I emerge from a winter spent in the woods to a parcel of land where I hope they will not follow. I find myself on my knees, begging the earth with a plow to give me a garden. Am I so sure about my answer? 

And when my garden grows will it be my own, good and honest, true to root, writ as wrote? If the woods follow after-all and bring their winter here will my flowers outlast it or will it freeze their wombs into graves? I ask am I for the garden or the woods? 

Did I inherit a broken trowel, seeds that canker in the earth? Hands not so dirtied, I have a depth to dig, soil and soul to harrow.

To toil. To weed and cultivate. Can I tame the chaos, can I trim what’s given in nature into something that has structure, beauty and coherence? Or am I to wander among trees alone and unseeing, the sky dismembered by the foliage and what’s beyond the woods unfathomable from within? Is it unethical to try and find your way out of such a natural place? It is much easier to stay. 

But I have smelled Joanna’s flowers, wanting of mine a similar redolence and when it comes time to pick them, an arrangement that recalls hers. To fill my home with the offspring of a garden I can call my own— and a garden to work at, even through winter— may be all I need to keep myself from falling back into those woods.

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