Pools

In the afternoon I planted bulbs. I’d never done that before. It was harder to dig into the ground than I thought. The wooden dibber, a tool for making holes for bulbs, wasn’t much help. I looked in the shed and in the tool cupboards for a trowel or a shovel. Finding none, I brought out a crowbar and an old screwdriver. It was hard work but the crowbar worked okay. I discovered moist, loose soil under the deck, and carried loads of it on a piece of wood to where I was planting. Tulips and crocus: tulips along the steps to the deck, crocus under a tree. Pushing a bulb into a hole in the ground before winter struck me as being an act of hope. An act of faith. I like the simplicity of playing in the dirt. I like the complexity of how many plant species there are, and all their different ways of growing.

At dusk we went down to the beach. It was low tide and there were tidal pools among the rocks. We walked out among them. The sky was a pastel pink and purple, reflecting in the pools. The greens and yellows of the seaweed had a muted way of belonging together. There were lots of little starfish resting in the water. There were periwinkles with spiky “hair” growing upward from their tops. When I picked them up they made a sucking sound. I looked into these pools for a long time, crouching down and picking up the occasional empty crab shell or odd rock. I wasn’t doing much of anything but it felt worthwhile. As we were leaving I found a surfboard fin among the rocks.

After that, at the grocery store, we talked about which kinds of apples were which: Cortland, Gravenstein, Macintosh, sweet, sour, hard, soft. In aisle 4 we dropped a bottle of olive oil and it spread outwards on the floor into a yellow-green pool, slick and unreal under the florescent lights.