matchbook

stand before glass—not double-paned, so the chill of an embryonic winter storm leaks in—strands of my hair caught by cascading succulent stems of Tradescantia pallida, an Heirloom plant, a Purple Queen perfect for this queen of an old Ohio farmhouse. Gazing out the window, I am grateful for this semi-tropical plant whose hardiness is a touchstone of relief in my life, a Thing That Cannot Be Destroyed. That’s not entirely true—if I did not invite it in for the winter, it would die. Still, it gives me more grace than other plants I’ve tended. 

From this window, I see raspberry beds, planted last summer. A full July day it took to dig them, the farmyard ringing with metal on stone as our spades struck glacial till trafficked by southbound ice so many millennia ago. 

          That night, those geomorphic nomads came to me in a dream: agitated, vibrating, unsettled. I sunk beneath earth and they gathered around me, chattering. 

Are you from Canada? Michigan? Wisconsin?

They were looking for my origin story. I did not have the heart to tell them I did not know it, that it was locked in a kind of legislative permafrost, that adoptee rights reform is glacially slow.

I too am not native to this place,

I said, and still they shivered but spoke no further. So I sang to them. They stilled for a moment, then began thrumming in unison until we all slept peacefully. 

          From these raspberry beds: three compost bins, already captured (my partner reports) by Google’s aerial surveillance. Weeks after we moved in, a butternut squash seed liberated and propagated itself through the vents of the bin. We ate the last flesh in the days between Deepavali and Samhuinn, roasting then wrapping it in masa flour and husks, steaming it into a tamale. Going to church, we call it, when it is time to empty the compost bin. Building soil is a matter of both faith and worship. The stones do their part, shedding their minerals into hidden horizons. 

          From these bins: a stack of wood, mostly elm from a twenty-foot branch felled by a lightning strike in a home-owning epoch that predated our own, pushed to the side of our woods. My husband’s birthday wish: a chainsaw. He spends weekends shirtless, dicing the elm and shuttling it to the wood stack. He loops his poonal left shoulder to right hip, anchors it in his waistband so it doesn’t get caught in the tools. He splits the smaller logs with wedge, ax, and maul, and stages the larger ones around the firepit where we sing songs and poems to the ancestors at Samhuinn.

          And from the wood stack: the stump of wild black cherry ringed at its base with Black-eyed Susans and Common yarrow transplanted from our previous home. I find an outcropping of mushrooms here the morning after The Mycorrhizal King visits me in my dreams, his robes shimmering iridescent with shifting, three-dimensional images of shaggy mane, morels, slippery jack, banded mottlegill, fungal conks and bracts. At Alban Elfed, we offer him honey mead at the base of what we call the MotherFather tree, a Chinquapin oak, oldest on our property. Duir Mamathad, we call them (they are monoecious, after all). Duir, the Celtic word for oak married to Mama and Thad, the Welsh words for mother and father. His Highness responds with a robust bloom of Hen-of-The-Woods in that very spot. In late fall, he claims the sugar maple, one of the portals to our drive. He marks her with oyster mushrooms stacked on trunk as notes on clef, a song of connection and death. We call the arborist, make plans for ceremony to send Sugar Maple spirit back into earth. We name her Persephone. 

          From the wood stack: the swamp. Not an actual swamp, but a depression where once was—we are told by our farmer neighbor who has lived here for decades and knew personally at least two of the previous owners—a magnificent flower garden. But for a tidy patch of mature hostas and yellow loosestrife, it is now overrun with a tangle of ivy, fleabane, and poison ivy. At the height of hosta bloom, we celebrate Gokulashtami here. We slip off shoes, wiggle our bare toes in the grass. We dip fists in flour and water and press them to stone. Dot them with toes to conjure the footprints of baby Krishna. We cover the bench with tablecloth, decorate it with flowers from the yard, offer to this altar small bowls of murukku and payasam and poha upma. My husband chants a Kaanada devotional 

yadava nee baa

yadukula nandana

 maadhava madhuoodana baaro

calling the cowherd, calling vanquisher of demons, calling the lover with his flute. I sing in English the Song of Radha

May the earth of my body 

be the earth my beloved walks upon

          From this sacred swamp: a window. When we arrived on this strip of Wisconsinan ground moraine, I grieved for our former land, for the place that was home before an advancing ice scraped and ground at our lives. Before we became sediment. Before we became glacial erratics. I grieved for my former morning circumambulation around invisible property lines, the communion of greeting each plant with the intimacy of a story we had co-authored. When we left, I felt as though I had abandoned them. Terminus Retreat. When we arrived, the land beyond the window where I am standing now was a stranger. 

          But for every disarticulation, there must surely be an equal and opposite articulation, yes? One that looks like a person standing at a single-paned window in early February. One that means looking both inside and out. One that reminds me that whatever churns beneath the surface has the potential to nourish the seeds I plant. 

          Snow falls. Through this window, I see my own reflection in the landscape and know this: I will make peace with what has been left behind.