Each of the three times my husband and I visited the house before we bought it, I was drawn to the backyard—the three tiers built into a hill, the overgrown garden, and the raw scrape of earth near the top, the clay cracking in the heat and studded with rocks. The realtor apologized with a half-smile and soft shrug. “It could use some work.” But the backyard is what sold me. Up there, I could see across the broad, tempered valley of central Arkansas, where we’d moved from upstate New York just one year before, and fully sense the way the development’s builders had scraped the topsoil clean when building. Four aphid-infested yucca stood in a line near a single, anachronistic oregano plant, but that was it. The contractors’ and homeowners’ attempts to re-sod had failed. This part of the yard was a dry, decimated mess.
I was a dry, decimated mess, too. I was seven months pregnant with my second child and questioning my marriage, but too afraid to be seven months pregnant and questioning my marriage to admit it even to myself. So instead, I moved through the world stone-like. My fingers shook in the morning when I made breakfast and so I clenched them, gritted my teeth, forced myself into some stiffness that might survive the next few months. Why I thought it a good idea to buy a house then, I do not know, but we did, despite the fact that I kept waking at four a.m., fearing it was all a mistake. The only thing I came back to: when we stood in the backyard with the realtor, I could envision a future with two children and a piece of land where we could nurture something more than ourselves.
The intensity of that season seems quaint now, but of course then, it didn’t. Hillary Clinton was running against Donald Trump, and then Trump somehow won. Marriages where one spouse voted for Clinton and the other for Trump suddenly ruptured. Though my husband hadn’t voted for Trump, he also hadn’t voted for Clinton, and I wondered if our marriage would be next. As newlyweds in New York, we’d often walked together to the polling station and then laughed as we left, knowing our votes had just canceled each other out. This time, in Arkansas, it no longer felt like a joke. Surrounded by conservative churches and conservative voters, I began to glare, tight-lipped, whenever my husband turned on election coverage. Though he did not celebrate or jeer, he also did not understand my despair. He did not write letters, nor join me at marches, nor empathize with my simmering anger. He did not understand why I was mad. The space between us crackled with differences, and as the skin on my pregnant belly stretched, my husband’s silence toward environmental justice and women’s rights turned to acid in my chest. Then, the dismantling of environmental policies: clean air and clean water and all the slow, political movements I’d hoped in for my children. Whatever the explanations and the reasonings and the truths, I began to realize that perhaps our culture—my culture—couldn’t solve these problems. Perhaps our culture—my culture—wasn’t equipped to respond to the violences it had enacted on the people, the environment, and the climate. Perhaps we were on a sinking ship. Maybe my marriage was also.
For a while, I did little with the yard. I bought a bird feeder in mid-November and staked it in the dirt—a small bit of care in a deadening world—but otherwise I spent the winter in a haze, trying to take care of a newborn and my own bruised and shaking self. I was not well but couldn’t admit it, in the way the backyard also was not well, and yet there wasn’t anything immediate to do. I moved through the days as I needed, focused on my work, and responded to the cries of my son and my daughter. When things became too tense, within my head or my home, and I feared I might run away or do something regretful, I’d go outside. I’d walk my son through the neighborhood, marveling at the ways he pursed his baby lips and squawked whenever the wind hit his face. I’d carry him to the top of the backyard, near the fence line, where the horizon stretched out and I could see clear across our Arkansas city. I stared at the rooftops and held my son close and breathed deep breaths until I could feel the air in my lungs and my feet on the ground. That spring, when the world became too much, I pulled dandelions by hand. Digging my fingers into the earth until my nails turned black and the dandelion stems and white roots formed a cemetery around me. It was the only thing. The only thing. And I clung to it.
Eventually, I began to plant. One weekend, I left my son home with my husband and drove an hour west with my daughter, deep into Trump country, and then north into the Ozark foothills. We drove past the nuclear power plant and the signs that announced the power plant’s evacuation route. We drove through mist and valleys and along a manmade lake and then into rural Arkansas, where poverty shat itself and small homes fell into themselves—all those abandoned toddler trikes and rusted trucks. Eventually, we turned right onto a dirt road so thin the trees left wet fingerprints on the windshield. When the road opened again, we were at the garden center, everything tucked away and yet sprawling, yellowing leaves blooming from worn plastic planters. An older woman sat in the shed, smiling, like some archetypal figure, and I felt myself relax as she guided us through the rows. I knew nothing—nothing of the plants’ names, histories, or uses. Nothing about the soil in our backyard or what might grow in this state we’d moved to for job opportunities and work. But I listened as she pointed, and I placed plant after plant in the wagon my daughter pulled until we were full: thin reeds the woman said would bloom purple; grasses that would dig roots deep into the soil and stabilize the hill; fish-on-a-pole, with its heavy, looping stalks and fat, flat seed heads; a flowering perennial that would match my daughter’s eyes. I purchased twice as many plants as I’d planned, though not nearly enough, and loaded them into the trunk of the car.
Back home, I spent the evening placing them around the backyard, eyeing them with a view toward the future, for how they would weather the winter and reappear the next spring. I moved the pots from one spot to another until it grew so dark that I couldn’t see, and then I went right back outside the next morning, this time with a shovel. I dug into the clay, unearthing shards of rock. I watered the cold ground, creating potholes of orange puddles. When I unpotted the prairie grasses, their roots were so tangled and knotted, I sometimes had to knife through the plastic to release them. And yet their roots amazed me. So fibrous. So rich and strong.
Slowly, slowly, I planted each plant. Slowly, slowly, I introduced each to the soil. It was a lonely practice in that I did it alone—as I had always, it seemed, done things alone—and yet I didn’t feel lonely. Oak leaves fell, dappling the ground around me. Prairie lizards, not yet hibernating, scampered between the scraggly yuccas. Birds flew overhead. A few hours in, my husband came outside, holding the now-hungry baby, and smiled at my mud-covered hands. I smiled back at him, and it was a moment, before my son began to cry louder and I needed to stop what I was doing to nurse him, during which things seemed okay.
That winter, the grasses and perennials I’d planted slowly pushed their roots into the ground, through clay and rock, deeper and deeper. In moments of hope and moments of need, I’d look up images of prairie roots—the long, tangled fibers extending downward, more than double and even triple the height of the plant. As I scrolled through photographs and artistic renderings of fifteen-foot tap roots, I imagined how deep the tendrils of my own plants would go, what they were finding, and what work they might be doing to stabilize the soil. I imagined how much carbon they might eventually sequester and what topsoil they would slowly, once again build. I imagined the bees and the butterflies and the birds that would come and perhaps gain sustenance, and what it would look like when the whole garden was grown and full, Indiangrass and bluestem and switchgrass taller than my son’s head, taller than my daughter’s head, everything so vibrant and full of life. It was an anecdote to my own stiffness, my own empty grasping and grief, as I realized how much I’d given up for my marriage and wondered how and if my marriage would survive who I was growing to be.
They are old questions, I am sure, asked by everyone at some time. How do you know what a relationship can accommodate? How do you know when to hang on and when to let go? And yet the commonness didn’t make them easier.
In the darkness, my husband and I quietly argued over baptism plans and parenting, finances and future dreams. Old conflicts resurfaced, as they always did, and I fell silent before them. As the sky spit on the frozen clay and lichen-covered rocks, I thought of the way people grow and, through no fault of their own, grow apart. The way I’d abandoned the religious beliefs of my youth even though my husband fully hadn’t. The way I sometimes felt myself to be more alive outside of my home than within it. The way, when I looked at my husband, I often saw the me of the past—the white dress, the chalice, the furrowed eye, the belief that marriage could ground me rather than hold me back.
As I escaped the house to pace the cracked and frozen backyard, where the deadened stalks of my prairie grasses now frayed in the wind, I wondered what would happen if I let go. What would happen to the house, the children, the yard, the still-dormant plants? What would happen to the life we were trying to build there, to those small dreams I’d dreamed when I’d first seen that stripped soil, aching to be rewilded, aching for my hands?
This, the era of panic. One day, I drove to Target to purchase my daughter a personal floatation device, but as I stood in front of the life preservers, the air suddenly began to spin and my hands began to tremble. The room swirled so that I had to crouch, hands to the ground, certain I was about to pass out.
Later, I attended a panel about climate change while fighting a head cold. “We humans may not have enough time.” It all became too much, and when one speaker began to talk of a dead bird, the room again began to spin, my heart palpitating, the air darkening, until I fled to the hallway where I counted my breaths before retreating to my car. I was thinking of death. I was thinking of terror. I was thinking of the woundedness I felt within me, within my home, and within the world, this pressing need for release.
How do you know if something is dormant or dead? In a culture? In a marriage?
The following spring, as the world shut down due to Covid, air quality improved in major cities and dolphins were seen in Southern Italy. Amid the suffering—the job losses and economic toil and illness and death, all of which would stretch into the long summer and the long winter—there was a long, slow breath.
That spring and summer, my husband and I relied on each other more than we perhaps ever had before, the routines of our life becoming a comfort we needed. We let go of evening plans and activities and settled into a quietness, the day defined by mealtimes and dishes, by long walks and evening bike rides with the kids. Without anywhere to go, we spent more time in the yard, completing tasks I had figured would take years. I ordered plants by the pallets. Big bluestem, more switchgrass, sedge for the slightly shaded slopes, prairie blazing star, and rosinweed. I once again drove with the kids to the native plant nursery and picked up a parsley hawthorn, a red buckeye, and four winged sumac. At the end of one life and the beginning of another, I dug holes and freed tangled roots from plastic and felt a kind of peace. Not the peace of a marriage revitalizing, but rather the peace of one dying. The death of my conception of marriage—the belief that my husband and I must revolve around this one thing.
As I crouched on the earth, my hands stained from clay and mud, the plants began to teach me larger truths. Sometimes relationships end, making room for another. Sometimes we die and are reborn to each other again and again. Sometimes we must die even to ourselves.
Sometimes we must give up the belief that one death means total death, that new versions can’t grow again.
Yet even when dormant, our roots are often spreading, pushing through the rocky, clay soil. Stretching deep, storing carbon, interlacing, and creating an interconnected web so strong we cannot pull ourselves out.
Today, hummingbirds visit the wild indigo in the spring, and green lynx spiders spin their webs across bluestem in mid-summer. Run-off no longer waterfalls off of the terraces during heavy rains, but rather soaks into soil now punctured with plants and roots. Though I still have problem areas—where the oak leaves turn the soil acidic and nothing seems to grow—the yard has become a playful experiment. My children’s dinosaur figurines burrow beneath the yucca, and my father-in-law’s stepping stones form a path through sedge and grass.
At work, my students—all of them—even those who vote for conservative candidates—say they are concerned about climate change. Something must be done, they tell me, though they have little vision of what that might look like or how their worlds might have to shift.
At a community discussion about climate change, an oil and gas retiree clenches his jaw and hardens. His face grows loud and red. Oil, he says, has given us ibuprofen, which we cannot live without.
In my town, a developer clear cuts a forested parcel. For a week, the smell of smoke lingers, making its way into my house and into my daughter’s school.
On the weekend, I go to a nearby prairie, where volunteers and I collect wildflower seed for monarch waystations. As I hunch over plants with scissors and a paper bag, I once again feel it—the sudden clench of panic I’ve been carrying these past few years. The bright burst in my face, the sway of my body, the constriction in my gut. I breathe in and out as bees shift through the late-season sunflowers.
Yet each spring, the native plants in my backyard surprise me. In late March, I stalk the garden, watching for new growth, and I often don’t see it. I begin to mourn and think it must have been a hard winter, but then suddenly, a few days later, they appear: the green spikes of the grasses, the lobed leaves of the forbs, and the dappled sporadic growth of April turns rich and lush by June. Each year, the plants grow bigger and closer, and some I gave up on reappear. Each year, they remind me to be softer and patient. They remind me of the days I stood out there, wanting to flee, when anticipating how the plants would come up the next year was sometimes the only thing that kept me rooted. The only thing that helped me breathe.
My marriage has dissipated, becoming something softer I cannot name. And in that way, it has been reborn. My husband still smiles at me when he finds me mud-caked in the garden, and together we are raising two kids. I cannot say anything else. Beyond the question of staying or going is something to tap into, and it is into this that I have learned to ground myself. To become and to be.