This Song is for the Soil/That’s Toxic Clear Down to the Bedrock

I rarely have this kind of insight in advance, but it’s weird knowing that this year will be imprinted for the rest of my life in my sense memory as the year that smelt of gunpowder and sunflower oil.

I’m sorry to be moving out of the growing season, constantly stressing about how to utilize or store the harvest. I put carrots in 5 gallon buckets of sand today to see if they’ll do well in storage. Bea’s obit was published and it’s as fantastical as any obit could ever be. They did Sibling and me the courtesy of not claiming we’ll miss her. At least we got that.

‘Where no thing of consequence can grow
Drop your seeds there
Let them go’

Funeral Saturday, then I never, ever have to talk to a great number of my family members ever again and that is such a long time coming. I have been looking forward to being really free for years.

‘This song is for the people
Who tell their families that they’re sorry’

I finally got the magic done. I know now why I assembled everything in July, then couldn’t get it done and couldn’t get it done. Doing it today, though, in the liminal space between Bea’s death and her funeral is exactly right. I feel better and I feel safer. There is little more I can do than bury my fears and my thanks as ward and continue on packing carrots and garlic and potatoes away. The cabbages and brussels and rutabagas are all that are left in the gardens, and I will make beef stew next week and use some rutabagas for it. I am not looking forward to having to buy more sand, but it is so comforting in the hands and to the ear to touch.

‘For things they can’t
And won’t
Feel sorry for’
-Mountain Goats