Last Rites
Saying goodbye & de-centering the human
Many people have moved more than me - bigger and more frequent moves across longer distances I am sure - but I don’t know if anyone yet has managed to be as dramatic about it as I’m being. The feelings are big! This is their story.
I think part of it is how drawn out the in-between is - we found out we were leaving at the end of January so we’re coming up on almost half a year of preparing to go, and at some point I don’t want to do any of the things that are necessary or good or even fun to do anymore.
Don’t want to think about the garden or the new plants that need watering in this heat wave. Don’t want to tend anything. Don’t want to identify a new bird in the yard. Don’t want to appreciate the new cascade of blooming native wildflowers in the pollinator patches that I planted (spiderwort is done and it’s purple coneflower season now, in spite of myself I will tell you this because I can’t unsee it). Don’t want to sit on the porch with my coffee in the morning and watch what the birds and the rabbits are up to. Don’t want to enjoy the time I have left. Don’t want to go get breakfast tacos from the truck at the farmer’s market and have a cute little Saturday morning. Don’t want to savor it. Don’t want to be hypnotized by the wind teasing the branches and leaves of the trees. Don’t want to do the last garlic harvest. Don’t want to pick the first and last gooseberries. Don’t want to sit with the complicated feelings that are coming up. Don’t want to put my hand on the sun-warmed bark of the oak and say goodbye. But the adolescent grackle pecking at the window feels like the whole world asking me to come out and be a part of it, to stop denying these parts of myself and the life I’ve been living.
In preparation for the move I’ve been going through every single belonging and deciding whether to move it with me to the next place or give it away. It is always wild going through these old files and seeing the things I’ve kept year after year, moving them across the country multiple times. It brings up some very intense feelings of nostalgia that I’m such a sucker for, but it also confirms something that may sound silly. It reminds me that my life is my life, and there is concrete proof that I lived it.
Anyway, I found a quotation scrawled in my handwriting on a sheet of paper that I think must have been from the end of high school, which means I’ve been hanging on to it for two whole-ass decades. The quotation is attributed to a high school friend and reads: “I think I realized that today and focused on it without knowing because now I’m just waiting for the day we can go back to that old familiar routine, and we can’t, ever, and so I’m ready to go.” And that pretty much sums up how these last six months have felt. Seventeen year-old Mere and all that she was feeling reaches through the years to high-five thirty-seven year-old Mere and all that I’m feeling now, a resonance that echoes across what feels like at least five different lifetimes.
“Endings are safe” is a little internet graphic I saw on social media in the last few weeks that I have been holding onto and trying to shoehorn my experience into, trying to make myself feel it. But I don’t feel that way at all. Endings, especially this ending, feel profoundly unsafe - I feel at risk of drowning in my feelings and never being able to pull myself back out, wallowing in them for the rest of my life. I don’t know how an ending can be safe except to cut and run, to French exit my entire life and never be heard from again. But I think this is where a little nuance needs to come in: what if all the difficult feelings of grief - everything that’s bound up in that word - could actually be safe for me, even if it feels otherwise? What if it were safe to just be devastated, alongside being excited about the next chapter? This is always what I seem to be fighting against and always what I’m coming back to and re-learning again and again. The real truth is that my heart has never been safe, is never for a moment safe in this world, and letting go of the fantasy of control will free me up to feel other things, painful! but certainly more interesting things.
When I moved here in 2019 there was another phrase I was holding onto that felt aspirational, which was: “de-center the human.” I didn’t know quite what it meant or what it would come to mean to me but I knew that it held something important for me to explore, some seismic shift happening on a macro, a spiritual level, if you will. A way of zooming out and thinking about the world in its totality, even as I was dealing with the specifics at hand. Far from implying an abdication of responsibility or care for ongoing human struggles around the world, de-centering the human to me requires seeing very clearly the ways those human struggles are inextricably intertwined with ecological struggles. One prime example of this is the fight against Cop City in my beloved former home of Atlanta. The process of building this monstrosity of policing, whose explicit purpose is the more efficient repression of its (primarily Black) population after the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, is causing massive flooding from deforestation in the nearby (again, primarily Black) neighborhoods, contaminating the river, and causing all kinds of ecological devastation.
The thing about de-centering the human, though, is that it’s not something that can happen at only a way-up-on-high, macro level - it doesn’t work as abstraction. It only works in the concrete specificity of lived experience, lived interaction with the other-than-human beings of the world immediately around you moment by moment. It’s walking every still-alive spider or moth in the washed salad greens outside and putting it on a patch of grass no matter how much it slows down the farm’s production process. It’s letting myself be hypnotized by the way the wind ruffles the poplar leaves and forgetting about time. It’s being deeply invested in the bird drama in the yard - like the three-kestrel polycule that scared off a blue heron flying over us yesterday (not to mention the years-long process of learning to identify every single bird in the yard). It’s letting whatever plants want to come up in the yard-that-used-to-be-lawn and seeing what happens, trying to learn enough about the native ecosystems to give the plants that have been here for millenia a little space to grow. And it’s this work and this gathered knowledge that makes me so, so angry about the way that conventional agriculture and development happen in my county, state and country, which guides my actions in the political realm.
So I guess long story short I have done what I set out to do, more or less. I have experienced this seismic, spiritual shift that has fundamentally changed me (or, perhaps more accurately, allowed an animist sensibility which has always lived in me to fully emerge). And the grief that I feel about leaving these specific trees, these specific birds, these specific purple coneflowers, is the direct result and the only possible outcome of having changed my life in this way. And if not feeling this grief, or feeling much less of it, were the trade-off - if I could go back in time and choose to stay on the surface and not think or feel too much into the landscape and every being in it in order to be able to move away with a lot more ease and a lot less pain - I would not do it. I would not make that trade. So this is what it is.
I plead to I-don’t-know-who:
Don’t leave me alone with the almost-full moon, suddenly so shockingly bright for this early hour of twilight, a ghost just moments ago. Don’t leave me alone with this too-bright moon in the dusky evening fallen over the land I’ve grown to love, in which I have entangled myself terribly, lovingly. Don’t leave me alone with the bright bright bright moon and the industrious bats loosing their echoes in the air on the hunt and the hundreds of fireflies lighting up the dark like a silent disco on this humid summer night during the first heat wave of the year; the eve of the solstice. Don’t leave me alone with the moon or I might be tempted - in the absence of any other sensible course of action - to sing to her the first song that springs to mind, a song by an unknown composer:1
Evening rise, Spirit come Sun goes down when the day is done Mother Earth awakens me With the heartbeat of the Sea
over and over again until I choke on the words. Don’t let me feel silly, don’t let me turn away from the moon for not knowing what else to do, not being able to grab hold of the moment and keep it as it just blinks away like the echoes of the bats and the lights of the fireflies.
Eating / Growing
Garlic scapes in everything. I’m pickling them, I’m chopping them up and freezing them with a little oil in ice cube trays, I’m baking them into cornbread (I don’t know how but somehow we’ve accumulated several pounds of corn meal - a little on the nose for the corn belt, wouldn’t you say?).
I’ve also been relishing in using Alicia Kennedy’s green sauce template, which works better than a recipe for me because you can use all the bits you’ve got lying around and don’t know what to do with. I just made one out of radish greens, wilted arugula, garlic scapes, red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. Blended that puppy up and it was a powerful green color and I drizzled it on everything while it lasted.
I’m waiting for July to do the garlic harvest but the stalks look nice and thick so hopefully we’ll have all the garlic we need for at least another year - still haven’t quite finished eating through last year’s harvest, which feels like the definition of abundance. I am going to miss the magic of growing garlic until I have my own garden beds again! They are the one food crop I planted every fall, and I think the magic comes from starting the growing cycle as everything else is dying off and going to sleep for the winter.
From a single bulb my friend Nick yanked out of his hugelkultur bed in his yard in Atlanta and handed to me as we were saying goodbye - what a gift!! - each clove grew its own bulb, and then each clove of those bulbs could be planted the following year, and soon I had a full 10’x10’ keyhole garden bed full of garlic planted and enough to cook with all year until the new crop came in. After you plant them in the fall they just hang out, doing their secret things underground all winter and then sprout up green in the spring when you turn your back for a moment. In May or June the scapes squiggle out their delicate tendrils in curlicues, the tenderest allium form. And then the bulbs themselves get harvested in July. I just knock some of the dirt off them and leave them outside to cure for a week, then pop the bulbs into cloves, separate the seed stock (the biggest baddies of the bunch) from the eating cloves, put them in the basement in a loosely closed paper bag and grab as needed for cooking.
I hope whatever phase of life you’re in, whether you’re planting or harvesting (or both all at once), you’re doing good out there in the wide world. As always please tell me what you’ve been eating in the comments.
You can find a gorgeous rendition of this song here on the YouTube if you want to.