ground under my feet.
So I have many snippets and pieces, most of which only connect to my children’s/YA and my fantasy/science fiction writing because of my preoccupation with place. They aren’t full pieces, they’re reflections. What to do with them? I don’t know. I’m playing around, I guess.
I am attentive to our gardens, looking for signs that they will survive. Vermont’s weather and climate are changing. As someone who has lived here most of her life, I can see these changes, though I often attend to data collected locally to check my perceptions against something larger than my memory. Is spring truly sooner? Are winters really warmer? Memory is slippery, I know. But, yes, yes, I am not imagining these things.
My response to the cataclysmic changes shivering through the region has been to plant, to attend more closely to this piece of land where I live. Even here, I don’t have full control. I can’t prevent whatever has been eating the leaves of my beans, nor could I stop the first hydrangea I planted from dying. However, I have a new hydrangea, one I bought at Tractor Supply for less than ten dollars as basically a dormant stick. It is now crowned with green leaves, and I’m looking forward to its pale blooms in the late summer. Can I stop our country’s self-destructive spiraling away from renewable energy and toward hotter temperatures? I can do my small bit through what’s left of the tatters of our democracy. But can I convince a few more people to love this land we walk, and then maybe care more for it? That seems more likely.
I have let the wild mullein grow, and grow it has. Some of the plants around this place, which we affectionately call the Shire, have grown tall and wide, larger than a young elementary school student, more the height of your average middle schooler. We also planted some mullein we bought from a local nursery. I had never thought to buy mullein. It grows profusely here and is often treated like a weed. Weed is a funny word. There’s a judgement implied, but the word merely means a plant that’s growing where it isn’t wanted. Any plant could be a weed, especially if it grows so profusely a gardener finds it difficult to manage. We wanted more pollinators so we bought the mullein, and it is a slenderer variety than grows wild here, smaller, with more distinct blossoms. These are mostly yellow but red in the center. Come here, my darling, you can imagine those blooms crooning.
They soothe me, these plants. They don’t worry about our future as I do. They can’t anticipate what more 100 degree summer days might mean. They simply are, here on the second day of July. They simply unfold. They simply welcome the morning’s rain, and they turn their blooms to the sun.