Saving Seeds
I’m going to write to you in fragments. I’m going to give you a handful of moments and hope that, if you hold them together, they’ll make something for you.
The morning after the election, I walked to one of my regular spots. A grove of hawthorn trees. A maple and a fallen log. Nailed to one of the hawthorns is a tiny blue door. A faery door. It’s been there for a long time. Awhile back, I noticed it had broken in half. By the broken faery door, that morning, this is what I saw:
A brass floor lamp strung up in a tree by its chord
A house key hanging in a bush by a string
Two Sprite cans sitting in the crook of a tree, the words “RECYCLE ME” facing out
In a groove of tree bark at eye height by the path, a rock with the words “If it doesn’t open, it’s not your door” with a blue door painted below
I have no idea how to read any of this. A collection of symbols? Creative littering? A spell? I don’t know what any of it means. I hand it to you.
I crossed paths with a snail on the sidewalk. The glisten of their trail showed them halfway to where they were going on the other side. I watched them for a moment, then worried for their safety on the well trafficked path. I thought, I can help. I can do something here. I put a leaf in front of the snail and let them begin to move onto it. When I saw people coming, I gave the snail a little nudge so I could lift them on the leaf and give them a ride to the safety of the other side of the sidewalk. When the people came by, they smiled at me, puzzled by my crouching. I smiled back. The snails are still moving through the world at snail paces, I thought. There are still snails. My hands can still reach across species toward them.
A small flock of crows followed me through my neighborhood. I walked and they flew alongside me, perching on wires and branches, swooping down, almost grazing my ear a few times, and winging back up. Watching me. Cawing to me quietly. I wasn’t being chased away. I was being accompanied. At one point, they hung back and I looked behind at them and they all rushed toward me at once, as if responding to an invitation. I walked past a few loud children and the crows waited for the children to go and then caught up to me again. When I reached my partner’s place and walked in, we watched the crows keep watch from outside for awhile. Eventually, they disbursed.
I went online and saw these words from Rebecca Solnit:
“The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”
My wife is saving seeds. She collects them from the garden, tomatoes and green beans and peppers and squash that she planted last spring. She keeps them in little jars and envelopes, waiting for next year. The day after the election, my wife took me aside in the kitchen after bringing our child home from school and whispered to me about the school’s all gender bathroom having been trashed, how she didn’t think our child noticed the pointed hate of it—yet—just the mess.
After watching WALL-E for the second time in two days, my child asks me if we could go to space if the earth gets too trashed. I don’t really know how to respond. How to address the child fears for safety while knowing we are not at all safe and also that we are safe in this immediate moment. We are here in this mother-made garden. Snuggling with cats. Discovering movies and music. Learning to read. Playing with paints. Planting. Making a childhood. So I tell my child, maybe, maybe not. But the point is that the earth is our home. That we are a part of this place. This place is a part of us. We are connected to every living creature and there is great responsibility in that. And great magic. And great love.