One Can, One Wasp, One-Tenth of a Cucumber

August 10 - August 28

Hello, earthlings! It has been several weeks. My world has been busy and difficult, and I expect that yours has, too. There are simply too many things I would like to save. I have been trying to limit my news (and I do recommend Heather Cox Richardson for once-daily overviews of the most pertinent recent news, and Jess Craven for political and social activism action items, if you’re so inclined). But even a limited intake of news these days can be a daunting thing. Daily catastrophes are like grains of sand that can slowly bury you, and they get harder to wipe away as they pile up.

And so there has been less trash pickup and less writing than I would have liked, which of course can lead to a spiral of not-enoughness that makes it hard to return to those things. Sometimes it doesn’t feel right to return to small joys, when they don’t feel big enough to fix all the pains of the world. If I haven’t done my daily action items, I don’t feel like I’ve earned those small joys.

But this week, I sent a message to someone in Gaza, whose page I have been following for a long time. I sent them a picture of a flower, and they said that they used to wish to grow a field of flowers, but now they just want a single room to live in. When I asked whether I should stop sending pictures because it would make them too sad, they said, “oh no, my sister — when you send me a picture of a flower, it makes me feel better and reminds me of my dream.”

I hope we can all remember to dream.

Alright, deep breath in. Out. Get some water or tea or hot chocolate. Take a moment at the rest stop before you continue on with your day.

Jenna

An abundance of roses near the water in Nova Scotia.

August 10

one flattened Bud Light can

The last time I was here, driving my car along this Vermont gravel road, I told my friend it would be an excellent road to walk along. Now here I am, and I was right. Although I have to get back to my car to drive back home to go to work at 6am and then return home to pack for my flight the next morning at 9am, and the very thought of all of these impending Things To Do makes me want to start sprinting down the road, I try very hard to enjoy the walk. I return to caring about schedules and the catastrophe of missing a plane so easily, and sometimes I miss the woods, where it is enough just to survive. Despite the cans on the road and the occasional car, the woods are all around me, dry and warm-smelling. It is still enough just to survive. I practice remembering it in the woods, so that I might become better at remembering the rest of the time.

August 11

a dozen pieces of ripped-up paper towel

Partway through my walk, I veer towards a red bag and then stop when I realize it is not a red bag, but a thin red blanket draped over the shoes of a sleeping person on one of the benches. It’s warm enough, now, for people to sleep outside, unlike the winter that freezes unsheltered bodies solid. So many empty rooms in my university building, so many empty houses in this city, and still people must huddle their way through the winter on the streets so they can relax, slightly, over the summer. The heat waves may come, but at least the threat of freezing to death is gone.

There are several empty cans and bottles around the bench, but I don’t pick any of them up. I don’t want to disturb someone resting, and I don’t know if any of those bottles are still important to them. Across a field, under the cherry tree, there is a jacket and a few mostly-empty condiment containers, a lighter and about a dozen pieces of a paper towel. I have no idea who they belong to or if they matter to someone. In my mind, if someone cared about those objects, they wouldn’t just leave them outside, but that is the luxury of someone with a secure home in which to store things. Without that, where do you put the things you care about? You can only keep so much on your body. Or maybe, if everything can be taken away in one fell swoop, if you can return to your sleeping quarters and find your bits of stored-up security gone, then you learn not to care too much about things. It is too dangerous.

I leave the lighter and the jacket. I don’t know if anyone will come back for them, but I leave them in case they belong to someone who didn’t have anywhere else to put them, whose closest thing to home was the branched roof of a cherry tree.

August 27

One wasp

I rode with my father into Boston today. The morning was cool and the sky was a bright blue, the sort that ought to be unbearable when it covers such a wide field of vision but somehow is not. Halfway through our drive, at a stoplight, I noticed a wasp crawling on my window. I assumed it would fly away when we started moving again, but instead it crouched, right legs bent and set, left legs splayed out for purchase. Its wings whipped a little in the wind, but it did not leave. I wondered, briefly, if something was wrong with its wings, but both of them seemed to be fully intact and extendable. Thirty, thirty-five, forty miles an hour. The kinds of winds that can pick up umbrellas and knock over trash cans, certainly heavy enough to carry the body of a wasp. And still, it crouched against the window, pointed abdomen twitching in an unintentional dance.

I, like many people, spent my younger years fearing wasps. Even when I learned to like spiders and honeybees and other flying, buzzing insects, I retained my fear of wasps. Something about the pointedness of their bodies, the aggressive buzz, the striped yellow jackets that shone with metallic menace. And of course, the crawling fear of reaching out to pick a raspberry and closing the tips of my fingers on a small, crunching, suddenly furious exoskeleton.

Over the past few years (I wrote “fear years”, originally, which also seems appropriate), I have learned to tolerate, even respect, wasps. I remember that despite how I bat them away from my ice cream, how I have even reached up to pick a leaf out of my hair and pulled out a wasp instead — even in these moments, they have never stung me. Perhaps I am lucky, but perhaps wasps are also not as malicious as popular stories say.

Still, I have not until this moment felt fascination, even concern, for a wasp. But now when my father presses harder on the gas, trying to knock the little body off, I bite back the urge to ask him to slow down. What if a wing tears? What if the wasp loses its grip and is carried away, flailing, out of view? But it holds on. I have rarely gotten to see the underside of a wasp before, or been close enough for long enough to see the tiny spikes on each foot, which might work like velcro, or the impossible narrowness of the place where thorax and wings meet abdomen and it seems the connection point vanishes to nothing, or the little fuzzy threads inside the mouth. When we stop at red lights, the wasp sometimes crawls around the window. When we slow down from higher speeds, it doesn’t move, as if slightly dazed. It can keep walking around on the window until about 25mph, which makes some sense, as that’s a fairly normal wind speed for sustained gusts around here. Anything over that will cause it to hunker down. Once I look over and see it rubbing a front leg over its face, bending down an antenna like my bunny does when she cleans her ears.

We reach Boston and park the car in a garage, and tell another person passing by about our morning hitchhiker. We’ve gotten inside the elevator when the man runs up to the doors and calls, “Hey, mister! Your bee is gone!”

It is not quite trash-picking. But perhaps the wasp was out of place and needed to be moved to a different home. In any event, there is a little less fear and a little more curiosity in the world than there was before this morning.

August 28

one-tenth of a cucumber

The cucumber came from our garden at home. It is one of the few things that grows well despite our lack of time and gardening acumen, and I intended to take this one to a friend in Boston. But she is sick, and I have been walking around for several hours in the sun, and I am very hungry and thirsty. I send her a text: “Please forgive me – I fear I have eaten your cucumber.” She does not respond, so either she has declared vengeance against me for my gastronomic betrayal or she is resting because she’s sick.

I am learning small things about the garden this year, the sort of things you only learn when you stay in one place and watch the vegetables swell day by day. This species of cucumber is less bumpy than last year’s batch, and tends to yellow at the bottom when it is overripe. The flesh inside that yellowed skin tastes tart, and the seeds are downright sour, which is why I must leave the last tenth of the cucumber in a paper bag. I want to leave the seeds under this tree in a small, well-ordered park in Brookline, but I imagine some local homeowner’s association would rip it out for marring the perfect uniformity of the tree-lined grass. Perhaps this is an ungenerous and inaccurate assumption. As I walk back along the quiet streets, picking up bottle caps and half-sheets of flyers (“Join the First Year Student Outreach Program!”), I see a yard with soccer balls, a porch with a giant blowup unicorn. Not everyone who lives in these rich, kempt houses is sterile. There is life here, too, growing up quietly in the pavement cracks.

Life growing quietly in the middle of the city.