Apples, onions, children, and a bucket of dahlias. My worries came home with us, too. As I approach forty-six, a harvest afternoon and the words of Gwendolyn Brooks bring me back to the question of flourishing: what we gather, what we give one another, and what keeps opening in an imperfect world.
A missed bus gave us an unexpected morning together, a field of dahlias, and one magnificent flower already occupied by a bee. After twenty-one years of marriage, perhaps love is partly this: thousands of ordinary acts, and knowing what to do with the time life unexpectedly gives back.
A child brings his mother cowslips. In the middle of a struggle over authorship, a small gift becomes a witness to what is rooted, what is living, and what remains one’s own.
