The Invitation

"It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing."

-Oriah Mountain Dreamer

The Garden

"How simple

the garden, in its lucid confusion, the mind

in the plummet of sleep: no need

to remember, no need to forget-

just the hum and buzz of the world,

begetting."

-Suzanne Buffam

For Will, almost 96

I want to paint pictures in the air and bring them to you wrapped in cinnamon and bows, but I worry you won't remember them if they blow away. Instead I bring you the weather on my cheek. Every week. And we spill over pages like pomegranate wine in goblets from the Crusades, where we only go on days when we aren't in courthouses or photographs or early November. Really it's just tea on the table, ginger peach, and I'm afraid that if I leave for too long you'll disappear. So I ask you questions I know you can't answer. Tell me the color of her eyes. It's fine, I say, if you just make it up (that's what I do when you ask me how I'm going to change the world one day). And we talk about dreams we never had or what it would be like to trade places with the stars. We sit in silence while sirens pass below us and pretend they are only taxicabs to the sky.

Good news!

There will be strawberries in March! Well, not here- it's only 34 degrees, strawberries would never make it so soon. But I hear in California the weather's much warmer. I'll let you know, because I just booked my flight to San Diego next month to go to farm school! Farm school is a week-long alternative spring break trip to an organic farm to learn about sustainable agriculture- a much needed break from the snowy street corners of the city (sorry New York, you know I still love you). The trip also emphasizes the importance of social justice and mindfulness in food production. I can taste the strawberries already!

Harvest Day

To me harvest days will always be Mondays and Thursdays, torrential rains or excessive heat, six a.m. and the sun just showing up over the fields. It will always remind me of wide brimmed hats and bare feet in the mud and bin after bin full of cucumbers and carrots and kale. Back in New York, I never got to see the pumpkins or the potatoes that we planted in early summer. I fill in the gaps with the farmers market and the fig tree I am desperately trying to keep alive in my apartment, and I thrive in the city knowing that the farm still holds a special place inside me.

This year, the word harvest has new meaning; baking a pumpkin pie from a real pumpkin (even though it took four hours and my family hates pumpkin pie), a new appreciation for things that grow. But mostly this year I’m thinking not of what I’ve grown but of how I’ve grown and how I don’t try to define home anymore because I know it can exist in more than one place. It’s the city and the farm and it’s also right here, sitting by the fireplace with my family on Thanksgiving. I like to believe that I’ll somehow end up in the places I’m meant to be, and for now that is enough to feel content. Happy harvest, with many thanks.

A Love Poem

New York City, you have ruined me. Now, wherever I go, my heart beats to the pulse of your traffic, the Hudson flowing through my veins like melted ice cream from the trucks on your every corner. I crave the rumble of your subway beneath my feet, the residue drip from your buildings on the arch of my cheek. In the morning I wake with you wrapped around me. At night you shine brighter than the stars you obscure. You tease me with luxuries you never see through, promises of penthouses and candlelit dinners, and in a storm you toss me to the wind, drop me in puddles that form mercilessly in your potholes, leave me soaking on the corner while your cabs refuse to pause. Yet still I come crawling back to you, stumbling down Broadway as if I could have escaped- the bottoms of my jeans drag in your rain and the bottom of my heart aches for your love.

In Search of Roots

My grandfather says

He'd like to come back as a willow tree

For my sister and me to sit in his shade

He says, it will be enough for him to have lived

All his years for that day

I don't know if I could live as a tree, yes-

I'd like my body to be a home to birds and yes-

I'd be content to change colors each year in the fall but

I'd worry if I were a tree

Since trees can never run away, they stay

Bound by the very source that gives them life.

At least they always know where they came from.

I've been searching for roots, not mine

But the world's, for fruits that don't grow

On shelves in the store and for more shades of blue

Than exist in all five oceans

Did life really begin like my grandfather says

With Adam and Eve

And a snake and a tree? I wonder

If the apple she ate was Macintosh or Granny Smith

And if all the forces of the universe really came together

To bring us where we are today

I think if it were up to me I'd come back as the wind

Strong and free-spirited, nothing to hold me back

I'd travel the world searching for roots and

Everything else

I could find along the way