It’s Wednesday, November 4th
by Polly Buckingham
Mercury is just out of retrograde, it’s the morning after a yet-undeclared election where deaths from climate change, inequity, and Covid are all at stake, and I’m cutting up the last two chanterelles from a disturbingly dry mushroom season.
After the mushrooms, I’ll cut up two garden potatoes, one purple, one pink, and the rest of my cubanelle peppers and fry a couple eggs. I dried and stuffed the other hundred some peppers, and all that remains is a handful of fresh banana peppers and poblanos. As my breakfast is sautéing, I’ll bake one of the sixty some winter squash on racks in the back room; the temperature there is 55 degrees so the squash will last through the winter. I’ve named this variety “That Crazy Plant”; it comes from the seeds of a mystery squash that took over my garden the summer of 2019. It looks like a cross between a pumpkin and a turban squash and has a remarkably sweet bright orange flesh. I’ve moved the potatoes and carrots from the garage to the backroom, a room otherwise delegated to the dog and the squash, after a surprise snowstorm where temperatures dropped from the 60 to 12 degrees and some six inches of snow fell. I’ve spent the last few nights talking on the phone with friends while cutting the tops off hundreds of carrots. Over the next month, I’ll juice them, dry them, grill them, sauté them, ferment them, share them with friends and the foodbank, and eat them raw.
People say they have to find things to do during Covid, but I find I cannot get through all I need to do, though I often wonder about what I’m doing and why. I wonder about the notion of work, of a job. I don’t need a winter of food stored in freezers and dried in cabinets. And yet, answering this calling to grow food, to feed people, to understand what it means to grow most of what you eat, feels necessary. I feel compelled to do it, and it helps keep me steady—planting seeds, popping dried beans from their pods, saving carrot blossoms and sunflower heads.
Still, my job has always been to write, and it has always come first. I don’t have children: I dream and I write. I struggle with the simple tasks of daily living—paying bills, making doctor appointments, cleaning my house, calling for repairs, even opening mail. I was the child who couldn’t regularly brush her hair or teeth or clean out her locker or show up anywhere on time because she was dreaming and writing and writing and dreaming. I have never been suited for much else, and it has saved me throughout my life. Made me whole. Made my soul feel steady. Writing is that great creative force, that beautiful arc across the night sky, dusty and eons deep. It is the most important thing I have to offer. I have a duty first to vision. A sort of seeing that is transmutable and necessary to me and to the world.
Let’s be honest: I haven’t written enough since Covid sent us into isolation, despite the very clear invitation—that is, long periods of time alone at home. A dream, really, an ideal field, like a spring garden covered with the compost of fall leaves. Every day I wake up forgiving myself for not writing enough. I try to be good to myself. But it hurts not to write.
The apricot smell of the chanterelles steadies the panic that tries to rise up in me. What I know about this day as Mercury moves out of retrograde is how deep the change this country has to make, how deep the change I have to make. My job in this moment, on this day, is to transform. I don’t know how long it will take, or even what it looks like, but it must happen. And only a lifetime—fifty-three years—of dreaming and writing and writing and dreaming could have prepared me for this most necessary job. I have to trust my own role in the movement from seed to fruit to fallow earth.
Later today, I will clean with a dry cloth several of the winter squash in my backroom. The dog bed is still covered with carrot tops and unfinished carrots the dog got into a few nights ago—purple and orange and yellow and scarlet carrots, crooked and straight, enormous and tiny. The squash are weighty in my hands, and they glow as I wipe the cloth over their imperfections.
❤
Polly Buckingham’s collection of poetry,
The River People, was just released by Lost Horse Press. Her story collection
The Expense of a View won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. Her chapbook
A Year of Silence won the Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award for Fiction (2014), and she was the recipient of a 2014 Washington State Artists Trust fellowship. Her work appears in
The Gettysburg Review,
The Threepenny Review,
Hanging Loose,
Witness,
North American Review,
The Moth,
New Orleans Review,
Poetry Daily and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award in 2011, 2012, and 2013. Polly is founding editor of StringTown Press and teaches creative writing at Eastern Washington University where she is editor of
Willow Springs Magazine. Learn more at
https://pollybuckingham.com/😷
Pandemic Meditations is a weekly series in which creative people share responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Find more meditations at http://www.erinpringle.com/p/pandemic-meditations-series.html
