Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories where I muse and meander through the garden and my life. As always, links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for you. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone, but you can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber.

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Without further ado, today’s pocket.

We met Mateo’s teacher this week. Our district hosts conferences before school starts. This is not a time to talk about grades, success or progress. Instead, it is an opportunity to welcome students into the building and reduce their anxiety about the year ahead.

Mateo’s teacher invited us into her classroom. “Sit anywhere,” she said. “We use flexible seating.” There were numerous cozy spots around the room, soft cushioned comfortable seats on the floor, a few high tops like you would see at a coffee bar, rainbow colored milk crates with pillow tops arranged around an oval table. I could have walked out of the room right then because I knew, based on the choice she was offering her students and the inviting environment, that Mateo would be in good hands.

Mateo knew it too. He was anxious about meeting his teacher, but his face lit up when he saw the floor cushions. He smiled and sat right down. Dan and I took a high top, but when Mateo’s teacher started talking, Mateo started looking at us, as if to make sure we were still there, so we went and sat closer to him.

His teacher introduced herself and explained that this year, all the elementary teachers would begin the day with a soft start. After breakfast, students would be invited into the classroom to engage in reading or puzzles before jumping into math or essay writing.

This idea of a soft start is sticking with me. Don’t we all kind of need this? A cozy place to begin, to find calm before jumping into harder things.

Don’t we all rarely get this?

I make tea in the mornings, but I barely have time to drink it before I arrive at school. I dream about sitting in my garden and sipping a cup of tea on a weekday morning, but I’m starting to accept this won’t be an everyday reality. It is cool in Spokane in the morning, so I choose to run, which is a wonderful way to start the day. It’s just not soft, and even though I have an awesome husband and partner who on most days walks our dog and walks our kids to school, I still have little time to shower, dress and help the kids with anything they might need before I have to leave. And the mornings when Dan is out of town, and I need to walk Kam and get Mateo to school, forget it, there is little room for softness. When I do make it to school, there are already students outside the door, wanting something from me.

So how do I build gentleness into a hard morning?

I set boundaries.

I explain to the sixth graders that just because they arrive before me doesn’t mean they are allowed into our classroom the second I arrive. To be my best student facing self for the next three hours, I need ten minutes behind a closed door, even if it just means I’m sipping my tea while I turn my computer on and pick out a song to greet them with.

Because mornings are hard, I make sure to build softness into my afternoons and evenings.

I plan for the time of my day when I will be able to sit and drink tea and read and write. I pencil it in my calendar, and I show up for myself.

I adjust my schedule. In the summer, I love taking a noticing walk in the mornings. This is when I give some of my plants the extra water they need to make it through the hotter temperatures. Unfortunately, my school schedule also cuts into these noticing walks. My plants are left thirsty. By the time I’m done teaching and arrive home, it is too hot to water the plants. This won’t be the case forever. The heat will shift soon, but it’s the case right now, so I plan time when I can water and garden in the evening. It is a check-in with my plants and a check-in with myself.

I surround myself with people who offer me a soft place to land. Dan’s family moved here in June. Having them here is like having a roomful of soft cushioned floor seats. Yesterday, after the first day of school, Mateo was emotionally exhausted. Two days of school have gone by, and he has reported that they have gone great, but returning to school is a lot for everyone, and there were a few moments at the end of the first day when he was close to tears. My sister-in-law is fostering kittens right now, so we went over to her house and spent some time with them and my nephew. Sometimes all you need are a few kittens.

So, if you’re seeking soft, I offer you a few cushions…boundaries, carving out intentional space for what matters to you, creating a schedule that honors what you care about and kittens…Speaking of kittens, if you live in Spokane, and you’re looking for one, I can hook you up.

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This Week in the Garden

The snow peas I planted a few weeks ago are starting to appear. I also planted spinach and cilantro in my attempt at a fall garden. I chose the spinach because it is frost hardy, and the idea of harvesting something in the November darkness appeals to me.

With the weather cooling, I also found my way to a local plant store which specializes in drought tolerant plants. Floralia is a small outdoor nursery behind a brewery that’s only open a few days a week. There plants were looking gorgeous, and I chose a few to add some fall color to the garden. I picked up a peach coreopsis, a milkweed and a gorgeous purple and pink flowering plant that I can’t remember the name of. I showed some reserve and resisted their Agastache, even though the ones they had were tall and bountiful and smelled like royalty, because I already have several Agastache in my garden. I was seeking a wood rose, to grow along our sidewalk near our little free library, and they were able to order one for me. Given the option, I always choose to purchase a smaller plant, because it is cheaper, and I know it will grow, if I take care of it. When I returned for the wood rose, I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist the Agastache again. I had been thinking of her all week. I also picked up some penstemon and some pink salvia on my second trip. With the temps cooling and it being fall, it is the perfect time to plant perennials. These plants will have a chance to settle in before the frost, and by the time summer rolls around, they should be better equipped to withstand the heat.

In addition to planting perennials, I broke open some oriental poppy seed pods and scattered them around my yard. A few of my poppies which bloomed in Spring look like they might bloom one more time before the frost, which makes me happy. I also scattered a few other seeds, like black eyed Susans, which I know will benefit from cold stratification. The black-eyed Susan seeds came from a local park. I deadheaded them at the end of the season, before the cleaning crew got to them, and then I saved the seeds.

My dahlias are disappointing. I put a lot of effort into them, and honestly, I don’t know what their problem is. I find the dahlias are the most beautiful in September when the weather cools and the bugs are gone, so I’m not giving up on them yet, but if anyone has dahlia tips, I will take them. Mine seem to be really susceptible to bugs this year, and some of them seem to turn brown quickly. Also, they all seem to need stakes, so I need to plan better for that.

My blackberries, after an epic summer, are starting to slow down. It is almost time to harvest the last of what is left for another round of jam. My tomatoes, while not bountiful, are delicious, my basil is going strong, and my first giant zucchini has emerged. The new raspberry plants I planted this season are already outproducing the old which is an unexpected surprise.

August really is a lovely time in the garden.

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Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories where I muse about my misadventures in and out of the garden. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone, so go ahead and share with all of your friends. It’s an even better gift than a jar of homemade jam.

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Without further ado, today’s pocket.

In that kitchen, I knew I had to do something. The blackberries I picked the day before, an entire colander’s worth, were staining the counter red. Just that morning I had reached for a gorgeous peach, a farmer’s market treasure I had purchased a few days prior, only to discover it had turned rotten, black mold taking over its soft peach fur on the underside.

How could something spoil so quickly, black juice seeping out the sides of the fruit and into the yellow bowl it sat in, leaving a dark smudge on the lemon beside it. The black sludge river also covered its other companions, one lime and one orange.

I immediately threw the peach out and rinsed off the remaining fruit, placing the citrus in the fridge. I knew that if I didn’t tend to the blackberries soon, they might succumb to a similar fate. One rotten blackberry could spoil the bunch.

In my garden, blackberries are the one thing I have more of than I know what to do with. It is a sweet problem to have. I regularly pop them in my mouth as I tend to the garden. Nothing tastes better than fruit picked directly off the vine. However, I can’t eat dozens of blackberries daily, so I pick them, place them in small cartons and give them away as gifts. I turn them into delicious lemon curd tartlets, oaty crumbles, soothing syrups and hearty muffins. I make preparations for pie, and I freeze them for future use. Today, I set about making jam.

One of the nice things about making something with blackberries or any fruit for that matter is that you can use fruit that is slightly past its prime, not way past its prime like the peach, but just slightly. Sad, shriveled blackberries make delicious jam. Once they are rinsed, mixed with sugar and heated, no one will be the wiser.

I love to garden for many reasons, but in August the reason that most comes to mind is that I love enjoying the fruits of my labor. I like making lunch with basil and tomato grown just a few feet away. I like drying my own oregano for fajitas. I like that for most of the year if I need greens for an omelet, a quick sandwich or a salad, I can walk outside and find them. While I love harvesting, though, I have avoided canning.

Canning has always felt complicated. It requires precision, attention to detail and significant regard for cleanliness, none of which are skills I possess. Moreover, I have a small urban garden, so unlike folks who have larger farms and yields, canning hasn’t felt worth the hassle.

However, when I look up a simple recipe for blackberry jam, I find a cozy blogger who assures me that canning berries is relatively easily. According to her instructions, all I need to do is wash the jars in soap and hot water and then set them on a clean dish towel, place the lids in a boiling bath on the stove and then make the jam, which can be done in three easy steps, which take three minutes each.

1. Mash the berries. Cook three minutes.

2. Add the sugar, in a one-to-one ratio to mashed blackberries. Cook three more minutes.

3. Remove from heat and whisk three minutes.

Then, pour the jam into the jars, careful not to touch the lids when sealing them. Easy.

However, once I get started, my ever-helpful brain starts to wonder if it really is so easy.

Dan comes home, and I say, “I’m making jam. Hopefully, I won’t give anyone botulism,” and then I worry that this is a terrible thing to joke about, so I start googling botulism, something I would not recommend.

Botulism is scary because unlike the moldy peach on the counter, the deadly bacteria can’t be seen or smelled.

Aren’t the things we fear that we can’t see the scariest? As a child, I was terrified of quicksand. I really thought I would be walking along one day on solid ground, and then all of a sudden, I’d go under.

Now that smoke permeates the air during wildfire season, that same fear abounds. What are the unseen threats? What are we inhaling that we can’t see? What will the long-term effects be?

Perhaps it’s a stretch to worry about botulism, but then I get to thinking about how just because something is a stretch doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Remember, many years ago, when everyone started saying “the dingo ate my baby”? It was on Seinfeld, and in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it was the name of Oz’s indie rock band.

We laughed when someone said it. It seemed ludicrous, but horrifically, a dingo did eat someone’s baby. The poor Australian mom was wrongly imprisoned for three years because no one believed her.

And people really do get botulism and die, and here I was making a joke about it and relying on a random cozy internet blogger to keep me safe.

So, I did what any sane person would do in this situation. I “researched” what other random people on the internet had to say.

I should boil the lids. Excellent, check.

I shouldn’t boil the lids. Shit. Apparently, it interferes with the sealants in newer jars. Boiling the lids was outdated, like quicksand and dingoes eating babies.

I should put the jars in the oven half full of water, so when the jam goes in the jars, there is no temperature shock. This resulted in a substantial blister on my thumb.

I should close the lids super tight, so they can seal properly.

I shouldn’t close the lids super tight, so they can seal properly.

The jars will make a beautiful pinging sound when they are sealed. We were leaving town the next day. If a jar pings when no one is around, is it actually sealed?

I should aerate the jam with a silicone spatula before sealing. Unfortunately, I read this after all the jars are “sealed.” Turning back at this point would require emptying each jar, heating the whole batch up again and then redistributing the jam in the jars, with new seals.

Hell no, I remember why I never can to begin with.

I place my jars in the fridge. I take a deep breath. There are seven and a half tiny jars in total. I will give several away to friends who believe in me more than I believe in myself. That leaves me with a few that I will most likely freeze or keep in the fridge to be safe.

Even though further research informs me that while a dingo did indeed take someone’s baby, there have been no reported cases of anyone getting botulism from blackberry jam. The high acidity combined with the sugar content make it an inhospitable environment for the bacteria to grow.

I tell Seabass that I made blackberry jam, and that based on my research, I am pretty sure that it is safe. He says I might not want to lead with that when sharing the jars with my friends.

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This Week in the Garden

The blackberry jam I made is the most delicious blackberry jam I have ever eaten. Now, that I know that botulism is completely out of the cards when it comes to fruit jams, I hope to make more.

My tomatoes are ripe and delicious. I harvested my first cucumber which tasted even better than the ones I get from the farmer’s market.

I harvested the most adorable tiny habaneros I’ve ever seen. I am realizing that my sunflowers are keeping some things small and reducing the yield of other things. On one hand, I don’t garden for productivity. I’m okay with not having the most amazing yields when it comes to produce. Still, I would like to give some things a little more space, and I’m seeing what happens when things have enough room to grow. Now that the garlic has been harvested, the zucchini plant has room and is taking off. This is all to say, that I would like to be a little more intentional with next year’s garden plans.

I planted some snow and snap peas for fall and in the next few days, I might plant some spinach and cilantro, and perhaps a few more things if I have seeds. When the weather cools, I also hope to plant some more perennials in places where I’d like to see more color next summer.

I am making cards with some of my pressed flowers, and this is bringing me joy.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What is growing in your garden? What is not growing that you wish was? Do you have any tips on canning or not canning? What book is by your bedside these days? I finished Whistler this week, and I’m giving it five stars.

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Welcome to Pocketful of Prose a community for sharing stories. As always, links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Dan had a conference in Sun River, Oregon this week, so my family and I tagged along for some tail end summer fun before I return to work next week. There has been lots of hiking, exploring, and thinking about the year ahead, and there has also been a lot of laughing. In a nutshell, it has been great. To give me a little more time to soak it up, I’m sharing a beautiful guest post this week, written by The Questioning Quail, a nature writer and dear friend. This beautiful post captures so many of my feelings in response to the recent fires in our city. If you would like to read more of The Questioning Quail’s work, you can find her here. I’ll be back next week with more misadventures in and out of the garden.

Without further ado, today’s pocket written by The Questioning Quail.

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“I hope you find some joy today,” my trainer said to me as I was leaving her studio.

Later that same day, I got a text from a friend of mine stating, “I’m working hard at remembering joy is part of life in spite of so many, many difficulties.”

It is no accident that these sentiments were expressed last week.

My city, Spokane, has been under siege. Fires have destroyed more than 900 structures (a sterile word for people’s homes), caused the evacuation of 67,000 people, and burned through much of Spokane’s conservation areas where people hike and kayak.

It is hard to embrace August: hiking with a mask, setting up air filters throughout my home, cancelling a camping trip because it is unthinkable to be in the woods without shelter from the smoke, making a to-go bag in case the next evacuation order is for me.

And it feels bad to feel bad for myself. After all, my home hasn’t burned down; I am not evacuated; I am not homeless living on hot, smoke-draped streets.

I am one of the lucky ones. This time.

Global warming is making it hard to know how to move forward in this world.

I wish there were clear solutions. I wish I could do enough, give enough, be good enough to make things OK. But I can’t. And in the midst of all these losses, I need to live my life. My one and only life. I can’t squander it away waiting for a better tomorrow.

One thing I have been doing lately is to take a walk at Lincoln Park, a little park near my mother’s memory care facility. After I visit my mom, even if the outside air is bad, I go to this park because I still see wonder here.

Just a few days after the fires had started, my son, who was visiting from Arizona, and I visited my mom and then went to Lincoln Park. The smoke was terrible that day, but we put on our masks and explored anyways.

As we started to walk along the upper circle, we heard two birds screeching back and forth. We guessed that they were Cooper Hawks, but I was a little uncertain because their screeches sounded less fierce, almost thinner than the calls I normally hear from Coopers. I double checked with my Merlin app, and sure enough they were Cooper Hawks.

We got a second confirmation when my son spotted one of them high in a tree. I was still glad I had the confirmation from Merlin app as this hawk had dark brown and beige stripes on its head and on its chest and belly. I was used to seeing Coopers wearing dark berets and rust colored vests. I suspected we were looking at a juvenile.

We stood for some time looking at the hawk. It ruffled its feathers, cocked its head from side to side as it peered around, and periodically opened its beak wide to scream. Then we continued our walk around the reed-circled pond.

When we got to the other side, we again heard a Cooper screech. This time coming from the pond. We walked into a little clearing and there, right in front of us on a dead log, was another Cooper. This one also had the markings of an adolescent. And it acted like one too. It looked at us unconcerned, ruffled its feathers, returned a screech from its buddy across the pond, and didn’t flinch or move as I stepped closer to take a picture. It didn’t seem to know that humans can’t be trusted.

Seeing these hawks delighted me at a time I badly needed to be delighted. The experience was enough to make these trips to the park part of my routine--even when the air quality was very unhealthy on the Air Quality Index Scale. My mental health needed these excursions, bad air or not.

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Later, on another day, after I had already heard or seen a Northern Yellow Warbler, Pygmy Nuthatches, Mallards, Black-capped Chickadees, Mountain Chickadees, and birds that looked like flycatchers with their upright posture and saucy tufted hairdos, I again heard one of the hawks.

This time, the young Cooper was perched high in a tree where the Pygmy nuthatches and other little birds were darting in and out of. They were zooming right past the hawk as if it wasn’t there. The young Cooper was interested in them (his head kept turning back and forth as it watched them) but it made no attempt to catch one. I wondered if it knew how. Was the adolescent still getting fed by its parents?

I never found out what happened next. I had to hurry home and lock my chickens in their pen for the night. I have learned the hard way that once it is dark they are not safe from the wild animals--skunks and racoons--that live in my neighborhood.

My son left for Tucson on the day I watched the Cooper Hawk watch all the little birds. He had shared his planned route home--a route he chose to avoid the worst of the smoke. His planning made me think about the many birds that would soon be migrating south. I hope that they can also change their routes to avoid fires and smoke.

The fires North of me have mostly been contained. Some people have returned home, others will only be able to look at the place their homes once stood. It will be a long road back for those who have lost everything.

So as I stand in the smoke on my front porch, I am thankful I have a home to take shelter in. And I hope that others—those who have lost their homes, those who have had to flee from the fires, and those who are living on the streets can find some reprieve.

Maybe, they can take a walk in a park where the birds still sing.

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Welcome to Pocketful of Prose a community for sharing stories. As always links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Thanks for being here!

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On Saturday, a fire took hold of our city, a fire like Spokane had never seen before. At the current moment, it has destroyed 10,000 acres, forced 67,000 people out of their homes, destroyed approximately 900 structures, and burned through cherished natural spaces. The complex fire is currently about 45% contained. Several of my colleagues have lost their homes. Good friends have been displaced, and one of my dear friends is keeping an eye on her house through the Watch Duty app, where her home, where we once carved pumpkins together, sits precariously between three fires. Miraculously, there have been no reported deaths, thanks to tremendous efforts of first responders.

We in Spokane are heartbroken.

This past week, I was heartened by the response of our school system who set up an emergency day camp for families affected by the fires and then communicated about additional action steps. I volunteered at the camp on Wednesday. I played Candyland and Sorry, opened ketchup packets and listened to stories. “My dad had to run through smoke to get our dog,” one girl told me. Another girl said that even though she was in an evacuation zone, they were not leaving because they didn’t want to stay with their aunt. “Other people are still there,” she said. Another girl asked me why someone posted they could go home but then took down the post. I told her that everyone was working hard to keep them safe and that I hoped that she would be home soon. It felt good to connect with kids and my community.

If you are in a position to help, there are several things you can do. You can support the Red Cross, whose relief efforts are desperately needed. You can also support Innovia Foundation, which gives grants to local non-profits and community organizations who are helping those affected by the fires. Another organization that could use your help is Feast World Kitchen. Feast is a local nonprofit which serves our refugee community, and they are offering free meals to anyone affected by the fires. I think the road ahead will be long, and I will continue to share ways to help in my pockets.

I can’t tell you how much it meant to me that so many of you checked on me and my family this week. We appreciate your kind words, your thoughts and your prayers for our family, our friends and our city.

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

A crumble for when the world feels like it’s crumbling

When fire takes hold of our city

and we watch the evacuations widen and increase

and our friends text that they are safe but they think they’ve lost their house

and our teenage son wants to be with his friends, but we want him to be with us

and we don’t want to overact

but also, how is one supposed to act in this situation

To a 16-year-old boy, everything is an overreaction

but three thousand acres have already burned

and the wind is not letting up

My son tells me it’s twenty miles away

But twenty miles isn’t so far

and also my calculations show it much closer

a mere five or six miles to the North

What if the wind shifts?

When we can see the smoke

and hear the helicopters

and the wind makes everyone nervous

and we learn that the fire jumped the river

I pack a suitcase with important documents, some essentials and our wedding photo

I ask a friend if they have a place to go

“Not really, right now, we’re trying to find a place to drop off a bird”

I want to do everything to help them as they flee

but we can’t take the bird because I think we might have to fly away too

The newspaper headlines the next day just read DEVASTATION

and for once, the headlines aren’t overblown

They are just unbelievable and awful and true

people trying to evacuate but unable to

people who didn’t make it to their dogs in time

people returning to their homes and sorting through what remains

The path my friend and I walk every week, along the river, is gone

I hope the birds that lived there were able to fly somewhere safe

but when I think about all the nests, I am overcome

When I'm in the kitchen the next day

I don’t know what to do with myself

Everything is the same but also unfamiliar

Nothing feels certain

I’m offering up my house and wondering if people will stay

breathing in smoke while my 16-year-old tells me the air is fine

because the weather app says its fine

But I have a nose and two lungs and enough good sense to know

We are so far from fine

I go outside anyway, for just a few minutes

I see a male goldfinch feasting on sunflower seeds

In all of his golden mating glory

I pause and watch him for a moment

and then I pick blackberries, one at a time

until my basket is full

I pop the ripest ones in my mouth

and think about my friend’s text from this morning

When the evacuation order came, one of her daughters was at work

so she and her other daughter tried their best to pack for her

“I don’t think we got the right stuff,” she said

As if there is right stuff for this situation

“I keep thinking about all the old drawings and cards the kids made me when they were little. Obviously not the thing you grab when you leave, but so sad to lose them”

I go inside, and Mateo helps me cut the butter for pie

He tells me that people can have his room. He’ll set up an aerobed in Seabass’ room

I put the sliced butter in the freezer, but I never take it out

I just can’t do it

It’s too much

I make a crumble instead, a little flour, sugar, butter and all the blackberries I’ve gathered

Something good and not so hard

When it’s in the oven, I rest

I rewatch an episode of Derry Girls where it’s 1996

and another act of violence has hit Northern Ireland

and the adults are speechless,

but life goes on for the teenagers

and Orla, the quirky one, enters the school talent show, with a step aerobics act

She has been practicing for ages, but her peers don’t understand

so they do that awful thing we sometimes do when we don’t understand

They laugh at her

Not her friends, though

One by one, her friends get up and make their way to the stage 

to join her

opening themselves up to the same mockery

so that, even when world is mean and unkind, Orla knows she’s not alone.

and it occurs to me that maybe that’s all we need to do right now

Make crumbles or whatever we can muster

Make room for people who need a place to stay

and show up, however we can, for our friends

so that, even when the world is mean and unkind,

they know they are not alone

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Recipe for Crumble

This crumble was delicious, but the blackberry seeds were a little hard. They stick in your teeth. That feels fitting right now.

This Week In the Garden

The garden has brought me so much comfort this week. I saw my second hummingbird sighting in the same week. They like the scarlet runner bean flowers. I also finally managed to grow a pumpkin from seed. This little emerging plant brought me so much hope.

There are more birds in the garden than ever before. Flocks of them are feasting on the sunflowers and drinking from the fountains. The male goldfinch is stunning and the female isn’t so shabby either.

I haven’t figured out any plans for fall yet, but my gratitude for what is here has deepened immensely.

I harvested my first tomatoes and I’ve been eating them over eggs on corn tortillas. My tomatoes taste better than any I’ve ever had. It took years for me to find the kind I love and I’ve found it with Snake River seeds, a local company.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. If you are in Spokane, we would love to hear your story, if you want to share it. If you don’t live here, we also would love to hear your stories of hardship and hope.

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Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. As always links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone, so please share with friends

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Without further ado, today’s pocket.

This is the time of year in the garden when I start thinking about the changes I want to make next year. I am keenly aware of what hasn’t turned out quite as I’d hoped or in some cases, like my attempt to grow a pumpkin patch, what has completely failed. My sunflowers are mammoths, and they are attracting so many winged friends, but I look at my garden sketch for this season, and sunflowers are nowhere to be found. The showstoppers in my garden are the one thing I didn’t plan for.

I love my sunflowers as much as the goldfinches do. However, I wish that I had been a little more intentional with my garden design plan. Yet, I am reminded that some of my best pumpkins grew in years when I didn’t plan for them at all, when they emerged to my surprise from the compost. Sometimes the greatest gifts of the garden are the ones you didn’t plan for. Further, there have been other times in my life where I have been extremely intentional, and life laughed at my intentions.

For instance, just last Sunday, the night before we were supposed to fly from Spokane to New York to see my parents and my brother and my niece and nephew, and an assortment of aunts and uncles and other relatives on Dan’s side of the family, I packed with the utmost intention. My mom loves sunflowers but can’t seem to grow them in her garden. I clearly don’t have that problem, so I picked my biggest and brightest blooms and then gathered the very best flowers from other spots around my wild urban garden. I added phlox, Agastache, and mint, so the bouquet would be pleasing to the olfactory senses, and I also threw in some pink and purple snapdragons, some coreopsis, and some oregano flowers, giving it a flair that only a bouquet made by me would have. My mom’s birthday was last month, and I knew she would be so delighted with this handpicked arrangement harvested with love.

In addition to the flowers, I baked my parents a tin of rosemary shortbread cookies and blackberry thumbprint shortbread cookies to give them a taste of the garden. For my nieces and nephews, I packed handmade origami boxes which held little stamps that could be imprinted on anything inside or outside, an idea I stole from Erin Boyle. This gift was weeks in the making as I had to order the special eraser stamps, the ink pads and also teach myself how to do origami. I have long suffered from overpacking, so I tried to limit the other items in my backpack. I knew a large tin of cookies on my back and a giant floral bouquet in my hands would make every inch of an already long and arduous journey, slightly longer and more arduous, but I had a feeling, it would be worth it.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t always take our feelings into consideration, nor does it care about our intentions because while I made it through security with all my goodies without so much as a glance from TSA, and while the flight attendants generously shared their small overhead bin with my flowers, and while the bags we voluntarily checked made it to New York, the five of us never did. We were stranded in Chicago with just the items on our back, which in my case, was a fifty-pound bag full of gifts, art supplies and books, one I wasn’t even sure I wanted to read. If the apocalypse ever arrives, I definitely will not survive it.

In the prose poem “Welcome to Holland” Emily Perl Kingsley writes about what it’s like to have a child with a disability. She says, “When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.” Emily continues to explain that you had no intention of traveling to Holland, and it is okay to grieve and mourn the things that will never come to be, “But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.”

And so we arrived in Chicago and not New York, and Chicago didn’t have my parents or my brother or my nieces and nephews, or a clean change of clothes, but Dan and the kids were with me and I laughed harder in the Oak Park hotel hallway than I had in a long time, a deep body laugh where my stomach vibrated with joy, and I could no longer form full sentences because while in one sense, having a pouch full of every colored pencil under the sun, but not a toothbrush, or a pair of underwear or decent walking shoes was absolutely terrible, in another, when I considered what the hotel concierge thought of me as I clung to some newly purchased Target items, including a pack of men’s underwear and asked for four toothbrushes, not five, because one of my family members would definitely survive the apocalypse, it was incredibly funny.

And I laughed again at the Lucky Duck Japanese restaurant where you could exchange menu items for items won from the arcade claw machines except you couldn’t because no one ever wins anything from a claw machine, though Seabass spent ten dollars of his own money trying and coming so close.

And one day Anna and I ran along the path around Lake Michigan, in shoes we borrowed from Dan and Seabass and socks from what we now referred to as the collective family stash. We ran towards the Chicago skyline, never quite reaching it, and when we grew tired, we stripped to our underwear and identified a place we thought we could swim without the waves crushing us against the rocks. Our swimming attire brought more laughter as did our decision to walk a few more feet so as not to traumatize the Christian youth group that was about to picnic, but we found a spot, and the water was perfect, and we never wanted to leave the place we weren’t supposed to be to begin with.

And I can keep thinking, and I do keep thinking if I’m being really honest, about why the pumpkins didn’t pan out or why the first and second plane never took off, or how it feels like sometimes we spend so much energy on things that never come to fruition, or I can sit in the sun among my golden gods and make a plan for a fall garden knowing that many of those plans won’t come to be, but some will and they will be beautiful, and other just as beautiful things that were never intended, like goldfinches, pygmy nuthatches, and tiny baby robins with speckled breasts, will find their way to me as well.

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This Week in the Garden

I wasn’t supposed to be in the garden this week, but I am grateful for it. I’m harvesting blackberries by the bucketful this year. I see lots of jam, ice cream and pies in the future. The basil is happy, and I’ve started harvesting the kale. I’m eagerly awaiting the ripening of the first tomato. The sunflowers are keeping things bright, the first hibiscus has bloomed, the echinacea is saying hello, and lots of things are just about to…There seem to be more birds than ever before. I might start keeping track of the sightings. I think the three tiny water fountains and making sure they are always fully stocked, helps with this. I also think they appreciate the many safe places to perch. Cats can’t climb sunflowers.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What’s growing in your garden? Do you have a travel or life story that worked out differently than planned? What book is on your bedside table?

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Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. As always links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone, but you can further support my work by becoming a paid subscriber.

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Without further ado, today’s pocket.

In an effort not to waste water, I took the ice that remained from an ice cream experiment and dumped it in one of my flowerpots. This pot contained two tiny marigold seedlings which finally emerged, a large cluster of happy mint and purple and yellow pansies still eager to please. The next day though, things took a dark turn. The marigolds had shriveled and died as if cursed by an angry god. The mint was seriously distressed, the rich green leaves were now brown and crumbling to dust. The pansies looked pissed, each pathetic petal wondering, “How could you do this to me?”

I saw what looked like shards of ice around the edges of the pot. They couldn’t possibly be shards of ice though as it is July in Spokane; it hit 95 degrees yesterday. This was not the kind of weather where shards of ice stuck around. “What the fuh?” I said setting down my watering can so I could Miss Marple the situation. The answer dawned on me slowly. When I repurposed yesterday’s ice cream experiment, I forgot about one essential ingredient. Salt. The little shards I was seeing were tiny pieces of rock salt. The salt served as a desiccant, dehydrating my poor little plants, depriving them of the moisture they needed to survive. I could see the Clue Card in front of me, Mary Fruchter, in the garden, with rock salt.

It’s like that sometimes, isn’t it? We try so hard to get something right, and instead we get it so very wrong. Sometimes it feels like the universe is also in on the joke. Like the time I checked out Simple Matters, Living with Less and Ending up with More by Erin Boyle in an effort to get organized, and while I was decluttering one space, my puppy was chewing on the pages of Erin’s book in another space. I’m looking forward to the sequel, Simple Matters, Living with a Puppy and Not Losing Your Ever-Loving Mind.

And like the other day, when I decided it might be nice to have a toaster, so I could toast my sourdough bread when it was 95 degrees and have a slice with a little salted butter and rhubarb jam without transforming my kitchen into a sauna. Of course, because I so very much want to live with less and end up with more, I figured I could get a secondhand toaster. No need to add another item to the landfill. I mean sourdough toast with rhubarb jam is exceptional but at what cost? Fortunately, a planned thrifting crawl with friends offered the perfect opportunity to obtain a guilty-free toaster.

Unfortunately, the first two thrift stores didn’t have any toasters, or to be fair, I forgot to look for them. By the third thrift store though, I had accumulated a new to me dress, a cute tank and another pair of overalls, because really you can’t have too many, so I was satisfied and ready to search for my toaster. “Maybe people don’t use toasters anymore,” I said to my friend Andrea.

Miss Marple would have been disappointed with my deductions because when I walked the appliance aisle, which consisted of a few things that looked sadder than my pansies, I found not one but nine toasters. I chose a stainless steel one and then feeling smart started to look for somewhere I could plug it in and check if it worked.

“Hopefully I won’t get electrocuted,” I said nonchalantly, recently having finished a book where the main character experienced this fate. I asked one of the employees about testing the toaster, and he told me they had a station for testing the electronics. The station turned out to be a power strip in the front of the store, but it would suffice. Andrea followed along because she’s a good friend, and she wasn’t taking my electrocution comment lightly, or maybe she had a hunch that the situation might have a comical end.

I plugged the toaster in, and like magic, the green light lit up. I was delighted that it worked. I could even switch the settings, toast, bagel... The possibilities felt endless… that is until smoke, like a significant amount of smoke, started emanating from the coils. “Oh,” I said to Andrea, “it’s smoking.”

She nodded at me and watched me quickly unplug the toaster, leaving it to cool off among the lamps, alarm clocks and other things people were testing.

“On to number 2,” I said.

Andrea was laughing so hard her eyes were welling with tears.

“I wonder how much a new one is,” I said. I could tell by the look on Andrea’s face that she thought this was a better plan.

“I would just buy a new one,” she said. “They’re not expensive, and you can’t really clean those.” She’s practical like that, and I appreciate that about her. She cares about people and the planet, but she’s not setting herself on fire to save the world.

I love my friends, and I want to be like them in so many ways. This week we visited my friend Jamie. Her garden is lush and beautiful and impressively organized. She has an Agastache that is as tall as me. I’ve never seen anything like it. She started it from seed. She gave me the same seeds. However, my gardening is a bit wilder and more haphazard than Jamie’s. I took care of my seeds diligently, but now I’m unsure where I transplanted them. How am I supposed to grow a luscious licorice smelling plant like Jamie’s if I can’t even find it?

To conserve water, I installed a drip system in my garden years ago. It is functional, but it is far from perfect. The output I need to water the small front lawn and garden doesn’t quite match what I need for the garden in the back, and these two systems are connected to the same timer. In an effort to improve this situation, I decided to manually adjust the water system daily, so both parts of the garden get what they need. It’s a decent solution, but it relies on my remembering to make the switch, me the same person who can’t remember where she planted the Agastache, or to look for a toaster, or that homemade ice cream contains rock salt. I do it though because it makes my plants happier. There are more blooms. And of course, I also forget to make the switch, not once, not twice, but so far, three times this summer. I only remember when, like the rock salt, it is too late. The porch sopping wet, the wooden floor taking on damage it might never recover from.

In the most recent accidental flooding, I grabbed my usual fixes, an old towel to sop up the excess water and a fan which would hopefully evaporate the water off the wood. Maybe next time I’d get it right. Pansies would get watered and porches wouldn’t. Maybe not. Either way, I’ll keep trying.

This Week in the Garden

Inspired by Jamie’s gorgeous garden, I laid some of my compost down this week among my flowers and vegetables. It is a huge accomplishment for me that I had compost that was usable. My friend Liz is always telling me how easy compost is, but I told her recently that it’s not as easy for me. “It might be the chicken shit,” she said and then sent me home with a few bags along with some rabbit pellets. I added both to the compost and I’ll let you know how it goes. I also put some wet strips of newspaper over the worms in my worm bin hoping to see happier worms and more compost there.

The blackberries are starting to ripen. We have an abundant crop this year. In addition to just eating them straight off the vine, I’ve been trying out new recipes with them. One of my favorites was blackberry, whipped lemon curd tartlets. I’m linking the recipe that inspired the creation. I made this recipe with the first of our blackberry harvest. When I sent the boys to the garden to harvest the berries, they gathered all the ripe berries they could find, about two and a half cups. This was just the right amount for this recipe whereas a pie would require at least twice that number of berries.

The sunflowers are stealing the show in my garden. They are tall pillars, and there are so many of them. The birds love them, and so do I. I am already starting to think, though, about how to organize next year’s garden differently. The sunflowers are incredible, but they create a bit of a jungle, and it can be hard for some of the other vegetables to get what they need. I might be a little bit more judicious next year about where they grow.

I have definitely succeeded at adding more color into the garden. My favorite bloom this week is phlox. It smells so sweet. I also have some cosmos which are taking off. I love the whimsy of cosmos. I would still like to add more color though, so I’m beginning to think about where I have space and which perennials I can add in the fall.

In case you were concerned, I found the stash of Agastache. They are small, but healthy, and I’m hoping one day they turn into mammoth plants.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What are you giving your effort to these days? What’s growing in your garden? Which summer recipe has brought you joy?

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“We can create stories; perpetuate stories; reframe, reimagine and reform stories; believe stories, and, yes, sometimes let stories turn to compost so new ones can be born.”

- Kaitlin Curtice

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. As always links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone, so please share with all your friends.

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Without further ado, today’s pocket.

In Musical Chairs, a book I very much enjoyed this summer, Bridget, a celloist who lives in New York, retreats to her old run-down barn in Connecticut for rest and relaxation. She loves the barn but hasn’t kept up with its needs over the years, as evidenced by her slight electrocution at the start of the novel. Bridget decides to deal with the barn, though, to preserve it; she even fills out the paperwork to mark it as a historic landmark. When she does this, new opportunities avail themselves to her. Of course, because it’s a romantic comedy, every contractor and firefighter she encounters is incredibly handsome and available, but that is beside the point. What rings truer about Bridget’s experience is that sometimes we need to get rid of the old to welcome in something new, or as Kaitlin Curtice writes, “sometimes (we must) let stories turn to compost so new ones can be born.”

When I went to the lake last week, my intention was to have a creative retreat. I recently made the decision to pivot with the book I had started pitching to agents over a year and a half ago, a decision I will explain at a later point. In the hopes that I could figure out what my next creative step should be, I filled a backpack with New Yorker magazines, books on creativity, a pair of binoculars and my fancy camera that I never find time to use, and I headed to our lake cabin. I was hoping to photograph the baby swallows that had made a home in the porch eaves.

When I arrived though, it was quiet. Before I even unpacked my cooler bag, I went to check on the swallows, knowing in my heart they were gone. It breaks my heart every year when the birds leave even though I know that this is a natural part of things. Still, I was hoping to have their delightful chirping as a background noise for my creative endeavors. Just a few days prior, this porch was full of noise, with some of our family here, and now it was just Kam and me, not even the birds to keep us company. It didn’t take me long though to grow comfortable being alone. I read a book and listened to the birds flying in the distance. I didn’t do any writing that day.

I figured the next day I would get to it, but instead when I woke up, I made homemade granola with some oats I found in an unlabeled glass container in the cupboard. They smelled stale, but there was no mold, so I used them, a decision I felt would make my depression-era grandparents proud. One of my favorite family stories is about the time that my grandparents joined my parents on a trip to the Jersey Shore. My grandparents showed up with their red cooler full of food, including a packet of hot dogs that had turned a very wrong shade of brown. My dad explained to my grandparents that it was probably not the best idea to eat them. My grandmother conceded, but my grandfather was not as easily convinced. He turned to my dad and said, “So you’re saying we’re going to throw these out?”

After I put the granola in the oven, I started rooting around in the cabinets to see if other things had expired. Sure enough, the pantry looked more like a historical record, a documentation of a former time. I tossed the remaining expired items into the trash asking forgiveness from my ancestors before moving onto the fridge and freezer. The freezer contained a jar of unlabeled black beans and another jar of what appeared to be grape juice. Why I ever froze grape juice, I couldn’t tell you. When I finished purging the fridge and freezer, I scrubbed the shelves down and then took out the trash. When I did so, it occurred to me that I should probably deal with the large Rubbermaid trashcan full of dog poop that I’d been avoiding for years now. I transferred its contents to a large black trash bag, cursing biodegradable bags. I set the large offensive smelling bag on the lawn and returned to the house for some bleach to clean the can. On my way back inside, I couldn’t help but notice that the gutters were full of debris, and this was the case because the roof was covered in pine needles, so once I sprayed bleach in the trash can, I grabbed a broom and climbed up on the roof in my flip flops.

I managed to get on the roof without falling. It occurred to me that if I fell off the roof, it might take a minute to get some help, so I sat on my bottom and scooted myself along, using the broom to push the needles away from me onto the ground. Much too late, I remembered the tray of granola and hoped Kam wouldn’t notice it. It was scary on the roof but also satisfying to be able to take care of this thing myself.

When I had two feet back on the ground, I checked on Kam who looked so serene I felt bad for ever doubting him. However, when I started sweeping the needles off the porch, he picked up his leash and took it outside. He laid down in the sun with it as if to say, “Come on mom, that’s enough. Let’s play.”

I searched for my phone to take a picture of him, and I saw that Dan had texted me to say that he hoped we were relaxing and having fun. I was sweaty and dirty and covered in sap. I sent him a picture of the porch covered in needles that had once been on the roof. “I must really be at an impasse with this book,” I said.

My husband, ever supportive, texted back, “That is impressively productive procrastinating.”

I hearted his message. Clearing off the roof was oddly relaxing, and I was having fun. I remembered that the last time I got on the roof I was also working on a book. It occurred to me that this clearing out might be part of my process.

I finished sweeping the needles off the porch, and then I hooked up the hose and rinsed out the garbage can. As I did so, I noticed the discarded mattress topper on our lawn. Seabass took it off one of the beds when he was teaching himself how to do a backflip years ago. One summer night, during quarantine, the four of us lay on it at three am watching a meteor shower. It was now covered in needles and bird poop, and so I bundled it up and set it beside the trash bag.

I felt fatigue starting to set in, but I had just enough momentum to finish my uncharacteristically urgent cleaning spree by addressing the floors. I didn’t have a mop, so I just grabbed a rag and soaked it and started moving it around the floor. Whenever I sweep or mop, I think of my grandmother, and how she swept our summer childhood cabin meticulously every day. I felt the morning work catching up to me. I was running out of steam. I thought about the writer’s office hours I attended the day before for a memoir class I am currently taking and how one woman commented on how she makes herself write in the morning because that is when her brain is at its best. Here I was using my best brain to clean an old jar of beans and wrangle poop bags. I wondered where I’d gone wrong.

I finally took a break and took Kam down to the lake for a swim. I tied him to the dock and dove in. The water felt so good, the way it only does when you have worked up a sweat and smell of pine needles and a trace of dog poop. Kam whined because he wanted his turn, which was fair, so I took him to the beach and let him run free.

When we got back to the house, we made a trip to the dump with the windows open wide. When I got back to the lake, I showered. I had intended to make myself lunch, but I was spent, so I just pulled out leftovers from the previous night’s dinner and sat on the porch and contentedly ate them. Then, I rested. My best brain needed a nap.

I didn’t play with any of the toys I brought. I didn’t take any photos or use my binoculars. I didn’t take out my glue or the scissors I brought from home. I didn’t even open the books on creativity or attempt a scrapbook. I read and tidied the lake place and climbed on the roof, grateful to have managed it without falling, and in the afternoon, when I woke from my nap, I pulled out my phone and used the notes app to sketch an outline for my next book.

Somewhere among the pine needles, black beans, and tree sap, I let myself let go of an old story, so a new idea could take root. I love her already.

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This Week in the Garden

We harvested the garlic on Sunday as a family. It is by far our largest yield, with most of the bulbs being above average in size. I think this is because we used our best cloves to plant last year’s harvest.

Tomorrow morning, I will harvest more blackberries. They are lush, and I’m hoping I have enough to make something special with them. I think I just might.

The air quality deteriorated on Friday. It was so bad that I drank my morning tea inside. Mateo was supposed to go on a field trip, but camp was cancelled. He and I made ice cream instead. His ice cream required so much work and was so delicious.

The poor air quality days are rough. It feels so desperately apparent that we are failing this gorgeous planet we call home.

I’m grateful that tonight the air is clear and I’m sitting outside again. To be honest, if that wasn’t the case, I’m not sure I would have gotten my pocket out this week.

I pulled in the last of my snow and snap peas. When I did so, the pill bugs seemed to start eating one of the dahlias that was living right next door. I’m not sure that dahlia will make it.

It is hard to acknowledge the things we spent so much time on that are not going to make it, but I imagine that this too must be composted, and something else will be born.

My sunrise hibiscus bloomed this week, the first bloom since I transplanted her outside. I’m hopeful she will keep blooming for the rest of the summer.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What resonates with you today? What are you letting go of? What are you welcoming in? How is the air in your garden?

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Without further ado, today’s pocket.

“It will probably be fine,” I laugh as I carry the sheets from the bedrooms out to the porch overlooking the lake.

“Oh, you do have a washer and dryer here,” My mother-in-law says. “I thought you said you didn’t, and you hung things outside.”

She is hard of hearing, so I just nod. “We do.”

What I don’t say is that I’m not sure if the dryer actually works, that the last two times I tried to dry towels in it, they came out damp and I had to hang them all around the cabin so they wouldn’t accrue mildew.

We don’t have a lot of guests at the lake, and I’m not particular about clean sheets when we are out there, falling into full summer mode. They, like my ten-year-old, who forgoes showers for swimming for much of the summer, are clean enough.

But the sheets seem less so, when guests are coming. Then, I notice the dog hair, the dirt, the wrinkles…

I knew that our family was coming. The exact date was up in the air, but my brother-in-law, sister-in-law, and nephew as well as Dan’s mom were making a big move at the end of June from Madison, Wisconsin to Spokane, Washington, our home for the past decade. I knew they would probably come out to the cabin and stay over and require sheets, and I knew that I should probably change out and wash those sheets in advance because of the fickle dryer.

I knew this, and yet when I visited the lake alone a few weeks ago, the wild roses were blooming.

So, I didn’t change a single sheet. Instead, I sat outside and read a book, breathing in the roses and my first official day of summer vacation, looking up occasionally to watch the birds swoop in or to see the sun shimmer on the water below. When I finished reading, I picked one tender pastel pink rose and started to draw it, attempting to capture an ounce of the beauty I was experiencing.

I wrote down in my sketch book that it was windy, and now I recall it was so windy that a wildfire started blazing earlier that afternoon, in Spokane County, and one of my best friends, who was looking forward to her first day of summer vacation, was evacuated from her home with her family. This came on the heels of her mom’s health journey that at the time felt scary and uncertain.

I drew that rose and hoped that everything would work out for my friend Andrea and her family, that she would be able to go home soon, that she would have a home to return to. A few summers ago, Dan’s cousin and his wife and their little baby lost most everything they owned in the Altadena wildfire- their house magically still standing. However, they weren’t able to go home for over a year, and by then, home had drastically changed.

Andrea’s house was safe. The day after the fire started burning, she and her family were escorted home by kind police officers so they could grab their medications. The next day, she was able to return home, though the area was still in a stage two alert, meaning they needed to be prepared to evacuate again. Andrea shared her feelings that day in a note, saying, “As I thought about the possibility of losing my house, I thought about all the things I’d miss, including the home library I’ve been building for over two decades. But as much as I love my books, they’re replaceable. It’s interesting how you can love something so much yet understand that in the end, it doesn’t really matter, even if it matters a lot right now.”

I added a stem to my little rose and a few leaves, some support. I thought about The Little Prince and the deep friendship he formed with his rose, how very beautiful she was, but also how fragile.

While I sketched, I listened to the chirp, chirp, chirping of the baby swallows and wrens who waited for their parents to feed them, tiny mouths wide open. The wrens occupy the little wooden birdhouse attached to one of the porch beams; the swallows have built a sturdy mud nest in the porch eaves.

And so, it isn’t until the day my family came to the lake that I strip every last sheet from the beds and take them down to the laundry room knowing that the washing machine has to run for a bit and be given a good thump in order to finish a cycle and that if you forget the thump, the process is indefinitely stalled. I was also keenly aware that the dryer might not come through for me, and I didn’t really have a plan for that.

I load all the sheets into the washer, five separate sets along with pillowcases. The water starts, and I stay close by and sweep the floors, waiting for the machine to stop so I can bang it back to life. I suppose I could potentially hang the sheets outside if it comes to it, but we aren’t talking about a few swimsuits, we are talking about five sets of sheets. We don’t have a clothesline set up, and I didn’t pack rope or clothespins, so my only alternative is the porch railings which since the wrens and the swallows have moved in and made themselves at home is not an ideal place for sheets.

I hear the water in the washer stop. I lift the lid and bang it back down to get things going. The water resumes, and I hope for the best. I walk back upstairs to my family, grateful beyond words that they, like the birds, have chosen this place as their new home. On my way up the stairs, I can’t help but notice the wild rose bush, empty of every last pink bloom, the petals long lost in the wind.

This Week in the Garden

We harvested lavender this week and made wreaths, more on this soon. It is July in Spokane which means it is getting hot. I’m in awe of my pansies which seem to survive the heat as well as they do the cold. They have been providing consistent color to the garden since April. My basil is liking the change of weather, and I think I will soon be able to harvest enough basil for pesto. The basil seeds I planted a bit ago also seem happy. Princess Duncan, my hanging fuchsia, on the other hand, is not loving the heat. I have started to water her every day, and I’m hoping she can hang in there for a few more weeks, as I know she will be fine in August and love the pre-frost fall weather. I did transplant a few pansies that I had in tiny pots on my garden bench. I dug them up and placed them in larger pots that had space because it was becoming impossible to keep them hydrated. I think I waited too long to do this though as only one survived, but one is better than none.

The single sunflower that emerged last week now has several friends. Several of them are giants, and I have to stretch to photograph them. I like to read outside in the evenings and pretend I’m in a field of sunflowers.

Several of my cucumbers have started to flower and my tomato plants have little green tomatoes on them. I know I planted pumpkin seeds, but I don’t see the plants anywhere. It is possible that one is hiding under the snow and snap peas or among the garlic, but if so, it is really good at hiding. I’m hoping to find a seedling to plant in the next week as I would really like to have pumpkins in the fall.

I have about ten rose bushes in different locations around my garden, only one of which produces a plethora of blooms. I’ve been paying more attention to my roses this year, and I am hoping that next year I will see even more flowers. One of my roses, the only red one, and the one that smells the most luscious, was looking really rough last year but appears to be coming back to life, and this brings me joy.

I planted a wild rose bush in the back of the garden, and it looks incredibly healthy, but it hasn’t flowered yet. A wild rose showed up in the front, as they tend to do, and it bloomed a few flowers. I am planning to plant another wild rose near our Little Free Library in the fall, in an area that currently houses tiger lilies that do not get water, so won’t bloom. I have already moved loads of these tiger lilies to other parts of the garden where they are thriving. I will probably give some away when I make room for the rose bush.

Speaking of fall planting, I am already thinking about it since I’m on a planting hiatus until it cools down. I am noticing that the strawberry plant I have in a pot is doing better than any other strawberry plant, so I’m planning to move some of my strawberry plants over to that same area and try growing them out of pots next year. I’m also hoping to add a few more native drought tolerant plants out front, and I’m thinking they will do better if I do this in the fall. I haven’t settled on what yet, but it is fun to think about. I will probably add more daisies and black-eyed Susans among other things, as I can’t seem to get enough of them.

This weekend, we plan to harvest our garlic as a family. In the past, we have done this in one harvest, but this year, I’m going to try it differently and only harvest the plants where half to a third of the leaves are brown. I will leave the rest in a little longer. This means that when Seabass returns from Italy, there will still be garlic for him to harvest. He will be so pleased.

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Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. Links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone so please share with friends. If you would like to further support my work, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber.

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Without further ado, today’s pocket.

We returned from vacation to discover some of the hollyhocks that I grew from seed last year, and strategically placed in the back garden, blooming. I was pleased about this as I waited over a year for these blooms as hollyhocks are biennials, and they didn’t bloom last year. The hollyhocks add gorgeous color to the garden. One is a deep fuchsia, and the other looks like a sunset. The tall flowers complement our old wooden fence perfectly.

I sometimes struggle with color in the garden after the initial blooms fade, but this year, the snapdragons have spread, the daisies are delighting and the coreopsis or tickseed, whichever unpleasant name you choose, is a showstopper.

I have some new flowers growing, like this purple flower which to me resembles a mix between a firework and a sea urchin. Sometimes I don’t remember planting things and so discovering them is such a delight.

The tomatoes seem to be forming flowers despite their location among the sunflowers. I am hungry for them. I tried to buy an heirloom tomato at the grocery store today, and it rung up at $6.00, so I decided to bid it a sweet farewell and wait for my harvest. I wait albeit impatiently. I continue to check on my plants to make sure they have enough light. Things got a little crowded while we were away, so I once again pulled some things to make space. My sunflowers are mammoth and heavy so I’m using stakes and random things I can find to keep some of them upright. The first sunflower bloomed on Thursday. I’m so glad I didn’t miss this occasion.

The raspberries have started showing up, and while I wish there were more, I’m picking handfuls for my kids and my nephew who arrived this week from Madison, and this is bringing me joy. Everyone loves them. (Update: this morning I realized I have more raspberries than I’ve ever had. I think my weeding and watering are working.) Yesterday, Mateo came in the kitchen with one he had saved in his palm for me. The strawberries seem to be done for now; the plants didn’t produce much but look so healthy so I’m hoping maybe next year will be the year for strawberries.

My parsley has been so slow to start, and I think next year I’m giving up completely on trying it from seed due to how long it takes to germinate and then how long it takes to get going. Again, I’m waiting albeit impatiently. My basil is also taking its time. It has been cooler here, and basil likes it hot. I planted some more basil seeds today because I love basil so much, so we shall see.

The snow and snap peas have been thriving and feeding us numerous times over. Mateo was the first to find them and pick them as a snack when we got back from vacation. I am learning that when the peas ripen, they need to be picked, and then the plant keeps producing. Also, if you wait too long, the peas become stringy and lose their sweetness.

The Oregon Grape is producing beautiful purple berries which Mateo has convinced more than one person, including myself to try. They are as awful to eat as they are lovely to look at.

My cucumbers and pumpkins are slowly taking off, and my hot pepper plants have tiny peppers on them despite being overshadowed by sunflowers.

Mateo and I dug our first potatoes. We listened to Farmer Fred’s advice and waited till the leaves turned yellow. They look delicious, but next time I will wait till all the leaves turn yellow to allow some of the potatoes to get a little bigger. It is so hard to wait. Still, this might be my favorite and easiest crop ever because all I did was stick an old potato in the ground and voila, a few months later, lots of delicious red potatoes.

The pill bugs are plentiful and adorable, but they are taking a toll on some of my plants, particularly the zinnias and the Tuscan kale. I’m getting creative and putting some chili powder at the base of the plants to ward them off. I also am using some toilet paper rolls around the base of some of the seedlings hoping to deter them. It makes my garden look a little insane, but I think it might be working, so I don’t care.

Because the pill bugs ate most everything in one of my beds, and I’m still not sure what happened to the Swiss chard seeds that I tried planting twice, I decided to buy a few more plants and take advantage of the cool wet weather we’ve been having. (I know that so many places have experienced a heat wave this summer, so I don’t take this weather for granted.) I planted a version of Chinese broccoli in the back bed, and I added some Russian kale to another bed, and I put some Swiss chard seedlings near the tomatoes. I will probably add one or two more parsley plants and perhaps some zinnias if I can find some for a reasonable price. (Update, I couldn’t find them, and so I’m letting go and focusing on caring for what I have.) I also brought home a few more native plants, some echinacea and blanket flower, another coreopsis for the front walk, a little lavender because my transplants completely failed and a gorgeous tall red salvia which smells and looks delicious. I check on these new plants every day to make sure they are hydrated.

I enjoyed planting this week as come July I refrain from putting anything new in the ground because of the heat. I will attempt to start a fall garden mid-July. I’m waiting for my garlic to ripen, keeping a close eye on the leaves which have started turning brown. When about half the leaves are brown, I will stop watering them for a week, and then I will harvest them. In the meantime, I harvested loads of scapes and am making garlic scape pesto for sandwiches. Because I don’t have a ton of basil, I am substituting some lemon balm. I imagine the garlic and the snow and snap peas will be finished just in time to open up some space for a fall garden. This year, I’m planning to plant spinach, mustard greens, broccoli rabe, snow and snap peas and cilantro. I might also do some more mesclin as that was a real winner for me in the Spring. It is still producing. I also might do arugula later in the season even though it is quick to bolt because I love it and I’m a glutton for punishment.

We harvested rosemary this week and chopped it and put it in our pizza dough. We also harvested mint, which I used to make a salad that both Mateo and Anna call “the salad I like.” I’ll include a recipe below for “the salad I like.” I make it from memory now, so it will not include measurements, but if you would like that, I bet you can find it online.

I’ve been drawing my garden more, and I find that even though my drawings aren’t very good, the experience is lovely, and I love them in all their imperfection. I’m participating in a 100-day project, and the intent is to draw something in my garden every day, but I miss some days, and I’m trying to be okay with that.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What’s growing in your garden? What is something that you love and don’t care about being good at? What book in on your bedside table? What is one of your favorite recipes that highlights something you have in your garden in abundance?

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The Salad I Like, named by Mateo and Anna

One can of garbanzo beans, rinsed and washed

Green onions – chop the bulbs and use them, dice the onions and add them

Lots of mint

One ripe avocado (good luck finding one)

Cucumbers thinly sliced

A little extra virgin olive oil

A pinch of salt

A generous helping of rice wine vinegar (this is what makes the salad so good, I think)

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“You can’t be everybody’s cup of tea
Some like it bitter, some like it sweet
Nobody’s everybody’s favorite
So, you might as well just make it how you please”

-Kacey Musgraves

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. Links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone so please share with friends. A big thank you and shout out to my newest paid subscriber, Sharon Straub. Your support of my work means so much.

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

“I’m going to have you do something uncomfortable,” the writing instructor and respected author said as she grinned at me and the other workshop participants. “I want you to walk around the room with no destination in mind. Allow yourself to be completely free. See what happens when you move differently in the world.”

She put on some music, and thirty or so of us, writers and artists, rose up like obedient sheep and started walking in circles around the fluorescent lit space. Some people crawled on the floor. Some climbed on chairs. Some made significant eye contact with strangers exchanging smiles and wary glances.

“There’s so much possibility,” the instructor, let’s call her Denise, said as she attempted a backwards crawl along the floor, the same floor people were walking on in their shoes, the same shoes that were previously walking on the streets of Spokane. Denise beamed at us, emanating enthusiasm. “Do whatever you want,” she shouted. I wanted to leave.

I’m slowly learning to accept that everything does not have to be for me. I often check in with others for validation when I don’t feel like something is working for me rather than trusting my own intuition. A friend of mine attended the same workshop, and the next time I saw her, I asked her what she thought of it, and she said, “Oh, it was amazing.” My face visibly dropped. “Wait which workshop?” she asked. “Did you mean the morning or afternoon?”

“Afternoon,” I said.

“Oh, I walked out of that one.”

I immediately felt better, but I wished I could have trusted myself to walk out too.

As a teacher, I never want my students to walk away empty handed. I give two surveys, one mid-year and one at the end of the year to get student feedback on what worked for them and what didn’t. I use this feedback mid-year to make changes for them in the second semester, and I use their feedback at the end of the year to make changes for the following year. I will be honest and say that it is also a nice opportunity for me to hear what students have gained from the class. What is harder to swallow, though, is when the feedback is less complimentary.

This year, one of my Native American Literature students, who I highly respect, shared how he didn’t feel challenged. It was his senior year and for his book club choice, he chose to reread a book he had already read, which I supported because you can’t really read Pulitzer Prize winning There, There too many times. However, when I saw his comment about being challenged, I wondered if he should have chosen something different. I mostly wondered though what I could have done sooner to help him extend his knowledge. I tend to stray away from direct instruction in general because I want students to generate their own ideas. In my Native American Literature class, this feels even more important because I am a white lady, and my voice should definitely not be the loudest in the room. However, the feedback from this student has me reflecting on whether I might need to be more explicit with some of my instructions and material to help students foster those new ideas.

This student was in a unique situation because he came to the class with significant background knowledge on Native culture. He was also extremely gifted. He shared his gifts with our class by teaching us some Salish, which was one of my favorite experiences in all my years of teaching the course. I think he enjoyed the community we created, but I wish I could go back to day one and ask him what he hoped to gain from the class. I imagine I did that, but I wish I had done more to help him meet those goals. I wish he was more satisfied with his experience.

Another student’s response was polite, but her review of her experience and the course was lukewarm.

The truth is while I tell the students to be honest, and I need them to be honest so I can make changes and adjust, I don’t want anyone to find my cup of tea lukewarm. I want everybody to like me and everything I do. As I write this, I recognize how problematic and unhelpful this is. In the workshop I attended, I didn’t think the instructor did anything wrong. She was offering a delicious drink, albeit one you had to sip while walking around a room on all fours, staring at strangers, but some people lapped it up. They thirstily transformed that workshop into creative fuel.

In Austin Kleon’s new book, Don’t Call it Art, one of his rules to create like a kid again focuses on the importance of input, meaning what we feed ourselves as creators matters. We need a daily diet of quality material to produce our own quality material. The good news is that means that we should be seeking out and surrounding ourselves with creative work that we love. The bad news is that this can be challenging in an age where we are constantly fed material regardless of whether we like this material or not. Consciously curating our intake is essential. According to Austin, the first step is knowing what we like. “By the time we grow up, we’ve been told what we’re supposed to like for so long that it’s easy to lose track of what it is we really like… “If you don’t know what you like, how can you expect to make anything you like?”

I’m slowly learning that knowing what you like sometimes begins with acknowledging what you don’t like. As an artist, it also means being okay with the fact that some people are not going to dig your tea leaves. I’m teaching and creating for people who have taste, and if I want to quench people’s palates, my work needs to have flavor. Some people are not going to like that flavor.

Next year, I hope to continue to remind my students and myself to love what we love, to try new things, yes but also when we’ve tried something and we discover it’s not for us, even if that something is my class, it’s okay. It’s more than okay. Each aversion leads us closer to who we are, who we need to be and what we will create in this world.

Inspired by Austin, I made a graphic organizer of my input, the things that offer me creative fuel. I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What resonates with you? How do you like your tea? What are you reading or consuming that’s quenching your thirst?

I will have a This Week in the Garden update in next week’s letter. In the meantime, here are some foxgloves I fell in love with on the coast.

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. Links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone so please share with friends. If you want to further support my work, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber. If you like it here, please click the heart at the bottom, and make sure you are signed into Substack when you do so.

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

“You are… my family tree… Be good to me… Take care of me. Bap, Bap.” We sing along with Ben Kweller as we head to the coast for a family vacation. Who doesn’t love a good road trip? Solid snacks, breathtaking views of the Columbia River, a popping playlist… No one curates a playlist quite like Dan. I think making playlists might be his love language. Bright Eyes, “Another Travelin’ Song” comes on next.

“I never feel quite prepared,” Conor Oberst sings. I can hear Emmylou in the background. This lack of preparation I know well. It is how I feel before most trips, most things maybe.

I spent the last two days prepping for this journey. I wrapped up my school year on Tuesday, so I had a little extra time to devote to the task, and yet by Thursday I was feeling overwhelmed by it all. How can it be so much work to take your family on vacation?

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I took care of necessary things like picking up our renewed car registration tabs because they conveniently expired this week. I cleaned the car, and by that, I mean I took shit out of it that should probably have never been in it to begin with. I was trying to make some space because I was anxious that even the best playlist which includes Belle and Sebastian singing about a favorite New York Yankee, might not be a match for the misery that might ensue when five people, three of them taller than me, plus one puppy, squish themselves into a Subaru of average proportions for seven plus hours, more if you account for traffic, which I never do.

I made arrangements for my garden. Early in the season it pains me to leave the garden, but by late June, I’ve already started to let go a little. I understand there is only so much I can do. I am now applying that same level of hopefulness to trip preparations.

I did other just as necessary things. I packed books to read making sure I had one I really wanted to read. I do, it’s The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans, and I’ll probably finish it tomorrow because it’s incredible, so I made sure I had more books but also not too many because, not to repeat myself but five people and one dog in a modest size Subaru. Said dog is supposed to ride in the hatch, but he doesn’t seem to understand that. Before we left, I asked Dan if we should consider putting stuff on the roof, and he said yes in a way that clearly meant no.

To be fair, one year I packed our things on the roof so we would be cozier in the car. It was lovely. Everyone had ample leg space, but while we were driving on Route 2 on the way to our campground at Priest Lake, listening to another amazing playlist, we heard a thunk that was not part of any drum machine. Something had come untethered. We pulled over when it was safe to do so to see if we had lost something important. We discovered our tent was gone.

It was 102 degrees in June that year, so getting ready for that trip was a beast. I bought a small ac unit for our bedroom because we were leaving our dog at home, and I was worried she might die.

My prep this week still had a hum of anxiety to it, especially by Thursday when I realized I might not get it all done, but it was much less harried. I even prepped a few things I didn’t have to but wanted too.

I made garlic scape pesto for the cheddar and soppressata sandwiches we would eat on our way. Garlic scape pesto is made from the delightful circular garlic scapes that form as the garlic ripens. In the food processor, you can toss them with a little basil, lemon balm, toasted pine nuts, parmesan cheese, lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil. The spread is rich and a little goes a long way, so we use it on sandwiches as opposed to eating it over pasta. It is Spring in a jar.

I also baked three dozen chocolate chip espresso cookies because we are taking this trip on the day Seabass turns 16, and baking for the kids’ birthdays is what I do.

I can still picture him in his highchair, those long blond locks, his red cheeks covered with chocolate cake, the two fingers he put in his mouth to fall asleep which he eventually did right there in his chair, face full of frosting.

I remember the road trips we took when the kids were little – frantically trying to anticipate all their needs, hoping not to forget a thing while also not really having time or room to pack anything.

On one family camping trip, Seabass cried when I walked to the pump to fill up our water jug. It was about ten feet from where he stood in his little red short pant onesie right next to the rest of our family. It was too far.

When I was prepping for this trip, he asked me if he needed to come. I smiled at him and kept packing…two decks of cards so we can play Scopa, hoping someone will remember the rules without Grandma here, a speaker so we can listen to music when we cook and hang out at the beach, sunscreen so no one gets burned, even though it’s the Oregon coast so no one is going to get burned. I pack toilet paper for the glove compartment because one time Seabass got a bloody nose and we had no tissues on hand. Anna offered him a tampon. Dan gave him the shirt off his back.

I start to hand my son, who is now taller than his dad, everything I have so carefully prepared for the journey ahead.

“Load the car please,” I say, looking up at him. I follow him outside and snip some lavender to take in my pocket.

I pull it out later to breathe it in when there’s a slowdown, and some passengers, who I will not name for the sake of peace, are getting cranky, and one four-legged panting passenger’s collar starts jingling, which indicates an attempted escape.

“No, Kam,” all three kids holler from the back seat, working in unison to heft him back in the hatch where he belongs. It takes all three of them, and it is barely successful, but they pull it off. It’s stressful, but Seabass is laughing, and that makes everyone feel better.

We smell smoke and watch a helicopter dump water from the Columbia River over a brush fire that has broken out on the train tracks.

I unzip the small cooler and let the smell of everything, the lilacs, the pressed basil and garlic, the defeated dog, linger.

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I don’t want to forget a thing.

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Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. Links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone so please share with friends. If you want to further support my work, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber. If you like it here, please click the heart at the bottom, and make sure you are signed into Substack when you do so.

Without further ado, today’s pocket

Recently, I finished reading Everything Is a Story, Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives by Kaitlin Curtice. I teach a class on Native American Literature, and when this book came out this past fall, I knew it might be an important one for me to read. Using the metaphor of an oak tree, Curtice suggests that we plant stories that can either harm or heal; how we tend to these stories matters. Some stories need more light, water and love. Some, on the other hand, need to be composted.

Reading Kaitlin Curtice’s work is similar to participating in meditation or yoga. She encourages breath and mindfulness. She offers rituals for healing. One such ritual that she shares in this book is meant for times of transition, where something is dying and something else is being born. Curtice invites us to draw two circles which are not touching each other. Label one circle letting go and label the other circle harvest. Then, reflect on what you want to release and what you want to draw in.

On the last day of school for seniors in my Native American Literature class, I shared this practice with my students, and I asked them as they either prepared to graduate or move on to their senior year, I have several juniors in the class, what is it that they want to let go of, and what to do they want to cultivate. What do they want to tend to? It was a big ask on their final day of school where many of them were hoping they could just play cards and sign yearbooks, but we had created our own little community in the room, and I wanted to close out by doing something that fed that community, so instead of caving to popular demand, I insisted we have a final community circle. I made three dozen chocolate chip cookies to soften the deal.

To be honest, it wasn’t that hard to get students to participate. The end of the year brings up a lot of feelings, and this was a chance for them to reflect on those feelings, to think about what they wanted to hold on to and what they wanted to let go of, to give them some ownership in a time that perhaps felt like it was moving a little too quickly.

One student said they wanted to return to their culture more, they wanted to dance again and work on their regalia. Another graduating student said they wanted to harvest time with their friends. One student spoke about how she didn’t want her illness to get in the way of her life and another talked about how she hoped she could work on her lateness because she missed some things this year, she wished she hadn’t.

In the circle, we listened to each other, and we held each other’s reflections, hopes and aspirations. I reminded them to honor their humanity. Yes, it is healthy to reflect on what we want to harvest, but sometimes when life takes over in ways we don’t expect, when that darn illness we wish we didn’t have shows up and gets in the way, we need to give ourselves some grace, and maybe find a work around. Sometimes we have to let go of what we hoped to harvest.

It was a beautiful way to end the year, and it reminded me that one of the things I want to continue to harvest in my classroom next year is community. Several students shared how they spoke more in this class than in previous classes. One student said that he shared more things with this group of people than any other group. I hope to create a similar space next year. I remind myself, though, that some of that will depend on the willingness of my students to share and open their hearts.

As for my own list, I want to cultivate reflection. It’s an incredibly busy time of year. This past week alone, in addition to baking those three dozen cookies, I also baked two dozen brownies for my youngest to take to a school picnic so he wouldn’t think I loved my students more than him. I met with so many students about their final research papers, which I am once again swearing to introduce earlier next year because procrastination is real, and there is enough stress at the end of the year without having to worry about works cited pages. To top it all off, as a senior prank, someone gave all sixty of my sixth graders kazoos. I’ve never been so close to breaking y’all.

It was a full, chaotic and exhausting week, where my brain was bubbling with ideas for the following year, ideas that might make it a gentler, smoother ride for myself and my students if I put them into practice. The problem is that at this time of year I’m often too tired to write the ideas down and come August, I forget them all. This year, though, perhaps because of Curtice and the gentle way she speaks to herself and her readers in her book, I decided to be kind to future Mary. I wrote her a little list with a love note at the top, a reminder of the beautiful community she built and a few thoughts for things she might want to let go of and or refine. I think I’d been putting it off because I thought it would take a ton of time to do this, but in practice it took less than twenty minutes because the ideas were already brewing. I saved it in a 2026-27 folder, and then I let it go.

This Week in the Garden

Here’s what I’m cultivating…

Garlic scapes, things have definitely gone a little loopy

Gorgeous red strawberries

A large rose, the color of sunset, blooming on a bush I planted for my parents who celebrated their 49^th wedding anniversary

snow and snap peas which I’m eating right off the vine and turning into stir fry

Thai basil and other farmer’s market seedlings

the leaning tower of delphinium

a blackberry trellis and the anticipation it holds

so many sun flowers, stately, stoic, just starting to…

Here’s what I’m composting…

The strawberries not being as plentiful as I’d like them to be

the cut worms or something such that ate the dahlia I tried to transplant in the back garden, the carrot seedlings they seem to have eaten as well

the porch I watered unintentionally

the lavender I transplanted, with so much hope, that probably won’t make it

the last week of Spring which I’m sad to see go

the bird that pooped on me while writing this piece

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I would love to continue this conversation in the comments? What are you cultivating and composting right now?

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. Links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone so please share with friends. If you want to further support my work, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber. If you like it here, please click the heart at the bottom, and make sure you are signed into Substack when you do so.

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Without further ado, today’s pocket.

“Are those invasive, Mama?” Mateo asks pointing at the poppies. We are in the back garden. I am taking my daily noticing walk. Mateo is following me around showing off his new vocabulary. I notice the poppies too. You can’t not notice them. They are stunning, wild and whimsical, and in May, they are everywhere.

Poppies are generous and free. They self-feed, which in my garden means they have established themselves in most of the raised beds and have even found their way into the front yard. California poppies are quick to spread. If one neighbor has them, other neighbors will likely get them too. Isn’t it comforting to know that beauty is contagious?

Recently, I took my students on a field trip where we planted trees along Hangman’s Creek with the Land’s Council, an organization whose mission is “to preserve and revitalize Inland Northwest forests, water, and wildlife through advocacy, education, effective action, and community engagement.” The days I took students to plant were practically perfect for me because all the things I love aligned. Yes, my feet slipped in the creek bed while I was filling up buckets with water to feed the wild roses, yes, my students told me that it was not looking good from behind, and yes, my socks and self-respect might never recover, but my soul never felt better. I was doing work I believed in alongside my students. We were together outside under a blue sky, and the sun was shining.

My life and passions are not always so balanced. Sometimes, one thing tends to take over, just like the poppies.

I knew that planting trees with my juniors and seniors would be amazing, and it was. One of my students even snuck away at lunch to use the pickaxe to make it easier for the rest of us to plant more trees in the afternoon. I wasn’t sure how the trip would go with sixty sixth graders. I had never taken kids on a field trip before where there wasn’t an accessible bathroom. One student asked what would happen if they needed to go number two, and Kat, our land’s council liaison and fearless leader, replied, “Well, you do have a shovel.”

As part of this unit, my sixth graders wrote research papers about water and trees. One of my students chose to write about invasive trees. The problem with invasive trees is that “they do little...to support the surrounding biome, stealing all nutrients from the soil, and leaving the plants nearby without nutrients to grow.” I learned from his paper that in Anchorage, Alaska, the government actually pays people a hundred dollars per tree to remove the invasive chokecherry tree. The chokecherry trees are lovely, but they take up space that would otherwise be inhabited by native trees which are beneficial to the local ecosystem. The chokecherries offer no such benefit.

There doesn’t seem to be a definitive conclusion on whether California poppies are invasive in my neck of the woods. I googled it, but the results were inconclusive. I also googled whether I could replant the poppies if I removed them. I accidentally typed puppy instead of poppy, and this was the AI generated response I got, “No, living animals cannot be replanted.” And we wonder what we did before AI?

Another one of my 6^th graders wrote his paper on the threat that AI poses to our water supply. The amount of water needed to cool AI technology is astronomical, and the benefits seem inconclusive at best. His paper inspired me to google how to turn off AI when using google. As I did so, I thought of Audre Lorde; “The master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house.” I did learn that you can add -ai at the end of your search, and it will filter the ai out. I don’t know if this reduces the carbon footprint, but it feels less complicit. Maybe if more of us do it, it will send a message that we don’t want AI answers. Interestingly enough, typing fuck ai at the end of your search works too.

Can poppies and strawberries co-exist? I’m starting to realize I don’t need someone else to answer that question for me. Unlike Alaska’s chokecherries, the poppies in my garden feed butterflies and bees. They are not without their benefits, but their roots extend deep into the soil, and they are soaking up all of the sun. If I want red strawberries, I need to let go of some orange poppies.

Along Hangman’s Creek, Kat tells students to make sure they can fit a full shovel between their saplings.

If we want something to grow, we need to give it space.

I’ve made a decision to teach part-time next year. I will still teach the same classes, Kat and I are already planning next year’s field trip, but I’m letting go of my coaching role. I’m not going to teach other teachers next year unless they register for my adult creative writing classes. Like the poppies, I’m placing this incredible work that I’ve gotten to do for a decade in the compost. I don’t do this lightly, but I’m learning that sometimes this is what you need to do in order to make more room for something else.

I’m a little scared, but the strawberries and trees are good teachers. I want to see what happens when I give my writing more soil and sun.

I’m giving myself some strawberry space.

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P.S.

* My brilliant daughter coined the phrase strawberry space.

* I don’t think I actually have California poppies in my garden. I think they are Moroccan.

*If you are worried about my poppies, don’t be. I still have loads to spare. I’m letting them stay in other parts of the garden as long as they respect some boundaries.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What resonates for you today? What are you letting go of and leaving space for? What’s going on in your garden? Read on if you want to know more about what’s happening in mine.

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This Week in the Garden

A lot of this week has been reflecting on what’s working and what’s not. Some things are taking off like the sunflowers, the snow and snap peas, the garlic and the delphinium. I think I might have a state fair delphinium on my hands.

Other things are slow to start. All the things I started indoors, save the tomatoes, are not looking amazing. I’ve become impatient. The growing season is only so long here in Spokane, and soon it will get hot. Today, I bought a few starts of some of the things I love from the farmer’s market, two basil and one Thai basil, which was actually two plants growing in one small pot. These starts will go a long way. Tonight, we will use the Thai basil in a stir fry along with the snow and snap peas we harvested. I will enjoy tending to these herbs while my seedlings slowly take their time.

I planted some mesclun this year for the first time, and it is a winner. It is still producing large greens. On the other hand, the arugula I planted bolted before doing anything. My kale in the back garden is slowly starting to take off. A few Swiss chard seedlings are emerging, which is unimpressive since I tried planting these seeds twice. I think Monty the Squirrel is messing with them. The carrots I have in the back garden are not doing much. I’m not sure the space they are in is a great location. I did some research though, and it might just be that I have to wait a little longer for them to produce. The potato, on the other hand, that I just popped in the ground because it grew eyes on my kitchen counter, is flourishing. I have no idea how to tell when it is ready to harvest.

I planted some hot pepper starts in the same bed as my sunflowers. I am not sure that was a good idea. I don’t have the heart to take out any more plants, so I’m going to wait and see how this co-habitation works out.

Four of my six dahlias sprouted and are now in the garden. One dahlia which I accidentally left in the ground last year came up as well, which I love. Next year, I will use the same planting method I did this year, because for the most part it seems to have worked, but I will get my dahlias from somewhere that will give me a refund if they don’t sprout.

Mateo and I weeded out the front garden. It’s amazing how much better it looks now. My drought tolerant native garden is looking pretty good. I know there are some things that I planted over the years that have not survived. I am getting better about realizing just how much care and attention things need when they are newly planted. This week I put a black-eyed Susan and some blanket flowers out there. I’m keeping a close eye on them.

There is space near the driveway that is empty where I decided to transplant some lavender from another part of my garden. It was challenging to find some roots, but I did, and it was enjoyable work because I got to smell lavender the whole time. I don’t think one can ever have enough lavender in their garden.

I have so many lovely flowers, more this year than ever. I’ve been making bouquets and sharing them with friends. I’ve been doing the same with my rhubarb jam. I have a recipe I love, which I’m linking here. It is super simple and doesn’t require canning. I think I may have left the lemon in a little too long in the last batch, but my friends tell me it was delicious.

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Without further ado, today’s pocket.

I love it when I’m reading a book that I can’t wait to return to. Right now, I’m reading Deep River by Karl Marlantes, a story about three Finnish siblings who are trying to find their version of the American Dream in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1900’s. All the characters in the book are rich and well developed. They feel like friends, and I can’t wait to spend time with them.

As a teacher, I start class with reading time. I believe that if I want my students to develop a reading life outside of school, I need to show them how to do that inside school, so I set aside time each class period for students to read. For dysregulated kids, this is a relaxing experience they can rely on at the start of class. Sometimes I read while my students read. Recently, I’ve been reading Everything Is a Story by Kaitlin Curtice. So far, it is my favorite of her books. Curtice’s words expand my thinking, and I’m enjoying marking up the book with my thoughts that I will share with students next year when I teach the book to my Native American Literature class.

This past week I even read the latest edition of the New Yorker, not cover to cover, which I decided wasn’t working for me, but I skimmed through and picked the story that interested me the most. It was a real-life Cinderella story where a horrible couple in Texas trafficked a girl from Guinea to work for them without pay. I can’t stop thinking about it.

My current reading life is full and flowing like a river, and I am happily paddleboarding down it. It is not always like this. Sometimes, the water is shallow, the rocks are abundant, and I can’t even stand up, let alone steer. Even in the best relationships, we sometimes get stuck.

A few weeks ago, I became acutely aware of my rut when Dan and I were sitting next to each other on the couch, reading our respective books. His face was so expressive while he read. His book made him laugh and sigh and nod. It was a classic I’ll have what she’s having situation.

When I’m in a reading rut, it is not that I don’t have anything to read. I usually have a book by my bedside, several actually. It’s just that I’m not reading any of them. Often, I have started one that I don’t find myself thinking about when I’m not reading it. It’s a basic, I’m just not that into you situation. However, I usually don’t do anything about it right away. The book just sits there, and I find other ways to spend my time. Often several weeks go by before it occurs to me that maybe the reason I’m not reading is because the book is not for me. At 46, I’m still slow to acknowledge when things are just not for me. If a book is recommended by a good friend, whose taste I trust, I tend to think there’s something I’m missing, if I’m not enjoying it, and perhaps if I just stick with it a little longer, the magic will be revealed. This happened recently with The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray. I wasn’t enjoying myself while reading it, but instead of letting go, I texted my friend who recommended it to see if her reasons for liking it would be enough to propel me forward.

My friend Andrea Bass, who writes Literary Merit, works as a library clerk in several school libraries across the district, including mine. She sets up fun displays to encourage students and teachers to check out books. One of my favorites displays that she does is where she pairs Amazon’s one-star reviews with the well-renowned book that received the review. She recently shared some of these reviews on her Substack.

I recognized many of the books on Andrea’s list. Someone said that Catherine Newman’s Wreck was “pointless and silly.” I read that book in a weekend, and it was a very good weekend precisely because I was reading that book.

One review for Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, one of my favorite books on the planet, said “the story was so heavily invested in poop and procreation.” I don’t even know what that means, but I imagine procreation is important when telling a story about intergenerational trauma. Also, everybody poops, so shut up hater.

I’ll be honest though, there were a few one-star reviews that I tended to agree with. “On a positive note, the book landed in the wastepaper basket on my very first throw.” This was a review for a book that I regretted making myself finish.

It occurred to me though that perhaps the people writing these Amazon reviews weren’t angry at the authors for writing books they didn’t like, they were angry at themselves for spending their time reading them, when they knew from the start they didn’t like them.

I did that a few years ago with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. A hundred pages in, I really wanted to throw the book in the bin, but I didn’t because it had gotten such rave reviews, and because I had loved every other book I had ever read by Kingsolver. So, I finished it, all 560 pages. When I completed it, I wasn’t pleased I persevered. Rather, I wanted to throw the book not just in the bin but at every person that had ever recommended it to me. Andrea didn’t recommend this one, and I could never throw a book at her even if she did. Mostly though, I was angry at myself for not listening to the voice that was quietly whispering I’m not sure this is for me.

In my classroom, I only require my students to read two whole class novels for the year. For the other books I allow them to choose books from the library and from a curated list of five or so books that we do book clubs with. I do this to recognize their different tastes and to allow them to have choice in what they read. Choice is voice after all. One of my students was absent for a couple of weeks when we were choosing our book club books, so I placed him in a group that was reading another one of my favorite books of all time, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. When he returned the book to me, I asked him what he thought of it. He said it was like eating a well-done steak without seasoning. He couldn’t wait to return it to me. He had written his one-star review on his heart.

My nephew coined the phrase, you like what you like, and the rest of us fell in love with it. Yes, you should try new things but after a hundred pages, or a hundred minus your age according to a librarian I love, it might be time to let go.

I can’t write a one-star review about The Bee Sting because I didn’t finish it. I returned it to the library, and now I harbor no hard feelings for Paul Murray. If anything, I’m grateful to him because saying what we don’t like helps us find what we do.

I would write more, but there’s a Deep River, waiting for me, and the wind is finally at my back.

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This Week in the Garden

Just photos this week of what’s blooming and bringing me joy.

I’d love to continue this conversation in the comments. Do you have a hard time letting go of books you don’t like? What book is at your bedside? What’s growing in your garden?

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Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. As we head into a long weekend, I’m taking a break from publishing something new and sharing an old favorite. Many of you may have missed this one as I published it several summers ago. I read it again this morning and laughed out loud. May it remind us all to turn down that pressure valve.

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose. Happy first week of summer! Thanks for being here. If you like what you read, please click the heart at the bottom of today’s pocket or share it with a friend. I’m recording outside this week which will probably make it sound a little funny with the wind and all. We have been warned that the winds will kick up today. I am hoping our trampoline will stay in one place and the bags of soil we have weighing it down will do the trick. For now, though, it is lovely out, and I’m enjoying sitting in my garden, noticing how it’s filling out in different places, watching the bees feed on the poppies and making new friends (see pic at the end of the post). Plus, this week’s pocket is about letting go of perfection, so without further ado…

I had a moment last week where I was sitting on my balcony watching the starlings feast on the cherries. It is pretty fun to watch them wrangle the cherries and nibble away and also a little sad as ultimately most of the cherry falls to the ground. I suppose it’s a good reminder to feast on your life and to not fret over making a mess. In reality, though, those birds are working really hard. Many of them are feeding their young, and their little ones eat a lot. They eat every 20 minutes. No wonder their parents aren’t concerned with the mess. I remember when I was breast feeding my babies in the first few weeks after they were born. My sole responsibility was to keep them alive. I had no time to do anything else. I certainly wasn’t worried about a messy kitchen.

The birds are working hard, but I am not. I am a teacher, and I am a few days into my summer vacation. And I have a lot more time on my hands, time to watch the starlings at work, time to have a cup of tea, time to read The Middlestein’s, this week’s escape book.  Summer is so delicious, and I am drunk with it all.

I am joyful, optimistic, whimsical, and I am greeting the blank canvas of summer like a welcome guest. I am looking a bit like this.

I soak in the delicious possibilities of what summer and I can do together, the books we can read, the podcasts we can listen to, the herbs we can harvest, the muffins we can make, the projects we can finish, the projects we can start. I am ablaze with possibility.

But on Monday morning, the first full week of summer vacation, I notice a shift in my emotions. My cup of joy has spilled into overwhelm. I stare at the blank canvas of summer, and I am lost in a world of white. I am looking a little more like this.

Possibility should come with a pressure valve.

When I was in middle school, I went to tennis camp. If you are thinking I was pretty cool, you are right. It was a one week sleep away camp that I attended with my best friend. Throughout the week, Joel, the middle-aged camp owner, kept telling us that we were going to be “in the fun.” It was so dorky and ridiculous, this notion that you could force people to have fun. But because the phrase was so awkward, it was hilarious, and we quickly adopted it to keep in our back pocket for rainy days.  

I was not going to let that blank canvas get the better of me. Summer would see that I knew how to be in the fun. My kids would see that I knew how to be in the fun. So, I did what any sane mother would do in this situation. I set about kicking summer’s ass. I created goals for myself that I would accomplish through rituals and diligence, and I created goals for my children, so they could do the same. They would learn by my steadfast example or by me repeating myself fifteen times before breakfast. My determination to master summer had morphed me into Ben Stiller from The Royal Tenenbaums. All I needed was a track suit and a whistle. We were going to be in the fun this summer, even if it made us all miserable.

My new leash on summer was off to a good start. Here’s a look at the first morning.

Household chores. Check.

A trip to the local library. Check.

A meeting with my writing group. Check.

A short hike with Anna and Cato. Hold up a sec.

I want to move quickly. Thus, I need Cato to move quickly. I have a lot of canvas to cover, after all, but Cato is having none of it. She is panting, and it is clear that my plans mean nothing to her.

We have to slow down, or she might die.

I relax my grip on her leash, and I let go of some of the things I have planned.

Anna and I talk while we let Cato catch her breath. And I use the pause to catch up to my feelings. “I’m feeling a little overwhelmed,” I say.

Anna says that she too feels overwhelmed.

I explain that my overwhelm mostly comes from wanting everyone to make the most of their summer.

She explains that her overwhelm mostly comes from me.

“Do you think you could try taking some of the pressure off of summer?” Anna asks me gently.

I think of tennis camp and Joel and how silly it all seemed, so silly you just had to laugh.

What resonates with you this summer? Are you in the fun or over it?

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. As always, links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. This week I found out that I was number 41 in Substack’s Rising and Bestseller Home and Garden Category. My first thought was that I wanted to be 42 because well, “it’s the answer to life, the universe and everything.” Regardless of those stats, I’m so glad you’re here. There is indeed tea on this spaceship, and I’d love to share it with you.

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Without further ado, today’s pocket.

Recently, I read Ellen Ecker Ogden’s post on an essential garden lesson she learned from her mom. Ellen tells a beautiful story of spending Mother’s Day with her mom in Cape Cod, caring for her mother’s garden. Ellen would tackle the weeds, but “even at age 94, Mom would start by sifting the compost…With a small shovel, she lifted the mostly decomposed food scraps and grass clippings in the wire sieve and pushed the small chunks through to make a light , airy compost.”

My thoughts while reading Ellen’s words were

1- how beautiful

2- how is it that after gardening for so many years I still suck at compost

3- maybe if I get a compost sifter, this will solve my problem

First, that meant that I had to figure out what a compost sifter was. A compost sifter, or soil sieve, if you’re a fan of alliteration, is basically what is sounds like. It’s like a spaghetti strainer for compost that separates fine material from course material. My next step once I knew what a soil sieve was, was to figure out how to make one or get one. According to Joe Gardener, I could make one easily. All I would need are 2X4s, wood screws, hardware cloth, wire cutters, a staple gun and staples. No problem, except I had none of those materials.

I have learned to take it with a grain of salt when someone says you can do something easily. I wasn’t sure this was the DIY project of my dreams, so I started looking around to see if I could purchase a compost sifter. I looked on Etsy, the place where people who actually do find it easy to make such things, sell the fruits of their labor. The compost sifters were gorgeous, but they were also pricey.

I then turned to the place I turn when things get dark, Amazon, and I found not one but three stainless steel sifters in varying sizes. I could use the sifter for my yard compost and my worm compost, and I’d have one left over to, I don’t know, wear on crazy hat day.

For $25 and a small portion of my conscience, they could be mine. I ordered them.

Then, I remembered how I thought that purchasing magazine subscriptions would encourage me to be better about sorting and opening the mail. Truly, I thought I would do the task that I despise more frequently because I would want to read the new exciting mail I would now be receiving on a regular basis. I would solve my mail problems by intentionally sending more mail to my house on purpose. A flaw proof plan if there ever was one.

You can probably tell where this story is going.

When my first New Yorker Magazine finally arrived, after I had to reorder it because the first time, I accidentally purchased a subscription to the Atlantic, which means I know receive both magazines, I was elated. I was feeling optimistic about my life choices because I read that New Yorker cover to cover, cartoons, political exposes and all. I felt so cool, so well read. And then the next one came, like six days later. And then the next one a week after that. Did you know the New Yorker was a weekly magazine? I certainly did not.

The mail piled up along with my guilt, and when the IRS wrote to tell us our electronic payment didn’t get processed and they like wanted us to do something about it, I missed that communication because it was buried underneath a half dozen New Yorkers and my beautiful aspirations of becoming someone who could manage mail.

So, I started to have second thoughts about the sifter.

It occurred to me that in order to sift compost, you need compost to sift, and my problem was that I still didn’t have that. I had a well-intentioned pile of yard waste, eggshells and kitchen scraps. There was no money or thing that I could throw at this pile that would transform it, just time, attention and a shifting of ingredients. Just as the mail is a mix of junk to things you really need to attend to, a staggeringly high ratio I find unfair, compost is a mix of green to brown. The green consists of food scraps, mostly fruit and veggies, which we have in plenty. The brown is dry leaves and paper, which we also have loads of, but to work, both of those things really need to be shredded. Further, the ration of brown to green should be 3 to 1. For years, I think I was working with the wrong ratio. Compost also needs to be wet, which might not be a problem for most, but our summers can get pretty dry, so making sure the pile gets watered is important. Finally, compost needs to be turned, according to my research, only one or two times a month. That’s not so bad.

Truth be told, I am paying slightly more attention to my compost pile this year, just a tad more attention than I’m paying to my mail pile, and it’s already responding.

This week, I will shred some leaves to add into the bin, and then I’ll give it a good tumble.

I can’t wait to use the compost I create it because as Ellen says, “Gardening is all about compost, and making it yourself is the best way to absorb all the benefits of this life-giving force. Buying compost in bags is like fast food and cheating a bit. You don’t really know where it is coming from or what it is made of, yet you put your trust that it is a good thing. Mom knew better and taught me that making compost is feeding not just the garden, but our connection to the garden. It is a part of us that naturally returns to the soil.”

When I do get some compost, though, I won’t be sifting it, because in a rare moment of self-awareness, I cancelled my order for a soil sieve. It’s not for me, at least not right now. I don’t need one more thing coming for me in the mail.

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This week in the garden.

The peonies started blooming this week, though it looks like I’ll have to wait another year for the yellow peony that I planted in Cato’s honor to bloom. The oriental and California poppies are also in full swing. My garden looks like a sea of orange because I let the California poppies do their thing. I think it adds a charming, whimsical look to the garden which I love. I think next year, though, I might try planting a few different kinds of poppies and seeing if I can cultivate a few more colors. Red would be nice.

I started off the week with some manic garden energy. Everything shoots up in May, including the weeds. There’s a difference between cultivating a wild garden and letting your garden run wild. I had an extreme urge to tidy the garden this week, which I did. I pulled weeds, supported my blackberry trellis, and put in some small stakes to support the raspberries. I also scattered some wildflower seeds in the area where I am trying to create a natural fence line. They have already started sprouting.

My rain barrel ran out of water this week, so I was really happy when we got rain on Wednesday, and it filled up again. I’m using the water for my hanging baskets, planters and the few places in the garden where the drip doesn’t quite reach.

One of my goals this year was to harvest more, and I’m happy to report I’m keeping up with that goal. This week I harvested rhubarb and made three jars of jam, two of which I’ll pop in the freezer. I can’t fit canning into my life right now, so this method works for me. I also made a rhubarb crumble, which is one of Seabass’ favorites.

It’s funny, I was reading a gardening book the other day that says that rhubarb can be fertilized, but mine is mammoth, and I’ve never had to fertilize it. I’m so grateful for the goodness it provides.

I also harvested broccoli rabe from the garden this week, which Dan cooked up over spaghetti. It was divine. This is the earliest I’ve ever been able to harvest broccoli rabe, and it is the result of the direct seeding I did early in the Spring. I will definitely continue this practice next year.

All of these things remind me that sometimes the best lessons are the ones we learn from our past selves, so I’m so glad to be keeping track of things here for you and for me.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. Do you have your own soil sieve story, or a magazine subscription problem of your own? What’s growing in your garden? What recipes from the garden are your favorites?

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Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. Links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. This week’s audio contains a version of the post that underwent less editing, so it might be a little clunkier, but it does have the sound of a fountain in the background.

I was featured in Spark this week in Elizabeth Marro’s amazing series The Right Book at the Right Time. You should definitely check me out as well as Elizabeth’s Substack which is one of my favorites. Happy Mother’s Day to my mom and all the amazing women out there who make the world better by being in it. Without further ado today’s pocket.

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It all started with a goose, a white goose with large yellow feet sporting a blue bonnet, in a shop window. I loved her from the start, but I figured our acquaintance would be fleeting. A few days later, though, I found myself at the same shop window searching for my friend. To my dismay, she was gone.

I walked in the shop to inquire. “Do you know what happened to the goose?” I asked the clerk, a slight tinge of panic in my voice. She looked at me a little sideways and then pointed to the back of the store. “Thank you,” I said relief ringing in my voice. I walked quickly to the part of the store she was pointing to. Hallelujah, my goose was still there. A white goose with yellow webbed feet in a blue bonnet on a soft red sweater. I knew we were destined to do great things together.

The sweater was short sleeved with sweetheart sleeves, a button-down sweater one might describe as impractical because who really needs a short-sleeved sweater, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and this heart wanted a goose sweater with sweetheart sleeves. There was only one sweater left in my size, and by that, I mean, there was one sweater left that might fit, there being no guarantees when it comes to women’s fashion. Shopping for clothes is not for the meek. As I prayed for mercy from the fashion gods, I noticed there were a few larger sweaters on the rack, the same style and color. Those sweaters, though, were bereft of geese. Imagine a person sees the same exact sweater, same color, same soft material, same sweetheart sleeves, but one sweater has a goose, and one does not. Now imagine this person choosing the sweater without the goose. Can you imagine it? I can’t because it’s preposterous. No one would do something so insane.

In the store window, the goose sweater was paired with a pair of white pants, so I inquired about those too. It turned out they were cargo pants, something I’ve never owned. I grabbed a pair, threw them over my arm and took everything to the dressing room. where I experienced one of those rare Cinderella moments where everything fits perfectly and you know your life will never be the same. At check out, the clerk said that if I purchased one more thing, everything would be cheaper because they were running a sale. My teenager told me this was probably a scam because it made no logical sense, but I ran around searching for something that cost less than twenty bucks and landed on a bright yellow shirt. The shirt was a perfect addition to the fit because I can wear it underneath the goose sweater and not worry about whether the buttons are slightly popping open.

I love the pants almost as much as the goose. They have ties at the bottom, that make them balloon out and make it, so they never touch the ground. When I wear them, I feel like I’m floating. They’re white, and I’m wary of white clothing, being a person who does things, but they have so many different patterns and textures that a small stain could potentially go unnoticed.

Still, I’m trying to be careful with them. A few weeks ago, when I was in Bellingham with my daughter Anna, we did yoga by the ocean. I wore my new fit because like I said, we were destined to do great things together. I had to modify a few poses because I didn’t want my knees to touch the ground. This made everything significantly harder but saved me from grass stains. I would not let harm come to my goose ensemble.

It’s been a long time since I loved a piece of clothing like this. Anna embroiders her clothes. She makes things she absolutely loves. She will buy things and then DIY them, so they suit her more perfectly. I’ve learned a lot from watching her do this, not about sewing but about loving the things you surround yourself with.

In the Netflix series Maid, which is based off the book by Stephanie Land, there is a powerful scene where Alex, a domestic abuse survivor, played by Margaret Qualley, is staying at a shelter and they encourage her to go shopping at their store. Instead of giving her hand me downs, they give her a basket and tell her to walk around the store and choose what she wants. At first, she is overwhelmed by this freedom, but then she leans into it, choosing beautiful things for herself and her child, restoring a little bit of what has been taken from her.

I take the power to choose what I wear for granted. My goose has got me thinking, though about how perhaps I shouldn’t waste my time on anything that doesn’t bring me as much joy, as she does. This applies to my closet, but it also applies to a lot of other things.

Recently, I wrote something that I loved as much as the little goose on my sweater. It suited me and made me happy. I’m not taking this writing into the world yet. I want to keep playing with it and see what it becomes. But just as my new sweater has me thinking about the rest of my closet and what I might be ready to let go of, the piece that I wrote and loved has me wondering if I should do the same thing with my memoir, sift through it and let some things go, pare it down so in the end I’m only left with what I absolutely love.

I don’t know yet what this means or where it will lead, but I’m not worried because I’ve got the perfect fit for the journey.

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I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What piece of clothing do you absolutely love? What is bringing you joy right now? What’s growing in your garden? Speaking of gardens, read on if you want to learn what’s going on in mine. If that’s not your cup of tea, just skip it, but please scroll to the end and click that heart. It helps people find my work.

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This Week in the Garden

It’s been a busy week in the garden. I set up our drip irrigation system this week. A few years ago, I installed a drip system. It was a steep learning curve for me, and it took about a week and many trips to the hardware store to figure it out. It was well worth it. Now, it only takes about an hour to set up the system for the season. Since setting up the drip, we have saved a ton on water. It is encouraged that you check your drip periodically so as not to waste water. Since we have a puppy, who likes to jump around in my garden beds, I’m trying to check it more frequently. Checking it simply means running it for a few minutes at a time when I can see what’s happening. If water is not gushing out somewhere it shouldn’t be, and all the plants are getting wet, we’re good. If not, I walk around until I identify the problem.

I also set up my garden fountains this week. I have two solar fountains in my garden, and this season I’m adding a third. I was happy to see that last year’s fountains survived storage and were up and running in no time. I am so pleased with these solar fountains. The sound is so pleasant. They add a lot of charm to the garden, and the birds love them. Just yesterday, I watched a robin having an afternoon bath. Kam also loves to drink all the water from the fountains. I like to keep my fountains shallow to avoid mosquitoes but with Kam’s antics, keeping them full of water is a challenge.

It’s Mother’s Day weekend, which to a Spokane gardener means it is safe to put non-frost hardy plants into the ground. For the past week, I’ve been slowly hardening off my seedlings, carrying them outside during the day and inside at night. This weekend, I will plant them, which I am super excited about.

In May, everything seems to take off in the garden, including the things you don’t want to take off. In the past, I haven’t been so great about weeding, but I’m trying to be better about it this year, recognizing that the weeds prevent my crops from getting what they need. I also find weeding really relaxing. I try to make sure to weed my beds at the time of day when they are in the shade.

I also have two small patches of grass, one in the front yard and one in the backyard, that we don’t use fertilizer on, which means they are covered with dandelions and other things. I live in the city so cultivating a wild garden feels subversive in the very best of ways. Still, at some point, the dandelions annoy the shit out of me. I love letting parts of my garden run wild with long grasses, but I don’t really want a bunch of dandelions in my sitting area distracting from the garden’s beauty. I tried doing no mow May one year, but it drove me nuts. Also, I have lots of areas of my garden that provide nourishment to the bees early in the season. I leave the dandelions when they are yellow, but when they turn white, I bring out our battery-operated lawn mower. I managed to get this done this week, for the second time this season, and this little tidying of the main sitting area of our garden has brought me peace. I also brought out my battery-operated edger, which last year I didn’t bother with. I was amazed at how well it worked and how clean it made everything look. In some of the spaces that were covered with dandelions and weeds, I plan to sow local wildflower seeds and see what happens.

Speaking of seeds, my outdoor seedlings are doing great. Some are further along than others, like the mustard greens and broccoli rabe. Some things just grow fast, but everything I planted outdoors, save the chives, seems to be chirping along nicely. I don’t know what’s up with the chives.

My indoor seeds are another story. Nothing looks great. Instead, they run the gamut from looking decent to just plain sad. I’ve had to start over several times for reasons I won’t mention again, and so some things are just getting started. We will see how it all turns out. Seeing the drastic difference between what I planted outside and what I planted inside not to mention how much more work it is to start the seeds inside has got me thinking. Next year, I might limit even more what I do inside. I might also consider trying winter sowing again for some things. You really have to find what works best for you. We don’t get at ton of Southern light exposure in our house, one of the things that keeps it nice and cool, but it’s not ideal for the seedlings, so in my case, it’s worth exploring other alternatives.

I’m also worried about my dahlia tubers. Last year I didn’t have a lot of luck with my dahlias, and I was hoping this year would be different. They are taking a very long time to get going, and I’m already worried that I may have screwed it up. We shall see.

My dogwood tree is in full bloom this week, and I’m so happy I chose just the right tree for the right spot. The rhubarbs are mammoth and have been ready to harvest for a few weeks now. I hope to do this soon. Rhubarb jam is one of my favorite things. White flowers are showing up on the strawberry plants, and I’m hoping for perhaps more than a handful of strawberries this year, which is exciting.

Because it looks like our last frost is behind us, I put a lot of other seeds in the ground this week, zinnias, cosmos, scarlet runner beans, nasturtium, French marigolds etc... This makes my daily noticing walks even more important as I want to make sure all of these areas are getting water.

I was sick this past week because my 6^th graders broke my immune system, and my garden was a haven for me. I loved just sitting and looking at everything that was blooming or about to bloom and letting the sun rest upon my shoulders.

I love being in my garden so much, probably more so than anyone else in my house, well almost anyone.

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. Links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. At the end of this pocket, you will find a “this week in the garden” section. If it’s not your cup of tea, skip to the end. Please do click the heart at the bottom though, join us in the comments or restack this pocket if it makes you laugh. I sure do hope it makes you laugh.

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Without further ado, today’s pocket.

I think I pissed off some low-level gods. I’m not talking hell, fire and brimstone gods. Not Zeus or Poseidon or anyone keeping a seat warm on Mt. Olympus. The gods I’m talking about are not the “I’ll ravage your whole village” kind of gods, they’re more like the gods that sort the mail for those dudes.

The reason I think I pissed off the gods of petty things is that a few weeks ago, I learned that my favorite spa was closing forever, and on that very same day, I discovered, in a disheartening drive by, that my favorite nursery closed at the end of last season without so much as a goodbye note.

Where do you go when the places you go to stay sane no longer exist?

Yes, in the grand scheme of things, these are small potatoes, first world problems for sure, but still… Imagine cleaning the house, weeding the front yard, and making space in the garden for a few ranunculus. Imagine picturing them in your mind, thinking about which colors you might pick out this year and then driving over to your favorite nursery joyfully anticipating the conversation you will get to have with Melissa, who in your mind, for all sense and purposes still works there. See yourself quickly throwing on a pair of presentable pants and driving down the road, thinking, “I’m so lucky to have a nursery so close to home,” only to realize that you don’t. You stop the car confused, pulling over first to avoid traffic. You sit and stare at the vacant lot with a pad locked gate (almost as if they knew you wouldn’t take this one sitting down) and turn to the one you always turn to in situations like this, google. Sure enough, Blue Moon lost their lease, and they shut down at the end of fall.

I can picture him so clearly, Derek, in lower management, smirking at my dismay. “Ha, you thought you could have a nice thing.”

Have you seen those shirts people buy their toddlers that say, “I am my why we can’t have nice things”? I imagine Derek in a dumb shirt like that, pleased as punch, with himself.

It’s not just the nursery and the salon, though really, that was a lot. There’s something else that I was hoping for, something I was really excited about, that looks like it’s not going to work out. I’m not going to go into all the details. Let’s just say this thing I was hoping for would have allowed me to spend more time on my writing, which delighted me. Just think how much funnier this pocket could be if I had a little more time to spin it. I bet I’d have come up with a much doochier name than Derek. It’s hard when we realize we really want something, and we make space for it to happen, and then we learn that it’s not going to happen.

On Sunday morning, the same weekend I was processing these losses, I met my friend, Jamie, for a walk along the river. When I arrived, there were a lot of cars in the parking lot, and I figured it was just because of the nice weather. It turned out the parking lot was packed because there was a race, a race along the river, on the exact trail Jamie and I walk every Sunday, lucky us. The trail is narrow and rocky, and we witnessed more than one runner almost twist an ankle. We passed so many runners, each one expecting us to stop and wait for them to go by. This was extra challenging because my pup Kam was with us. Kam wanted to race after every runner we passed. Every time someone went by, my arm felt like it was being pulled out of its socket. Later, I noticed marks on my palm, similar to rug burn, made by Kam’s leash. The runners, unlike Kam, didn’t seem to be in a rush. They were stopping to take selfies and catch their breath, on a trail that is super rocky and narrow, so in reality they weren’t going much faster than us but because there was an organized mob of them, they got the right of way. They smiled and said thank you as they passed, and I passive aggressively responded their greetings. One guy, probably named Derek, smiled and said, “only 900 more,” and I briefly considered pushing him in the river, but decided that if I did that, I might piss off some higher-ranking gods, and so I refrained.

In the spring sun, the Spokane river is spectacular, but the best part about the walk is shooting the shit with Jamie and dishing on our lives. This week we were talking about gratitude, and how it sometimes felt slippery, like you know you have so much to be grateful for, and still, you want to pull your hair out sometimes. It felt like a not-so-subtle irony that our conversation about this kept getting interrupted by mobs of bib wearing, water bottle carrying, photo stick sporting runners.

Jamie because she’s sane suggested that we take the path by the road, but I didn’t feel like we should have to give up the river. Why didn’t these 900 runners run along the road? Seriously, run along. That seemed like a good place to have a race. Plus, I insanely optimistically figured the situation would improve. It didn’t. Derek must have had the whole mail team working on this one.

Finally, after realizing we had made a terrible choice by choosing to go outside, we chose a different path, careful to make sure there were no other people on it, at least no other people joyfully running. We came across a few non-runners, and our eyes met, and we had a deep understanding that someone else knew our pain.

In the quiet path between the trees, far from the river and the runners, Jamie and I were able to walk side by side, and I told her my theory about pissing off the low-level gods.

I told her about George, a man in my adult creative writing class, and how he always brings me books, so many books that I gave him my address, so that he could drop the books off on my front porch. So many books that I started placing them in our Little Free Library for others to enjoy. Last week, George wrote to me and asked me if I received the payment he left for the class I teach. He said he put a hundred dollars in V.S Pritchett’s largest collection meaning that he had left me a hundred dollars in a book in a grocery bag on my front porch and now, a few weeks later was wondering if I received it. I went out to the Little Free Library after reading George’s email, where I did indeed find a very large collection of stories by V.S. Pritchett, but I did not find a hundred dollars. I relayed the story to Dan who said our library might become very popular, or someone might call the police on us. As dreamy as the idea of finding money in a book is, I told George next time he might want to just go through the city for payment.

As I told my story, Jamie laughed so hard, tears formed in her eyes, and I realized how very funny it all was and also how much I loved the sound of Jamie’s laugh.

We passed two young girls, sisters, on our walk back. The littlest sister stumbled. Did I mention that it is a seriously rocky place, and anyone trying to have a race probably has a lot of optimism and good insurance. The older sister helped her sister up and then used both of her hands to quickly dust off the younger sister’s pink overalls. It wasn’t until their mother caught up to them that the little one started crying. Often, in response to situations like these, we say, she was okay until her mom came along, but maybe that’s not quite right. Maybe she wasn’t okay, and when her mom came along, she didn’t have to pretend like she was. She could let go.

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Jamie and I are both moms, and people let go a lot around us. With each other, we get to let go. We help each other up and dust each other off, and together we find the courage to keep moving.

When we walked past the little sister, I told her how lucky she was to have a big sister who helped her. As I was talking to her, she fell again. This time the older sister yelled at her to stop falling.

When we got back to our cars, Jamie said she was going to check out her favorite nursery, and I couldn’t think of a thing in the world I’d rather do.

When we arrived, they were having a sale on ranunculus.

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This Week in the Garden

I am sad to see April go. I wish the time when it was comfortable to go outside before it gets really warm was a little longer. I think sometimes I’d do well on a Scottish seaside. Following April on her way out are the cherry blossoms and most of the tulips, though a few late bloomers are still hanging around. I’ve been harvesting a lot of my tulips this year and sharing them with friends and colleagues and that has brought me joy. We made a bouquet for someone at work, and I asked my 6th graders who wanted to help me arrange the flowers, and just about every hand shot up, which made me think, we might need more, touching the earth, in school.

This week, the dogwood is blooming as are the lilacs. I upgraded my indoor tomato seedlings to new pots and am about to do the same with some of the parsley. With May comes warmer weather, so I’ve started carrying them outside during the day and bringing them in at night. So far, my direct seeding of seeds into the garden is going great. I’m definitely noticing that my indoor seeds require a lot more attention and care. I took two trips in April, one just for a few days, and left them in the care of someone else, and even in that short span of time, a few of the seedlings died.

I am currently watering my outdoor seedlings every other day with a hose and a sprayer. Watering with a can is a bit tedious but I love hand watering with the sprayer, it’s been a great way to notice what is going on in my garden as well. Soon, though, I will switch to setting up our drip irrigation system which will run on a timer and make sure things get watered consistently early in the morning and when the temps start to rise. I will still have to hand water a few things, but it will be more manageable. My main goal is to continue to take daily noticing walks so no water is being wasted and the things that are thirsty are getting what they need.

I love visiting plant sales and nurseries at this time of year. Last weekend, I visited Anna and I found a little nursery near the University. I picked up some geraniums even though it’s a little early for geraniums in Spokane. If we get a frost, they might get damaged, but I’m going to take my chances and keep my eye on the temps. If a frost is coming, I’ll throw a box or a blanket over them for the night.

I also picked up a hanging basket, a large fuchsia, which took up the whole trunk of my car as I drove home. I debated the fuchsia on Friday and decided against it, it being totally impractical and all, but then I changed my mind because I mean, well, look at her.

Sometimes when you want something bad enough, you just have to make space for it, so I did, and I have no regrets.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What’s blooming in your garden? What book is at your bedside? Have you pissed off Derek in lower management lately?

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Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. As always, links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Thanks so much for being here. If you want to support my work, you can do so by clicking the heart at the bottom, sharing with friends or becoming a paid subscriber.

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Without further ado, today’s pocket.

Dear Reader,

I must make a confession. The morning, when last week’s post came out on seeing things fresh and falling in love with your life, was a rough one. I had an argument with a loved one and acted childishly, and the fight escalated in a way that fights sometimes do, leaving me confused and turned around, wondering how I got there, when it was so far from where I wanted to be. The contrast between what I wrote the week before and how I felt that morning was vast. I felt like a hypocrite, so I sought refuge in my sacred place…my garden.

“I botched it,” I whispered to the tulips, starkly bright in spite of my despair. How do you write about rising above when you feel so low?

“I am not good,” I told the lilac, and then Mary Oliver’s words reminded me, “You do not have to be good.” Tiny purple flowers still bloom, and the robin still visits on mornings when I say unkind things and think unkinder thoughts, when I get mad at the dog for being a dog or at the child for being a child.

Maybe it’s enough, these days, to sit in the garden and let her love you.

What else are you cultivating for, if not for this?

All the while, the puppy runs to the woodpile and grabs one stick at a time and carries them into the sun. Finally, he manages a log. None of this is good for him, but maybe sometimes what is good for us is relative, because no dog ever looked happier.

How do you write about rising above when you feel so low?

Maybe, you don’t, maybe you watch the dog, accumulating a large pile of sticks, and you listen to the lilacs, and then you go inside and organize a closet or sort the mail, making sense, for a moment, of something other than your life.

On the last Sunday in April, I’d like to share one of my favorite poems in the world on belonging and grace. I hope both of those things waft in the wind from my garden to yours.

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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This Week in the Garden

I’m continuing to enjoy harvesting things. This week, I harvested cilantro, which popped up unexpectedly. I don’t remember planting it. I used it to season salsa and fajitas for the boys, and they loved it.

The lilacs have started blooming. One of my lilac trees is thriving. Many years ago, it was growing sideways, and Anna and I had to do some major surgery on it, but since then it has thrived. On the other hand, our other lilac tree, which is next to the trampoline, and gets a lot less water, is looking pretty rough. One of my goals, this season, is to cut it back a lot, mostly getting rid of all the dead branches, and to make sure it gets more water, so hopefully it can have a similar revival.

My tulips are going full throttle. I love watching how they pop open in the sun and then close back up again. This year, I planted some funky tulips, striped ones, ones that look like torn cloth, a few that have more petals than normal tulips. I love all these varieties, and have decided that next year, I want to plant more funky tulips.

I love spending time outside on my garden bench, and I also love prepping dinner outside on the potting bench that I also use as a prep table. This week, there was one day where Mateo was jumping on the trampoline, shouting to the neighbor kids who were on their trampoline on the other side of fence, and Seabass was playing basketball on the hoop we helped him set up late last summer, all while I harvested cilantro and prepped dinner in the setting sun. It made my heart so full. Home!

As always, I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What poem is written on your heart? What’s growing outside your door? Where are you finding unexpected grace?

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Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. As always, links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Thanks so much for being here. A shout out to Laura Foley for kindly letting me share her beautiful poem, “To See It” in this pocket. If you want to support my work, you can do so by clicking the heart at the bottom, sharing with friends or becoming a paid subscriber. If you like this post on stepping away from home and then returning with new eyes, you might also like this by Hermione Blackshaw. Hermione writes from her cottage in the Scottish Highlands, where my grandmother’s family hailed from and some still reside, so the scenery and recipes she shares have a special place in my heart.

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

Do you remember that scene in It’s a Wonderful Life when George Bailey runs home after he realizes that wishing his life away was a huge mistake? He darts through the snowy streets shouting, “Hello Bedford Falls…Merry Christmas movie house, Merry Christmas emporium, Merry Christmas you old Building and Loan.” It’s as if he’s seeing everything in his neighborhood for the first time, and in a way he is. When he arrives home, he kisses the knob on the railing that’s forever popping off and then runs to find his children and wife who he kisses again and again and again. “Are you real?” he asks his wife.

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Coming home, after being away on vacation in Maui for ten days, I feel a little like George Bailey. It’s as if I’m seeing everything in my garden and my neighborhood for the first time, and in a way, I am. While we were gone, the trees started greening, the cherry blossoms started blossoming, and the tulips started tuliping. I was worried I had missed the blooming of my favorite blossoming tree, a hybrid cherry that graces my neighbor’s yard, but I’m happy to report that it hasn’t even gotten started yet. Every day I get to watch its progress.

George is so happy to come home, he doesn’t mind that he’s about to be arrested. That’s next level gratitude that I haven’t reached yet. I still find little things irritating, like when one of my sixth graders eats a twinkie and then wears a mustache on her face for the duration of book club even though the topics we are discussing are dark and somber. Still, I notice I’m seeing more things through rose tinted glass since returning home.

I’m grateful to have our dog Kam to walk and less worried about how long it takes to put on his leash. (He seems to think he’s doing me a favor by jumping on me when it is time to go out. He then tries to be helpful by putting the leash in his mouth.) I’m grateful to show up to a classroom of children and teenagers who are excited to learn and happy to see me even if they have twinkie cream on their face, and less worried about whether I’ve managed to teach them every standard. I am eager to put my hands in the dirt and harvest and grow things and less worried about the mistakes that will occur along the way.

I’ve had vacations before where I wasn’t ready to return home, when I didn’t want to leave, but this was not one of those. I had a great time in Maui, but I was also really happy to come home. I think part of this was the unique challenge posed by traveling with a 10-year-old who really relies on a consistent routine to reduce anxiety. Mateo was stepping way outside his norm for a week and relying on me to prop him up through that change. So much new learning was happening, and he needed us to walk beside him in that learning. Sometimes this was exciting and joyful like when he jumped off a snorkel boat, walked on a volcano and discovered a sea turtle in the ocean, but other times it was straight up exhausting. Unlike Kam, who is so excited to get out the door every day, he barely has time for a leash, Mateo was less enthused about what lay beyond our cozy, Maui front door. He would often tell me he didn’t want to do what we had planned, even though he had no idea what it was. It wasn’t about our plans; it was about the uncertainty but helping him cross the threshold every day was tiring.

This is all to say that I’m glad to be home.

At the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, George is saved by his neighbors who show up for him and chip in the money he needs to pay the bank. Similarly, after stepping away, I recognize more fully all the people who make caring for Mateo manageable… his teacher, the teachers who run his after-school clubs, the community who invested in the funds to pay for those after school-clubs, the kind folks who welcome him at after-care, so that he doesn’t hate it, which makes it easy to use if we have to work late or we just need a minute to sit and breathe or read a book. I’m grateful for my teenage son who is taking on more and more responsibility, and while I gripe about how he sometimes drops the ball when it comes to his responsibilities like every other teenager I know, I am awed by his kindness, wisdom and patience when it comes to Mateo. He was able to fill some hard spaces while we were away from home and also find so much joy. He will make a great father should he choose that path.

I’m so glad for the time away with my family and for the memories we made. Mostly, though, I’m grateful for the perspective gained by leaving our lives for a minute. Sometimes, you have to leave to find your way back.

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April is National Poetry month, and my friend James Crews is celebrating the five-year anniversary of his book How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. One of the poems in the book, “To See It,” by Laura Foley sums up how I feel about returning home.

To See It

by Laura Foley (shared with Laura’s permission)

We need to separate
to see the life we’ve made,
to leave our house
where someone waits, patiently,
warm beneath the sheets;
to don layers of armor,
sweater, coat, mittens, scarf,
to stride down the frozen road,
putting distance between us,
this cold winter morning,
to look back and see,
on the hilltop, our life,
lit from inside.

This Week in the Garden

After a week away, I feel like I am looking at a new landscape. So much is blooming… tulips, forsythia, my weeping cherry tree…I planted this tree, several years ago, maybe more, before I started keeping track. I think it was during Covid because I’m pretty sure I was on a zoom when I was doing the planting. Anyway, it’s really coming into its own this year, and it’s a lovely sight through our front window.

Another thing that is taking off this year is my Oregon Grape. I bought three of these native plants several years ago to create a natural fence line and offer some privacy. I chose the Oregon Grape for their hardiness. We have a shared driveway and two teenage drivers in our house, so it’s not impossible to think these plants might sometimes get bumped by a rear bumper. This is the first year that the clusters of yellow flowers are bright and vibrant. They add joy to the whole backyard.

One of my goals this year is to harvest more, and I’m happy to share I’ve gotten an early start on this. This past week, I harvested mint for my omelet and chives for my pesto. In the coming weeks, I hope to harvest rhubarb and make some jam.

Two years ago, I planted bulbs around my Little Free Library, and they really didn’t take off, but after reading someone who said it took them a few years to transform a patch of lawn, I gave it another go, and I’m so glad it did. My bulbs are brightening up the hood.

I did a fair amount of weeding this week. I’m seeing the benefits already of early weeding and mulching. I’m also reflecting on how there will always be more weeds than plants, and yet all I can do is tackle them one at a time.

My indoor seeds sadly took a beating while I was gone. I left them in the hands of a capable teenager, but seeds are hard, and if they don’t get enough water, they will die overnight, and then, they are dead, dead. Needless to say, I was pretty bummed to return home and find most of my seedlings in a postmortem state. On the bright side, my outdoor seedlings are doing great. I started some new seeds the day we got back, and some of them are already starting to say hello.

Five of my six indoor dahlias are starting to emerge, which is very exciting. It is super slow growth, but I’m hoping it’s enough to have dahlias blooming all summer long.

It rained a few days this week which was good because the seeds and the rain barrel needed it, and I got some inside chores done.

Mateo seems to really enjoy accompanying me in the garden. He will often jump on the trampoline or swing in the hammock while I tend to the plants. This past week, he helped me plant some new raspberry starts because while I already have some raspberries and was hoping they would spread to the rest of the bed, they are stubborn and only seem to show up along my garden paths. Mateo loved digging in the dirt, and then he took my shovel around the garden asking if he could dig up things. I finally pointed him towards a pesky batch of crabgrass that was crowding out some perennials with strict instructions not to stab my drip lines or kill any plants. He sort of listened.

I’m back to writing and eating and reading and playing outside every second I can steal, so in that sense, it is the most wonderful life.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What is a poem that helped you see things in a new way? What’s growing in your garden? What book is at your bedside?

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