Fall 2022

What are you harvesting? What are you laying fallow?

Harvest: My plants are dying. I took all the dead shit off and cut the most barren stems to propagate. This season, I’m harvesting new growth. Unorthodox, but it’s what I have right now. I’m not who I was. My harvest isn’t a great bounty but it is nutrient rich. Few, hearty things. Potatoes and my Halabeoji’s hot peppers, new friendships, the new feeling of a worn-in relationship and a worn-in home, and taking it all under the covers with me for winter.

Fallow: My therapist is unionizing her workplace. She told me last Monday that she may get fired for it and that we might have to figure that out. Then she sent me a dissociation quiz. I worry the fields of my emotional landscape are fallow already, that I’m watching myself on TV, that the soil’s gone bad and so next year’s harvest will be even smaller, recovering its nitrogen supply and its memory for vegetables. Nevertheless I’ll try to let my worry rest underground. I’ll lay the iPad there, and my monthly budget, which is picked over and grown out in the wrong places.

Laying fallow a workout routine and the thought that I am not who I say I am. Not looking for anything in the mirror in the field. Depression, have me, or don’t. This season I surrender futile attempts for control. Elation, find me, if you can. I want to laugh and laugh through the cold months, even through a winter I won’t remember.

I keep seeing a loaf of my mom’s pumpkin bread in my mind – it has wings, flying to me. I cooked and ate a gourd the other week, thinking it was a squash. It wasn’t so bad. I keep dreaming about those double shoes. It’s a good dream because I never get it confused with reality.