A curated list of some of my favorite (and most anxiety-reducing) stories. I hope they bring a little more light into your world.
Meteorites, giraffes, astronauts, and other favorites
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Stories about gardening
How the wild things grow
It is a different kind of motherhood to tend a garden, one that is probably more about nurturing yourself than a tiny creature. But as we each stretch further from our childhoods, grow like saplings toward the sun, so it becomes more important, and often more necessary, that we learn to provide ourselves with some parenthood as well.
Pretty things aren’t always meant to keep
Loss will make ribbons of you; and while some messes can be twirled and fluffed to look pretty for a time, their usefulness is short-lived. We untangle them only to leave them in piles, to be sent to decompose with the rest of our refuse. Pretty things are not always meant to keep.
Projections
I was shuffling around, hunting and weeding, when I grabbed a tuft of unwanted sprouts and yanked, and a clod of dirt came flying out with them. In the bald spot that clod left behind, I could make out what looked like a smooth, flat piece of stone. I picked at the edges and found more stone, and then more, and before long I was hacking at the backyard, trying to excavate this covert, stony path.
A tiny island
Today I am thinking about dirt. Really. I am thinking about the difference between dirt and soil, and how to turn one into the other, and how there is the expression “cheaper than dirt” and yet how soil is insanely expensive. Like, really expensive, you guys. Maybe this whole time we’ve gotten the meaning behind that expression wrong. “Cheaper than dirt” could refer to almost anything, because almost anything is less expensive than dirt.