I spent the morning with my hands in the dirt—what little of it there is out back behind my apartment, the cracks of earth breaking through the concrete, enough for dandelions and morning glory to push their way skyward, enough for me to come upstairs with dirt under my nails. I miss having a garden, a yard, a place to feel like I really inhabit this world, a place to cultivate roots that dig their way deeper and deeper toward the center of something.

I am grieving today, feeling the loss for my hometown, for the world. Still, I know I am grieving in that privileged way where I can afford to abstract, where I can draw connections and think about things like love and nostalgia, where I can wonder why the ways we take care of ourselves and each other are all so tenuous, so grasping.  I never knew him well, not well enough, not as well as I wanted to. He worked at the record store when I was a teenager, and his smile was enough to make me stumble for words and blush. Later, we knew each other casually, a conversation here and there, a nod on the street, but the details of it don't really matter.

They found him floating in the harbor.

That detail shouldn't matter either, but it's all I can think of, his eyes, his smile, and the reduction to a body floating in the water, an article in the local paper. Short dry sentences, body of liveaboard man found floating. So I pull weeds this morning, under the beginning of the warmth of spring, and I think about how we are all so entangled with one another, but yet so far off, how life and living and moving through this world together are so messy. I think about how I'm pretty sure I'm doing it all wrong, but somehow I am alive and strong enough to be pulling weeds in the sunshine, how my own dark nights have always given way to morning, how I feel undeserving and grateful, and how cruel it seems that so much of this is just luck. And then I just feel sad, so deeply sad for this man, sad for those who loved him, sad for people I love who are feeling his absence deep in the marrow of their bones.

Hurricane

It didn't behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to 
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn't stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn't
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

--Mary Oliver