My Meadow is Real
Spring, Summer, Fall,. Winter...and Spring
It has been a year. I come out of literal hibernation to step lightly over to my wreckage of a meadow. It is maybe the day after my 40 days, a self-imposed period of staying warm and protected inside after giving birth to a child. I have my little boy, about six weeks old, strapped to me. Last spring when I began this ‘Meadow Project,’ I also conceived a child. 2024, the year I dreamed of much to be born—not only the meadow and my child, but Imum Press. And now it is 2025, the year of the results of it. I had my child alone with only my partner late at night in wintertime. I birthed in darkness, a fire burning in the wood stove, and the moon tipping faintly through the skylight of the yurt, to which I gazed and cried and prayed; a painful birth—one which wrenched so much deep detritus out of me and left me emptied, hardly remembering there would be another spring, but much less tightly wound, all my seedcases cracked open. And then spring did come. And there amidst the rain-soaked, black stalks of last year’s goldenrod—which I did not plant—and whose presence made me doubt entirely my ability to consciously create—are my lupines.
They are established now. It was that plant more than any other that I wanted to see here. How beautiful that drops of rain sit between their flower-like leaves like buds in themselves. But soon they really will bud, and their early flowering stalks will sear up through grey mists in violet robes. The goldenrod, to tower many feet above them, cannot get at them because they are like night and day which can never truly meet; the lupine belongs to early spring and the goldenrod to late summer—they are opposites. Like deft swords to shear away all else around it, the goldenrod, extremely deep-rooted, has shoved aside so much of my careful planning, but the lupine will be retreated safe into the soil by the time of its inevitable reign. In nature and in life there is such heavy presence of the already established, such a multitude of fiending other voices, it seems the gravest naïveté to even attempt to get a word in, for me to intentionally plant what I wanted over a ground that once teemed with mugwort (and still does here and there) hard by a meadow of goldenrod fifty feet away. But, my dearest heart’s wish was to bring the coastline of Maine, the hardy flower of seacliffs, when I do not yet have a hope of moving where I long to be—the oceanside—here, where I am.
I managed to bring the lupines to myself. And it may be that this meadow reflects my secret wishes just for a breath of days, early in spring, before being overwhelmed by a locale that is so much more deep-rooted than I will ever be, that will soon enough cover up my very existence with heaps of earth, and it be hard to discern that I ever was, but I have made my peace with that. I don’t need to be remembered to have lived.
I am making peace with the idea of invisible impact, and potentially being forgotten. Once you die, it is neither here nor there whether you are remembered, is it not? The soul after death seeps into forgetting. Bliss it must be after a conscious life to release all memory. It is funny how this used to terrify me and now it does not. But I have lived long enough to have established my impact, invisibly perhaps, but which to me lay beneath the mystery of my desiring of the thing. Between the covers of the hard-back books I have bound, about a hundred last year alone, are my toiled over, my triumphant stories—triumphant because they are, in prose, what came of my heart coming to my mouth. Yes, between two covers, down in permanent ink, down on paper, exist already the novels I wanted to write. I am much calmer of a person now than I was before they were written. And though there may only be a few copies in existence rather than thousands, they do exist, and the impact beyond my own self, as dangerously mysterious as invisible things are, remains to be seen. Then there are my children, whose lives will roll beyond mine to places, down tracts, I can never see, they will take with them the remembrance of how I gazed on them adoring, from this third little baby, to my middle child, all the way back to my nearly grown son who is fourteen, hardy and thin as a bayside reed, with a shock of black hair, and a penchant for arguing. I don’t know where he will go, but with him in some way I go, like immune-bodies, my love for him, penetrated deep into his skin. Just this morning I dreamed of my mother, who is ashes to this earth, standing at my kitchen sink, with a little frown on her face. And I clutched her hands and said, but I thought you died! How are you here?
The purple of the lupines, like a trick of the light, or impermeable distance when mountains far away condense into such a color, is not a color or a plant evident everywhere, like the green of the trees which impresses so deeply upon my eyes, or the yellow-white shock of the sun. But I will see it soon singularly peeking up above the dark wreckage of the goldenrod stalks I did not plant, having survived an entire year of every seed blowing by and trying to root. I hope they will remain here, bringing joy to whomever will live in this yurt after I pack my family up and leave, which we all hope will be soon. But not before I bring my little baby over to the gently arrayed purple and white and violet stalks and sit him on my lap. First, a wave of lupines, that will be the first layer, and then? What shall crowd in this meadow after them?
