In a few weeks, the back fence by the elementary school with be a place where migrants gather themselves before they leave. The fence is popular because of its temperature and the protection it offers. The sun hits the fence from mid-morning until late afternoon in May, and so many years of sun has turned what must have once been dark wood into a faded gray. But the fence also has a line of horizontal two-by-fours about a third of the way to the top, which seems to be the ideal combination of warmth and shelter for monarch caterpillars.
I’d like to think, too, that the fence has a special energy, a border that is already attuned to small creatures who navigate the world on wonder and sugar. In May, going to school seems like less of a drag, so close to summer, than a metamorphosis watch. Each day, another pale green caterpillar finds a place along the wood from which to dangle itself in the shape of the letter J. By afternoon, it has become a pale green chrysalis flecked with gold.
The repetition of this post, which first ran on April 5, 2021, and then again almost exactly a year ago, is out of my hands. I go outside for my morning walk, brooding on my bad habits; I look around the garden to see what’s not working now; and oh glory, oh sweet child of joy, the minor bulbs are blooming, they’re flourishing (“flourish,” from “florire,” to flower), they’re yelling all over the garden. How can I not?
And then, but then, I saw the Dutchman’s breeches. I planted them the fall before last, and that next spring, three of them leafed out but didn’t bloom. This spring, one BLOOMED, but two haven’t yet; and then in an entirely unrelated part of the garden, a fourth one BLOOMED. How graceful they are, how self-assured. When I was little, they used to grow wild in the woods, I loved them the way kids love unexpected beauty, and I haven’t seen them since. And here I believed that once something was gone out of your life, it wasn’t coming back. Silly you, say the Dutchman’s breeches.
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The flowers that bloom in the spring tra la. I love them faintingly, I gaze at them, hands folded reverently, such dears they are, oh my darlings, my minor bulbs!
Minor bulbs might not be the same as spring ephemerals — that’s really their name — like spring beauties, dog-tooth violets, may apples, and shooting stars, their names alone are a song. Spring ephemerals grow in woods and each one is so delicate, so oh-please-stay-awhile that they break your heart when in the next minute they’re gone. I’ve tried transplanting them into my garden and it doesn’t work.
Neighbors and passers-by say how beautiful are the daffodils-narcissi-hyacinths, which I also love though more prosaically. Thank you, I say, but come look at my minor bulbs. Oh nice, say the neighbors and passers-by, and continue having transports over the major bulbs. But look at this one, I say, it’s called Chionodoxa, chion meaning glory and doxa meaning glory, snow glory, glory of the snow, see how the white centers fade into the blue petals, so interesting! The fact is, minor bulbs seem to be of no great interest to anyone but me.
For years I ignored them in the catalogs — minor, unworthy of my attention, and dirt cheap. The catalogs say to plant them in masses and drifts so you notice them. I don’t know about that: I’m kind of a minor bulb myself but I wouldn’t be better drifting all over the landscape.
At first blush, the request from my son’s preschool seemed reasonable. “As spring time approaches we want to encourage families to consider packing ‘waste free’ snacks and lunches, which should help boost your child’s nutritional intake, reduce waste going into landfills, and save money over time.” Sure, we’re drowning in plastic. Let’s produce less waste. It’s a sensible ask.
Yet this seemingly benign request filled me with blinding rage. (These days, I’m often on the verge of blinding rage, so it doesn’t take much). How. Dare. They.
Let me explain. And in doing so, give you a snapshot of what it means to carry the mental load as a mom in 2025.
A few days ago, a friend texted me that a red-flanked bluetail had been spotted a couple of miles from where I live. I had to look up what a red-flanked bluetail was. Turns out that the red-flanked bluetail—also known as the orange-flanked bush-robin—is a small songbird with red flanks (or orange flanks, I guess, depending on who’s looking?) and a blue tail (which isn’t always a big deal?). More to the point, the species normally ranges throughout Asia and Europe, so in the Seattle area it is quite the rarity.
News of the bluetail left me largely unmoved. I like birds a lot, as people who know me know, but I don’t chase rarities. I don’t have any profound philosophical reasons for this. I’m just lazy, and the thought of skulking around the suburbs for hours only to stand among the peering hordes just this side of some befuddled schlub’s property line so I can stare at some distant smudge in the bushes is not why I got into birding.
On second thought, there might just be a tiny bit of philosophy undergirding my studied disinterest.
My preschooler is awed by many things, some of them more generally relatable than others. A spider in the sliding-door track. Mist coming through the woods. Irish butter. And rocks. For a long while now, her favorite miracles have been rocks.
She doesn’t anthropomorphize them, turn them into pets, or expect unreasonable things from them. She respects them as they are.
To her, all rocks are “peshal” (special) and deserving of her regard. They don’t exist as proof of some epic backpacking trip, or as mementoes of places we have traveled. Her rocks come from someone else’s lawn, from the parking lot at Noodles and Company, always from playgrounds, always from hikes.
Because of her, I find rocks on the bathroom floor, in the laundry basket, nestled inside cups in the kitchen cupboard. She got a new coat recently and it has a little chest pocket, which for adults might hold your ID or your sunglasses. She unzipped the pocket and announced, “this coat has a rock pocket!” It always has a rock in it, always a different rock, which she takes out and holds and gently puts back.
She genuinely loves rocks, and maybe she will be a geologist, or a rock climber. I try not to overthink it. For now, I think of the rocks as a testament to her character. She loves and honors the smallest, most lowly things, the things most people don’t think about at all, except in the context of kicking them, or removing them from one’s path, or maybe making them the path upon which to tread.
Right now, she does not need all the information I have about rocks. Some of this information I am saving for later, when she is older, and she can understand what rocks represent, rather than what they simply are.
Rocks are hard, but they soften under pressure. They do not give in easily, but when they are forced to do so, the Earth itself shakes. Rocks harbor life. They make up the surface of this world, and they give us purchase in an otherwise uncaring universe. They are strong. It takes a lot of power, by which I mean violence, to break them. When they do break, they are never really destroyed; they just become something new. Even when they are pulverized into dust, drowned in water, tumbled in mayhem, they do not fail but become other, stronger rock — metamorphic rock, or concrete.
Rocks and the minerals in them are the mountains and the seafloor. They are food for trees and crops; they are our roads and sidewalks and trails. We can move them, but it is hard work.
We can learn a lot from rocks. We can learn how to be crushed, tossed, drowned and then remade into something new, and even stronger. We can learn how to let time shape us, and to let experience soften us. We can hold life, and provide it safe harbor.
What would happen if we all looked for wonder in such forgotten things? What if we found purpose in the objects and the lives that the rulers prefer to ignore, or do their best to destroy? What if every rock on this rocky world really was “peshal,” and all of us were too?
Images: Some favorite rocks in Colorado Springs, by the author
What follows is a poem about the Voyager spacecraft I wrote a long time ago, when the world and I were very different than we are today. For a multisensory experience, you can read along while listening to a splendid set-to-space-noise version here.
“Whether we like it or not, there are things out there, not alive, that think about us,” wrote a contributor on the internet anthropologist Katherine Dee’s substack. He was talking about the networks of technologies designed to stalk our movements and use the information to influence our decisions and command our attention.
In the age of these infinitely networked technological megafauna, how do you know if anything you are dealing with on the internet is under human control or driven by its own opaque desires? What is watching you? How will it act on the information it harvests?
I have begun to mentally categorise these nonhuman entities along the same lines theologians once taxonomised them in the old grimoires:
