.mornings in the garden.

I shed a few tears in the garden this morning. I’ve been feeling so tender these days, grateful and fulfilled by the simple pleasures of harvesting carrots, watching the zucchini, cucumbers, and kale continue to grow, and gathering epazote to dry for winter beans.

I cut three Hopi sunflowers and laid them in the grass to dry for winter dye projects. As I moved through these small acts of tending and gathering, I found myself missing my nana. She has been gone for thirteen years now. There are so many things I’ll never know, garden knowledge I didn’t get to observe, and a part of my mom that left with her.

This is my third year gardening here, in the garden that was once my Nana’s. But something feels different this year. I’m gardening with my son in my first garden. Where I watched the transformation of the land and began to understand what it means to tend something living.

And yet, alongside that grief, I feel deeply grateful to have found a kindred spirit in this garden—something to accompany me through my most tender days. My heart feels full knowing that Amado, whether he remembers these moments consciously or not, will carry a kind of cellular knowledge of his first year: that he observed, crawled through the dirt, watched things grow, and eventually ate from its abundance—carrots, cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, strawberries, and blackberries.

It feels like the deepest rhythm of life—the tending, the growing, the grieving, the nourishing, the returning. A quiet continuity between those who came before us, those who walk beside us now, and those who are just beginning to learn what it means to care for the earth.