The Persians start their new year on the vernal equinox. This pleases me. What better time to begin again than when the earth reawakens? The pandemic followed this calendar, too. It was announced in March 2020. Now that we’ve cycled through a full year, it’s striking how much the natural world keeps me in check of what happened when.
For me, my memory of coronavirus will always be colored by my second and third miscarriages. The first I rarely count anymore– it was a chemical pregnancy, gone within a week of finding out. The second miscarriage felt doomed from the start. I took a pregnancy test the day before the WHO announced that the disease had reached pandemic level, and I thought to myself, “Well, that’s just my luck.”
This spring, when the first plants started to re-emerge in the woods behind our house, I was taken back to the same time last year when Brian furtively, almost obsessively, would go and weed out the garlic mustard that was already threatening to choke out the jack-in-the-pulpits, wild ginger, and other early plants. He needed a task that took his mind elsewhere and pulling weeds is good meditation.
I doubt if the woods are worth the work it’d take to reclaim it for native species. There’s debris that suggests it’s a former dump site, but it sits on a drumlin that boasts a grove of oak trees. Rabbits, woodchucks, and owls call it home, foxes pass through. It’s also surrounded by development. Kids forge paths and make forts. A couple of neighbors use its cover to smoke. It’s not a perfect place in terms of ecological restoration, and it’s certainly not how it was when settlers first arrived in our former cow town, but it’s made itself a useful place.
This spring, I got into the habit of making nettle and mint tea in the evenings. The nettles grow in the woods, and if you pluck them just right they don’t sting much. I was about two months post-op from the pregnancy that took out my right Fallopian tube in February 2021, and then I saw the violets.
The violets were just blooming in 2020 when I had the MVA
that removed the empty sac from my uterus. I should have been 10 weeks along. I
was sick, so sick, this time around that it shocked me to find an empty womb
during the ultrasound. I suspect I had
gestational diabetes that time around – even water tasted sweet – and I felt so
good physically after the procedure that it was hard to feel bad about losing the
pregnancy. The utter joy of my health restored buoyed me for some time.
A year later, I’m still shooting daggers at women who have six, seven month old babies. That could have been me. A year later, I’ve lost another chance and I’m not sure whether I have it in me to try again. I used to think I’d have three (maybe four, five!) children, and now it’s becoming clear that I won’t, at least not with this body.
The oaks in our woods have seen many changes since they were saplings. They’re no longer in the oak savanna, but they avoided being cut down when the sawmill was here some hundred years ago, and again when they built houses all around the drumlin. Their landscape changed, and with it their use, and yet they’re here, still useful, still enjoyed. The wood violets still grow around them. They’ll be here next year.
