Winter garden

Winter garden is temporary acquiescence.
It sings of silence. Life suspended. Of turning inward and down and deep.
Weeds that seemed to taunt me, to mock my efforts mid-summer are now submissive.
No fight left. No desire to conquer.
They have laid down their bones, their armor.
Anyone believing it is a truce, would be mistaken.
But it is reprieve. I revel in it.
I love the dark and deep that is the earth smelling of leaf decay.
I love the skeletons that were last season's fierce vines.
They rattle in the wind and tell me stories of warmth, of facing upwards, of tea mornings spent together in solitude.

Life, death, rebirth;  constant reminders.
The ongoing cycle of the growing-dying things here.
My life which has always seemed to pivot in the garden.
My center seems to come back and back and back.





Moss covered hand-prints in concrete telling of children who are no more.
Their now-hands will never fit that small shape again.
Mosaic fragments of a life that no longer exists, hiding beneath
hibernating rose bushes. A pin prick view into the past.
Rebirth isn't always some mystical idea.
It's happening all around. Every second.
I know this to be true, in the winter garden.






There is no choice...
Change is the crux of everything.
Our conclusion is in the stories.
In the building of fragments.
In the shifting of seasons. In how well we navigate loss.

Through moving hulls of seasons past, and protecting soil, in clipping of rose hips, and
clank of shovel I find the center of the universe.
Everything hushed. Everything waiting.
To show me the exuberance of growth untamed yet again.
How "life persists" is the constant and death not separate.
It never was.