Texts that cut, burning anger. Walking into a hug with you keeps my body here, where joy, defiance, anger, and delight shatter into something that feels a lot like gratitude. For every bit of everything, especially this connection with you.
You send your heartbeat 100 feet. Water sloshes from pails. You smile, your gaze steady, encouraging. I pull out tiny English hawthorn, ferret out fast-growing black locust hiding in the shade of towering cottonwoods, dig a horse chestnut on the verge of adolescence. We bear the heat and sun for the good of our first native plantings. There is refuge in the shade and in being with you.
New friends, familiar friends. The Molina Crew. We know each other by our names, by the water nearest our homes, by our popsicle flavor preferences. We find shade. Popsicles drip. Mango is deemed best. Pogo shovel jumps, you move downed trees and bond over tech burnout. We collectively fall in love with the weed wrench, you discover it pulls up blackberry as well as anything else. The sun embraces us, the work is everything all at once, we are right where we are meant to be.
You were all so very kind and generous. And I thank you for it.
