In 2020 and 2021 I wrote a series of reflections on the pandemic and related experiences for my TinyLetter. Unfortunately, since TinyLetter’s demise those words haven’t had a home on the internet, so I’ve decided to republish them here. For me, they’re an important record of that time as it happened, especially as I try to write and edit my way into an uncertain future. It is important to remember these things, in a world that wants us to forget. Below is volume 2 of 2, from January through December 2021.

January 23, 2021
One of many things I’ve learned in the last few years since I first became interested in gardening is that, especially here in North Carolina, there’s always something related to the garden that I can be doing, no matter the season. This January I’m making the earliest start I ever have on Spring planning, which is less a result of the pandemic than of the knowledge I’ve absorbed in the last year. (Though taking the time to learn has certainly been aided by the pandemic’s limits on my usual weekend activities.)

I’m still very much a beginner, especially since this will be the first season I can apply much of what I learned last summer in my online Home Gardening course through the LSU AgCenter. But I was able to apply a few things as I went, growing plants from cuttings for the first time, and identifying squash borers that unfortunately killed all of my summer and winter squash. I know now, for example, that I should plant my squash somewhere else this summer, and plant different vegetables where the infestations happened.

On one hand, I’ve delved into gardening with a sense of freedom I have about little else in my life. Yes I wanted the structure of a class to give me a better understanding of what I was doing, but it wasn’t as if it was graded, and it mostly consisted of watching YouTube videos with my Saturday morning coffee before mucking about in the yard for a while. One the other hand, though, I’ve applied my usual (enneagram five) fervor for understanding, for specialized knowledge. Perhaps what feels different here, and what’s been so life giving for me, is that it’s ultimately not about mental knowledge. So much comes down to daily care, weeding and watering and trying to figure out how the heck I’m going to keep the squirrels from digging up the raised bed again. So much is about dirty hands and a farmer’s tan. It’s knowledge that is less about retreating to my interior castle than it is about connecting to the world, from the weather patterns to the makeup of my soil, things seen and things unseen. It’s knowledge with clear limits, because there are some things you simply can’t control.

A garden is a long term project. Every year I add things, every year it’s different, and when I put in something new, like the second raised bed I’m planning now, that’s just the beginning. It’s never finished. And when it comes down to it, I like to let it be a little bit wild, despite my planning nature.

It’s a future oriented thing, which means something that’s not quite hope but something like it. I don’t just plant seeds and hope they’ll grow; I do the things I can to ensure that they will sprout. And when, for the most part, they do, I take care of them, potting them up as they grow and hardening them off before planting them out. I water and weed and wait. (And chase off those dang squirrels.) Mariame Kaba says “Hope is a discipline,” and the garden shows me what that means.

An avocado pit started growing out of my neighbor’s compost and she asked me if I wanted it. I dug it up and put it in a pot, knowing it takes eight years for an avocado to bear fruit. (This is why they’re usually grafted, if you’re actually growing them for fruit. TIL!) Even though I thought it unlikely (out of the question really) that it would ever fruit, I liked the idea of planting something with such a long timeline. It means I expect to be here in eight years to see it.

Come January I left it on the porch in a hard freeze, and it died, so this doesn’t turn out to be a story about hopes realized. Some things don’t survive, and this too is a lesson I am learning. I have become borderline obsessed with the idea of fruit trees, though, with the long-term and slow growth. I’ll probably try dwarf apples or figs in giant pots, though, in acknowledgement of the realities of grow zones and my small yard.

For now, it’s January. I spent my holidays perusing seed catalogs and placed my first order January 1st, a gesture of hope if ever there was one in these strange times. I find something garden related to do every weekend: turning compost, potting up cuttings I’ve been growing indoors on my windowsill, drawing and redrawing diagrams of what I intend to plant and where, measuring spaces in the yard and deciding how to squeeze in this second bed. I watched the entire 2020 season of Gardeners World on BritBox, too. Winter feels endless, as does the pandemic as we near the one year mark, and I will embrace anything that helps me from one day to the next.

In February, it will be time to plant, and I will be ready.

February 16, 2021
When I was a college student in west Michigan we used to say that February was revenge on the Beautiful People, because no one could look good in February. I would walk around the Hope College campus in layer upon layer, one scarf wrapped around my face and a second one wrapped over the top of my hat, a makeshift balaclava. It was cold. It was endless. It was miserable. Not unlike this pandemic. Even now, living in NC, I find that February is the hardest month. It’s the kind of month that makes you forget what plants are altogether, until a kind friend reminds you.

There’s been a lot of talk about the so-called pandemic wall, and hitting it, but the truth is I think most of us hit various walls a long time ago, and we just keep getting up and going because there isn’t much of an option to do otherwise. This week I’m coping by lying on the floor for ten minutes on an acupressure mat I bought months ago and never tried. I have no idea if this is helping anything, but lying on the floor is nice. (Except when one of the cats climbs on my stomach. That is…not nice.)

Certainly another way through February is by focusing on what’s ahead, and I’ve already covered a small table by one of my south-facing windows with tiny newspaper pots and other random recycled containers repurposed for seed starting. Last year was only my second summer growing from seeds, and I got a late start. This year it’s possible I’m too early, as I have eggplants and peppers sprouting up already. It’s all an experiment, every year. This weekend was in the 30s and raining and I’ve been fighting off what seems to be a cold. Goodness knows how I’ve managed to catch anything at all this winter. I haven’t spoken to another human in person in over three weeks, and that was from six feet away wearing a mask, outdoors, over a cozy fire on a cold day.

It was good to meet my friend for a fire. I confess don’t miss parties or large gatherings all that much (though I miss sitting at the bar at Fullsteam more than I can say), but I do miss specific people. My friends, my loved ones. And I miss feeling connected to my community in my daily movements. I love Durham so much and yet lately I feel like my existence is floating in space. I could be anywhere and nowhere. I don’t like that.

Last year this time I was planning a trip to Texas for my nieces’ fourth birthday, and now they are almost five. I haven’t seen them since November 2019 and I grieve everyday the loss of that time, being part of their young lives. Never am I more aware of the limits of Zoom than with them. When I see them will they even know me as Aunt Meghan anymore? Will I know them? Will I even know myself, after all this time? And just in the days since I began writing this letter Texas has become a snow globe of disaster, further wearing at the threads of worry and longing in my frayed heart.

I miss my friends, too, many of whom I’ve lived far from for a long time, which has been a weird sort of blessing this past year insofar as I’m used to cultivating those relationships at a distance. Phone calls and texting would usually be punctuated by visits, though, even if they’re infrequent. The fact that we cannot even attempt to plan when we’ll next see each other hurts.

And then there’s my sweetheart, Raouf, who had to move home to Kerala, India, in November. He left the day after the election and so this whole season of cautious hope in the US has, for me, been tempered by a cavernous loss.

When people talk about wanting to hug everyone they meet when this is over I think, no, I only want to hug the one person I will not be able to hug, because he is 8000 miles away and he is not coming back. This is because of the pandemic, because of the havoc it wreaked on the job market, but the effects of racism, xenophobia, and bad immigration policy on his post-MBA job search were only exacerbated by the pandemic. It was never going to be easy for him to find a job here. It was never going to be easy to stay in a country that makes it so clear that it doesn’t want him here, no matter how much he or I want things to be different. Strangers at startups were never going to look at his name on a resume and see the man I know.

I have not been able to write or even talk about it because I never know what to say, because this is not a story with a happy ending. Instead I listen to this Bruce Cockburn song over and over. Bruce says it best: Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight, got to kick at the darkness ‘til it bleeds daylight. Which doesn’t mean I’ll get what I want, only that it was worth having it while I could.

I know that heartbreak is fueling my seed starting obsession as much as anything. I find myself wandering over to the seed table and just looking at the spouts for long periods of time. I shift things around to get the perfect stream of sunlight, carefully spritzing with a spray bottle. I walk away only to come back ten minutes later. It’s a point of focus. It’s something outside myself. No matter how many chili varieties I grow they won’t mend my broken heart, but that won’t stop me from trying.

Another song I’ve found soothing lately is this one from Elise Massa, A Man and His Plant. The first time I heard the chorus, You may be half dead but you’re half alive, so let’s survive, I truly can’t remember if I laughed first or cried, but I know I did both. If one wanted a chorus for this moment, that seems as good as any. And perhaps it’s true that as the plants grow so will I. It’s all an experiment, as I said. Every year. Every day, too.

April 21, 2021
My existence is a series of coping mechanisms.

That’s been my recurring thought these days. I work. Then, I take a walk, do some stretches, eat something that makes me feel good, do a crossword, practice French, do another crossword, plant more seeds and wait for them to grow. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat, varying the order, and repeat again.

In the last couple of years I’ve developed a useful box of anti-depressive tricks, but there’s no trick that gets you out of the cycle of coping in order to get up tomorrow simply to cope again. I have to remind myself that this particular version of that cycle is not permanent. It’s not over, and we don’t know when it will be over, but it will, someday, be over.

I don’t know what “over” will look like, of course. But it will arrive, for better or worse.

As we move into over, into after, into whatever newness hibernates beneath the cold ground of the present, this series of unchanging days, I feel something like clarity. There is something to having everything stripped away that leaves the world stark but clear. Often the last few months I’ve felt that the pandemic took everything that isn’t work away from me. No trips to see nieces, no sweetheart, no happy hours with friends. No wandering even in outdoor places without constant vigilance about distancing and masks.

Of course I am not literally left with nothing, but the loss of so much leaves me looking at the bare ground of my life and wondering what I want to nurture, now. Not everything that was there before will come back. In some cases, I lament that. In others, I think this may be an opportunity. Weak roots once ripped out are, in this metaphor, unlikely to thrive again, their remains perhaps better chopped into the compost pile and transformed into something else entirely, nutrients to feed an unknown future.

Tonight it will be cold. I tucked in my tiny plants before the sun went down, makeshift cloches weighed down with rocks and prayers, trusting that will be enough.

September 16, 2021
I am listening to Tyler Lyle’s The Golden Age and the Silver Girl album this morning, an old favorite I periodically need to revisit. It’s a breakup album, but I turn to it for solace in all kinds of transitions, endings, beginnings, decisions, and forks in the road.

A friend told me last night that they are moving, and I am deep in my feelings about all the ways that so many of our lives are changing right now. Little of it is easily classified as good or bad. It all comes together, a tangle of sadness and hope. I am sad my friend is leaving; I am hopeful for their future.

I last wrote on the eve of a late frost in April, and now it is September. Ironically or appropriately, my garden-themed newsletter has been quiet for these months of growth. Lush months, they have been, months of unfurling and reaching out after so many months shut it. In May, I did too much, exhausted myself in the joy of vaccination and familiar (if changed) faces. In June, I moved slowly, circling my garden multiple times a day, tending carefully, watching closely—myself as well as the tender new plants. For I was, and still am, tender. It has been a summer of doctor appointments and long Saturday naps and early bedtimes and herbal teas and soft pajamas and prescription medication and occupational therapy. It has not been growth for me, but it has been healing, in small, almost imperceptible shifts. Each walk in the woods, each swim in the Eno, each day spent trying a little less hard.

I feel more like myself than I have in a long time, if also a worn, weather-beaten version of myself. I think almost daily about the fact that we cannot go back, none of us, to who we were before. That means as many different things as there are people in this world, but the lack of a time-turner we all share. I will never be that version of myself again. And I do not yet know who I will be, only that who I am in this moment is kinder, and gentler, than I have been in the past, even as I am more stubborn and headstrong.

Life is so short. So unbelievably short. All I want to do with my wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver calls it, is putter about in my garden and try to love the world a little more. In so doing I hope I am learning to love myself a little better too.

In “When I say that I love you,” Lyle sings these lines and I sing along in my own off key voice:

When I say that I’m grateful
I guess what I mean is how the sapling is grateful for the seed
And I’m thinking how all things change
How the branches grow tall but our initials remain
I’ll remember you well when the summer is gone
Another year another ring round my bones

Just as each of us has changed, who we are with others has changed too. That is bittersweet, once again the mix of hopeful and sad. I am learning to acknowledge that some parts of my life have faded while others have deepened roots. It is hard to navigate that with grace, I find, but there is no escaping from it either.

The sunflowers are well past peak, the last tomatoes are ripening, the radishes and carrots are in the ground, with onions and loads of leafy greens to follow. I am starting a new job in October, and I am breathing many sighs of relief. The world keeps turning, and we go along.

December 19, 2021
It’s nearly the Winter Solstice, we’re a week out from Christmas, and for me this means it’s the season for perusing seed catalogs and planning for spring. Yesterday was unseasonably warm, and yet, even as I type those words I think, what does “unseasonably warm” mean now, in a changed and changing climate?

After Thanksgiving I planted bulbs: species tulips, mini daffodils, and a variety of crocus. The soil was dry from weeks of little to no rain, which made the digging difficult for my cranky wrists, but I got them in the ground and proceeded to put the rest of the garden to bed for the winter, cutting perennials back as needed and mulching with leaves, stacking pots and unscrewing hoses. The weather turned colder; winter had arrived, it seemed.

Then, yesterday, December 18, I noticed a few green shoots popping out already. Here in the season when I’m growing festive amaryllis and paperwhites indoors, the crocus I planted for February encouragement have decided that a few weeks in the ground were, apparently, enough.
The soil was now damp from much needed rain, and in theory it’s going to get cold again shortly, so I biked down to Stone Bros & Bird in Durham and filled my basket with more bulbs (and a couple cat safe houseplants). What could I do, I thought, but plant a second round? Whenever they bloom, I’ll enjoy them.

It’s a strange time to be a beginning gardener. No sooner have I read about recommended planting dates for a plant variety than I have to consider how the weather this year has been both cooler and warmer on any given day than one might expect for the season. I look up which perennials are cold hardy in Zone 7b where I live, only to consider that more likely than not, if I keep an eye on the weather and provide even a little extra protection, plants that are only hardy to Zone 8 will likely be perfectly fine. It’s complicated though, because even as temperatures on the whole are milder, intense cold snaps and late frosts are even more likely, climate change being as much about extreme swings as the overall warming trend.

Much like bicycle commuting has made me acutely aware of the weather patterns insofar as they affect my clothing choices from day to day, gardening has drawn my attention ever more constantly to the environment I share with other living things. I used to read Annie Dillard and think about living somewhere more rural, but these days I am focused on all the life finding its way in the small cracks and corners of my tiny urban plot of land. One bird feeder and a cat mint plant are enough to draw a surprising amount of wildlife into my yard, and as I cultivate my garden over the seasons with an eye toward creating a more hospitable year round habitat for my neighboring creatures, I feel less lonely and more hopeful.

The world is burning, and my small acts are not going to stop that, but they orient my mind and my politics toward the bigger needs even as they enable me to fend off despair. I still remember reading Steven Bouma-Prediger’s book For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care as a first year college student in 2003, and a class discussion about the idea of the catch phrase “Think globally, act locally.” Like any catch phrase, it can become trite from overuse, but it remains true in an era when people argue about whether it really matters whether an individual cuts out single use plastic or rides their bicycle instead of driving, when climate change is driven by massive corporations and we need sweeping policy changes.

My small acts matter if for no other reason than that they keep me from giving up. But they also matter in the meantime because the birds and bugs and leafy things live here with me, right now. Small acts matter because, even in a crumbling democracy, I have to believe that our individual and collective will might be able to turn things around. How we live matters.

In recent years I’ve struggled with the constant desire to make things meaningful, experiencing a new kind of exhaustion with the idea of calling or purpose. Of “making a difference.” I thought at times that I’d lost all sense of ambition. I’m slowly realizing that, rather, my ambitions have changed. They have shrunk. They’re about less rather than more. Slow rather than fast. Repair rather than innovate.

Last week I saw a video on Instagram in which someone showed how they refreshed a rusty cast iron skillet they had picked up for free. Many of the comments on this video mocked it, noting that the skillet was Lodge, meaning relatively inexpensive, such that one should have saved both the time and money spent on cleaning supplies by simply throwing it away and buying a new one for twenty bucks.

This depressed me more than any number of other depressing things I’ve seen on Instagram over the years. It was a clear microcosm of a throw-away culture, almost too obvious to use as an example. Use it until it breaks, or you get tired of it, then throw it away (“Where is away?” my friend Bryant asks in her book, The Last Straw) and buy another. It’s no wonder billionaires are obsessed with space travel. Why try to stop climate change when we can just colonize Mars? Innovation as permission to dispose of that which asks too much of you in the form of care.

As we stare down another wave of the pandemic, the exhaustion of the last two years has made it difficult to think much less act on these bigger issues, especially as we watch both political parties continue to muck up what chances we have to make big changes. Once again in hibernation mode, in these shortest days of the year, I am learning to orient my days toward life and renewal in whatever ways I can. I am recommitting to fixing things that break, to eating what grows here and now, to fighting for better bus, bicycle, and pedestrian infrastructure for my community. I am doubling down on beauty, and planting every flower that catches my fancy, knowing that their delight is more than ornamental. For creatures great and small, my garden makes this house a home.