Thank you for your kind words about my last essay, The Cedar. I received several email responses and in-person encouragement about it, and I am glad to hear it resonated with so many of you.
On Saturday night, we hiked the trail featured in that essay with my whole family. My brothers were visiting with their wives to celebrate my mom’s retirement and Mother’s Day, and after dinner, we decided to hike to see the spring wildflowers. Trillium and ramps were everywhere, and when we got to the meadow where I’ve seen asparagus ferns in the summer, I attempted to find shoots poking out of the ground. I couldn’t find any in the already tall grass, but I am sure that, late next month, I’ll see the ferns standing as tall as I am.
Monday night, while driving home at dusk, a mama deer and her very fresh fawn crossed the road ahead of me right before I drove down the hill into the village. It was the first fawn I have seen this year, and I imagine the baby is only a day or two old. I slowed down, my headlights shining on the fawn, who immediately lay down in the tall grass on the side of the road. She was likely frightened and didn't know what to do, so she sought shelter in the grass. I stopped my car, wanting to make sure she moved away from the side of the road before another car approached, and thankfully, I saw her trot after her mother on unsure legs into the woods.
It reminded me of last spring when I kept an eye out for a fawn its mother left in our neighbor's gardens each day. This is typical of deer: they find a safe spot for their fawns to hide during the day while the mothers search for food. Nearly every day on our walks last May, Daniel and I would see little ears poking out of our neighbor's garden, where the fawn lay in a nest of emerging dune grass or nestled in the ferns behind a shed. On those walks, my own new baby was tucked to my chest in a wrap or cuddled in the bassinet of our stroller, and I felt a stronger kinship with the village deer than ever before. Not only did we share the flowers in my garden (not by choice, but the deer are nosy neighbors), but now we shared springtime babies and created nests for them to sleep in as we went about our work.
The lilacs are blooming, a full two weeks earlier than usual, and last night, on a walk in our neighborhood, I found a morel mushroom. Likely some of the last of the season, but I hope to go out looking again tonight. My husband and I also spotted a bird we had never seen last night, separately, but it was unusual enough that he mentioned it to me when we were back in the same room. The bird had a white head with dappled black and white feathers on its back, a brownish-red belly, and was the size of a robin. It turns out that it was a robin, but it was a "piebald" robin, or robin with leucism. Apparently, this genetic mutation in birds is rare and sometimes caused by stress during molt. I wonder if early spring and climate change play a part and if leucism in birds is becoming more common.
As spring continues to charge forward, my schedule is changing. I plan to settle on a new day for my newsletter to go out each week, likely returning to its previous mid-week schedule. As wedding season approaches, my weekends are filling up (I photograph weddings and families), and it has already been challenging to hold my Saturday morning office hours to pull this newsletter together. I appreciate your patience as I sort out a new routine here. I plan to continue offering near-weekly newsletters to all of my subscribers, with one poem a month going out as a gift to those who support my writing time financially.
Since I am a bit off schedule right now, I thought I'd continue to keep things off-kilter by sharing a poem with all of my subscribers. I came across this poem while editing through some old work and decided to rework it. I wrote the original poem in 2021 for the Empire Asparagus Festival (if you haven't attended, mark your calendar for this year's festival on June 1!). It feels fitting for spring and Mother's Day.
Since becoming a mother, so much of my writing–even my writing that I don't intend to be about motherhood or family life–often winds its way there. While reading the introduction to Barbara Kingsolver's book Small Wonders, written in the early 2000s when her kids were little, I really connected with this clarification: "I have only two children, and this book is not about them: they just happened to be standing nearby while I looked for illumination, and so they cast their moving shadows."
My children's shadows are all over everything: my walks, my swims, my sleep (oh, my sleep). When Tim and I saw the leucistic robin, we were each alone, but we kept an eye out the rest of the night, hoping to point it out to our son. While on our walk, I waited until my son was next to me–his literal shadow framing in the morel I had found at the edge of a meadow–before I picked it. No act exists these days without my children on my mind; each meditation is either heightened or interrupted by them. I think this is making me a better observer, a better writer, and a better part of the world around me (even if it is also making me so very tired).
Today's poem is a glimpse of that flow from one thing into mothering, holding up a thought to examine just how much a part of nature we are.
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An Ode to Growing Seasons
In early May, I lay belly to the ground
to watch the asparagus grow. They rose timidly
at first, hesitant crowns emerging slowly as the season began.
Warm days beckoned the shoots upward, and soon,
they gained a foot between morning and night,
vigorous arms stretching up to the blue sky.
While I lay there in the garden, listening
for growth so sudden it felt comical, my son
traipsed around me. I blinked and missed the harvest,
instead watching the asparagus go to fern,
their brisk growth surpassing my toddler’s,
his eager arms reaching up to pick their seeds.
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Things I am connecting with this week:
This week I have been thinking about the mothers and children killed in the genocide in Gaza. While we celebrated Mother’s Day on Sunday, I kept thinking of the mothers who have lost children, the children who lost mothers, the families who have perished together. Operation Olive Branch, “a volunteer-powered grassroots collective effort to connect with and amplify Palestinian voices in an effort to support their critical needs” recently created a perinatal project to “connect families in Gaza to essential perinatal care.” If you are looking for ways to directly give to Palestinian families in Gaza, consider donating to the Perinatal project’s GoFundMe.
We are preparing to plant our vegetable garden, and I’m really excited about the starts we ordered from BlueBird Farm in Empire. You can still order veggie starts on their website; pickup and delivery begins next week! Check them out if you’re local.
There is a wonderful group of individuals carrying on the cold swimming energy in my town, even as the warmer weather arrives. The water temperature is creeping into the low-50s, so still technically winter swimming! I’m grateful for the community this practice provided me all winter long, and look forward to seeing how it grows before next season.
I hope you are able to take the time to notice what is growing this week, either out your window or within you.
Cheers,
Mae