Sprouts

I have spent so much time growing people.

We had a Chewbacca Chia Pet sitting in a reusable bag that we haven’t opened since Christmas, the kind of bag I always forget to bring when I go to the store. For some reason, Day 1 of "social distancing," I took him out and decided that it would be a good activity for us, something to pass that one passing moment. The kids were excited but quickly lost interest. I became personally obsessed with laying out the seeds as they slipped down the sides, retreating to Chewbacca like some mass produced zen garden.

This morning, while getting breakfast together, moving slowly, feeling as though maybe I am walking under water, I hear Clementine, my 6-year-old, screaming from the other room.

"Chewbacca! CHEWBACCA! CHEWBACCCAAAAA MOMMY!"

And I run out to see that he had sprouted exponentially overnight. She was shaking with the joy of it.

She was shaking with the joy of it.

I have spent so much time growing people. So much time cultivating myself, trying to push the hearty weeds of who I am through the thick, hardened soil of motherhood, trying to fill their developing brains with "nature" so that I could share that I had done so on screens with people who are, ultimately, strangers, mostly. So much time growing anxieties about who I should be and how I should parent ...that I haven't grown anything green in years.

And I remembered the time, on Day 3 of “social distancing” where I got body aches and a fever and fretted while friends told me to slam Vitamin C like it’s going out of style and how I desperately texted my mother-in-law to see if she had already eaten the tangerines we flippantly gave her and how bare the fridge looked, how sad the packaged cucumber was, wrapped in plastic wrap, how silly the closet we have full of costumes feels, how ridiculous the collection of toy rats is, the ones we bought and collected for his first birthday that are now scattered all over the living room…

....and how helpless I feel as though every counter-top is attacking us. And how much my heart was cleansed by these little chia sprouts sticking on to this terra cotta Chewbacca.

And I went online and bought an orange tree.

21 MARCH 2020

day 9

APRIL WISH

day 3

day 5

day 9