An update from the garden
On mothering, writing, and the world outside
I’m sitting on my balcony in the dark, 11 pm, after everyone else has gone to bed. The balcony faces the apartment courtyard, meaning I’m looking down into the parking lot and can see four neighbors’ front doors. It’s not exactly a private setting, so I’ve never sat out here in the dark like this and have never written on a laptop out here either. But it’s surprisingly comfortable. I hear the baby upstairs, maybe six months younger than Aya, crying, the muffled bass of music across the courtyard, a car passing on our quiet street, a persistent electrical hum, the chirp of crickets, and the occasional boom of fireworks in the distance.
I’m here because I’ve been wanting to give an update about my garden, since I first wrote about it in the spring, and that seemed to necessitate sitting out here among the plants. In other words, time alone.
As I write about time alone, I’m also looking at what has become Aya’s corner of the balcony, marked by a cheerful, light blue folding chair, a hand-me-down from our next-door neighbors covered with illustrations of bugs; a bucket containing miniature shovels and rakes; and a food storage tub full of chalk in the shape of sea creatures: an orange crab, a blue turtle. Aya likes to draw on the concrete balcony floor, almost as much as she likes to request I draw on it for her, so it’s now covered in drawings of our family, a pig, a crab, a turtle, an orange, many bunnies, a dog, all with her requested “eyes, mouth, glasses.”
So much of taking care of a toddler requires full physical presence. When I have time alone, I scan through the list of things I need or want to do and pick one to start, hoping I’ll have time for many of the others soon but knowing I most likely won’t. Prioritizing writing these past few months has meant the apartment is messier, books tower on the kitchen table, I don’t have a meal plan, I barely exercise, and I neglected the garden. Apart from the succulents, everything looked spindly and half dead but surviving enough that I felt I owed them some persistence.
When my mom saw the plants like this, in an impressive show of restraint, she said, “Your plants like to be watered morning and night.” While my friend who has a thriving community garden plot advised me over FaceTime, I did a dramatic pruning, cutting the leggy mint all the way down, removing dried snapdragon and salvia spikes, and gathering up all the dead leaves that had accumulated in the planters.
The succulents responded most quickly to my efforts, plumping up after a day or two of extra watering. The stronger of the two mint plants sprouted arms of baby leaves that reached out in every direction before stretching up. One morning, I noticed a mass on a vine — my first tomato! The resilience of the plants makes me more remorseful. Their needs were so simple.
Being in the garden also makes me think of Camille T. Dungy’s book Soil: A Black Mother’s Garden (2024). In one section she writes about celebrated nature writer Annie Dillard, whom I first learned about when I read “The Death of a Moth” in a high school English class. This was probably my first favorite essay, my first view of essays as more like poetry than the dry, formulaic arguments we cobbled together from received information for AP tests. Dillard was a mother when she was writing her most famous book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), but as Dungy points out, no evidence of her family life shows up in the text. Nor does the world immediately outside Tinker Creek in Virginia, which at the time was in the middle of the struggle for public school desegregation. Instead, Dillard wrote as if she were alone in the wilderness, stepping into the tradition set by white, male nature writers before her.
“To systematically exclude the lives of your neighbors from the space of your imagination requires a willful denial of nearly every experience outside your own,” Dungy writes.
I read “The Death of a Moth” again, maybe for the first time in 18 years. Dillard’s prose is concentrated beauty as she describes the small violence of the pile of corpses beneath a spider’s web: sow bugs, “ those little armadillo creatures who live to travel flat out in houses, and die round,” “empty of color, fragile, a breath away from brittle fluff”; spiders “translucent and ragged, their legs drying in knots”; moths “a confusion of arcing strips of chitin like peeling varnish, like a jumble of buttresses for cathedral domes.”
I had no memory of the ending of the essay, which shifts from this close witnessing of the death of insects to Dillard’s classroom. “How many of you, I asked the people in my class, which of you want to give your lives and be writers?” she writes. “I tried to tell them what the choice must mean: you can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax… They had no idea what I was saying. (I have two hands, don’t I? And all this energy, for as long as I can remember. I’ll do it in the evenings, after skiing, or on the way home from the bank, or after the children are asleep… ) They thought I was raving again. It’s just as well.”
What I read in the words of these two writers and mothers are two different decisions about where to focus attention and energy stretched by caregiving. You can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax… I admit, I can’t understand, beyond the conceptual level, what it would mean to be only a writer. Writing is only the final act of the process that includes living, observing, and thinking — so what do we take in that we want to document or transform?
Dillard, being white, had the privilege, in the 1960s and ‘70s, of creating a bubble around herself and her patch of nature. As a woman, she also faced the pressure to remove herself from her writing, apart from her observing eye. Dungy, meanwhile, writes about her garden in its surrounding context, including the colonial history of botany and the racism that shapes the experiences of Black gardeners in large and small ways. As a mother, she writes about undertaking this project with scraps of time and wanting to see more transparency in nature writing about this challenge of balancing work and domestic life.
I think about this as ICE raids continue across LA, somehow constantly showing new disregard for humanity — separating children from parents, deporting a child undergoing cancer treatment, abducting a man from a surgical operating room. Recently, ICE made a staging ground at Terminal Island, an artificial island stretching across the ports of LA and Long Beach that is now the site of a federal prison. Before WWII, though, the island was a Japanese American fishing village, home to my auntie and her family. I have written about my auntie many times before, how she became a kind of second mother to my mother and a grandmother to my brothers and me. I understand the ICE raids and her history through each other, the immediacy of familial connection and witness videos bleeding the violent events together across more than eighty years. “Never again is now,” we have chanted in Little Tokyo since I started working there fifteen years ago. Each year the call becomes heavier.
It is morning on the balcony now. I didn’t stay out here all night, but I’m back, looking at the sad salvia and snapdragon in the light of day. Hummingbirds have been buzzing, wanting to stop for a drink at the feeder above my head. I stay still and look away, hoping to make them comfortable, but instead they redirect and fly to the trailing succulent across the table, a safer distance from me. I see one angle its beak upwards into the open petals of a coral blossom, pause, sip, and move to the next, carefully aligning itself over and over.
Journaling prompt:
What is happening inside your home? What is happening outside?
Two things I’ve been thinking about this week:
Danzy Senna’s interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air about her new novel, Colored Television: “One of the things I kept hearing from publishers was, ‘Don’t do this again, don’t keep writing about mixedness. It’s time to graduate…’ It was almost as if they thought that mixedness was a plot and not a world, and not a people, not a geography. […] It’s the idea that you’re a predicament, you’re not a world.”
“Why Children’s Books?” by Katherine Rundell in the London Review of Books: “[Children’s books] remind us that the imagination is not an optional extra, which we can humour in our children but safely discard in adulthood. It is at the very heart of everything. It is deadly serious, the necessary condition of political change, of love. It is the sharpest tool of ethics.”
“...the imagination is the primary and first site of resistance. The market abhors all values that are not the values of the market: children’s books, to a great extent because they are written for those who cannot participate in the market, can offer resistance to a vision of the good life which is built on a hegemony of acquisition. Children’s books insist in having faith in vast truths that lie beyond consumption and display. Their utopianism is that of the Moomins and Pippi Longstocking: it offers an experiential microcosm of a more ideal world.”
“I believe in the necessity of offering children versions of wonder. I don’t mean the twee commodified vision of wonder we’re sold — the Instagram post of a mountain lake with an inspirational quote. I mean real wonder: the willed astonishment that the world, in all its dangers and clumsiness, in all its beauties and miracles, demands of us. Active, informed, iron-willed wonder is a skill, not a gift: you have to work at it. And you cannot remain in awe of that which is familiar, so the only way to maintain wonder is to learn: learn, and keep learning.”