Sit With Me in My Winter Garden

where the saffron grows

Hello my lovelies,

There are so many new faces here today, and over the past week, that I wanted to make a small post of welcome! Many of you have arrived here with me as I make my Meta exodus, and I just want to say I’m so grateful to see your names, to feel us gathering somewhere with more fresh air, more spaciousness, a slower pace, the feeling of a journal.

There are so many enormous things I could speak to in this moment— the devastating fires burning in LA at the same time as storms thrash the coast of Ireland with winds higher than any ever recorded, the nightmare fascist white supremacist hellscape that has taken over the White House this past week, and what it means in all the ways we cannot even fathom yet— but for this morning, I just want to welcome you new readers, and imagine I am giving you a cup of strong black tea in my garden here on Tamál Húye (the Point Reyes Peninsula) in the morning sun.

We can sit out on sheepskins above the garden beds with our backs to the wood fence, and I’ll pour you a very strong cup, and add a splash of goat milk, and we can listen to the acorn woodpeckers making a racket up in the oaks, and the whirr of hummingbirds, and be still, and talk about small, everyday things.

I’ll tell you how last week I tucked some little onions into the ground, as well as rows of spinach and kale. These I neglected to protect from the birds— the earth teems with them these sunny winter mornings, the quail families and spotted towhees and thrushes—and they ate every last new leaf in a single afternoon.

I’ll tell you how I planted the saffron bulbs in November and isn’t it pretty how they has sprouted long and green and luxuriant? I like to sit and look at the thicket of grassy leaves, and imagine the coming purple petals, and all the radiant saffron threads. I’m thinking of gathering them for pigment. Maybe I’ll dye a dress with them, like the ancient Aegean women did.

I’ll remember how I was digging and digging to loosen the earth in these beds just after the presidential election. I was getting out my anger while listening to Democracy Now, letting the horror move through the shovel and get diffused a bit with the reality of soil and the pile of saffron bulbs waiting to be tucked in.

The garden beds were built by the man who lived here before me, who had built everything by hand for his wife. The roses around the beds are the ones he planted at the end of his life, when he was in his 90’s. They bloom beautifully in May. There used to be a chicken coop on one of the beds, which before that was the rabbit hutch for my angora rabbit named Hawthorn. My ex-husband re-fashioned it into a chicken coop after Hawthorn died.

During our divorce, there were six chickens living in it which he had raised from chicks. I was in Crete for the first time then, because there was nowhere else I could be. Because Crete had given me back to myself. Because Crete had given me the strength to leave what had become of our eleven-year love story. My first love story. My truest, my deepest yet to this day. Our early love was and still is precious to me beyond all words, and because of that it’s a grief I am still recovering from. How love can turn to poison. How you can be lied to so badly by someone you love, and then lie to yourself about them lying until suddenly you can’t lie to yourself anymore, and everything comes crashing down, and you are the tempest that does the crashing, and it is ugly, and you feel you are entirely to blame.

While it was all ending, while I was in Crete, every last one of his chickens was killed by raccoons. When he told me this, I cried so hard I felt I would throw up. I cried for months. I cried, on and off, for years. There was so much pain between us. We were neither of us equipped to handle the damage, to mend it there between us. The only thing to do was to mend on our own, and let God do the rest. There was no one to blame, not really, not in the end. Not in the place the heart speaks from. That’s how I feel about it now.

The chicken coop stood there for some years after, getting overgrown, until last winter my brother, in a fit of rage about some of the things that my ex-husband had said to me, destroyed it with a sledgehammer and dragged all the pieces to the dump. Without my knowing. (That’s an Aries for you :) )

I was a bit shocked, but also relieved. I didn’t realize how much memory it had been holding. Now I have another garden bed. Now I’m planting saffron where all that pain was. It’s taken me seven years to come back here and stay. To be brave enough to say— I am here, and I am planting saffron, and I’m going to make dye, and I’m going to remember all the names and songs of the birds, and let them eat my greens until I find some netting.

I’ll apologize now, pouring you another cup of tea, for going on about things that are rather personal and not, after all, that small. And yet in the face of the huge global catastrophes afoot right now, the stuff of our hearts, our relationships, our everyday losses and joys— they are blessedly small, in the most precious kind of way. They are ours. Human-sized. Our journeys. Our personal myths that touch the bigger myth. Our hard-won amulets that help us see better in the bigger dark.

Maybe we’ll get up now and poke about the garden beds. I’ll show you where I’m going to put in some potatoes. You’ll tell me about your own amulets, some of your small beautiful human sorrows and joys. We’ll notice how the bay laurel flowers are blossoming, like they always do in January. They are an island of nectar for the bees.

We’ll talk about how we haven’t had rain all month, even up here in Northern California, and I’ll tell you how I’m keeping the bird bath full with the hose for now. How it’s not just for the little naughty lettuce thieves, but also for the honeybees who need somewhere to get water that isn’t far from the hive. How right now the only hive I have is one inside a redwood log strapped to an oak tree. How those bees came by choice, in a great swarm one day in June, and have now survived two winters. I’ll tell you how as spring gathers light and warmth, I hope to fill the top-bar hive here in my little saffron garden with a new colony to look after, to learn from, to dream with. To love. Bees are surprisingly wonderful and easy to love.

By now we will have had too much tea, and the January sun will feel quite hot, and we’ll go sit in the shade and drink water and you’ll tell me about your winter garden. What vegetables. What beehives. What trees….

with love,

Sylvia (& Runa, my little sweetheart Cretan hound you see here) xox

(Please do share a bit of your own “gardens” in the comments, if you feel so inclined! Your literal or metaphoric gardens, your literal or metaphoric bees, trees, etc.)