Something to Lighten the Load
Well, itâs spring break, and none too soonâbecause friends, I am exhausted. Attempting to keep afloat in an increasingly difficult class filled with boisterous youth, finishing a first manuscript draft and submission paperwork and getting it in to a publisher, watching every penny I spend in a progressively uncertain environment, dealing with the surprising new curveballs thrown by Aging: by the time Thursday evening rolled around, I could barely see straight; I couldnât even settle in for my normal round of come-down and relaxation: reading. My eyes just wouldnât function, and the words I could see might as well have been blank walls. The past two days have consisted of more napping than Iâve done in at least a decade, but I think Iâm starting to feel human again.
That renewal is due in no small part to clearing out the garden in preparation for springâs eventual appearance. Gathering up the moldering leaves Iâd left around the plants, I pretty much shrieked with delight when I found green shoots of chives and strawberry, yarrow and lovage and lambs ears and lilies peeking up from good, moist ground. The rest of their plant comrades are lagging, and I donât expect Carl, my fig tree, to do anything for maybe another couple of monthsâ1 but the mood boost on seeing those shoots was more intense than Iâd expected. At best, after all, Iâm a lazy gardener who could do better with the weeding and proper spacing and attention to soil quality and whatnot. But that surge of delight also makes a good bit of sense in the particular time and place in which Iâve been fated to dwell.
It doesnât even need saying that for so many parts of the world, the political situation is a terrifying, deadly disaster; and that the ecological circumstances of the entire planet are pretty much the same, even if the outcomes might not be as visible to some. I get down about it all, often tremendously so; that low has a great deal to do with the fact that I feel both pained at humanityâs tendency to destroy everything it encounters, including itself, and helpless. What can one person do, after all? My petition signing and letter writing and voting; my composting and recycling and half-successful avoidance of cars: these things feel pointless even at a local level, living as I do in a town crazy for monster trucks and, based on the number and frequency of Amazon vans clogging the narrow streets, near-continuous consumption. Thereâs not much I can do about or for humans. But, Iâve been realizing, I could at least make my little space a lot friendlier for everyone and everything else.
Starting a few years ago, every year, I would rip up a little more grass from the lawn and add a native pollinator-friendly plant into the mix. Because Iâm poor, itâs been a pitifully slow effort (even if the milkweed has really stepped up and built up a small corner forest of its own). If I had the money, Iâd just do the whole damn thing in one fell swoop, set up a microforest-cum-prairie haven and listen for the soil replenishing itself and the birds and butterflies and bees and everyone else dropping in for a respite from nutrient-free lawns and roads and shopping centers. This year, though, I want to recover at least a hundred square feet, put in a shrub or two, make some more room where I can. This morning, I laid down the cardboard and topsoil I had on hand (yes, I know I need mulch!) to smother the first chunk of grass. The aim is to do a stretch more by the end of the week, so that when class is really over in late May, everything will be ready to host a few more region-friendly plants, and theyâll have the time to dig in and root down for the winter.
Itâs a long process, and Iâm impatient; the sight of those green shoots pushing up made me want to see proof of life from the rest of the gang. But it also gave me hope that Iâm not doing anything terribly wrong, where hosting a bit of fauna is concerned; they came back, after all! And to top off my good cheer, when I pulled a pile of leaves back, a big earthworm crested out of the black soil, hurrying to escape from his newly exposed state and back into the ground. I laughed and greeted him and apologized; his presence told me, too, the soil wasnât a total poisonous dump, which is often the case in this neck of the woods.
Typing just now, the first cardinal Iâve seen this season, brilliantly bright red, perched on the power line outside my window. That, too, was fantastic, even if he didnât stick around. And it was on the opposite side of the yard and a while after my encounter with the worm, so I think the latter is safe for the moment.
I know this has all been little more than a brief cheer for gardens and spring, but damn it, I have to take what I can get these days. In a review I read last night of David Greigâs The Book of I, it was noted that one character, pained in his longing âto dissolve in the enormity of Godâ recognizes âordinary noticingsâ like âthe music of the sea, the arrival of plums on a branchâ as âbeautifulâbut, in the end, merely decorative.â In contrast, itâs the blacksmithâs no-nonsense widow who understands that those noticings are âprecisely the sites of grace where the presence of God dwells,â that, as she says, âyou can find somethingâŚ. to lighten the load; a joke, a face, some food, a song, a child, a man. Sometimes all of them in one day.â2 I could change up her list, finding new shoots, a worm, a cardinal, all in one day, and that just in the first day of a week of respite. Whatâs not to celebrate, then, even if the celebration is among forms of life for whom celebration probably has no meaning? Iâll take the noticings, and rest, and see where we go from there.
1. Carl is so called thanks to a short associational string; since heâs a Chicago hardy, able to withstand the areaâs winters, I took his namesake to be redoubtable Chicago poet Carl Sandburg.âŠ
2. Meghan OâGieblyn, âThe Island That Held Them,â The New York Review of Books, March 26, 2026, 18, 19. All but âprecisely the sites of grace where the presence of God dwellsâ are quoted from Greigâs book.âŠ