Watch the grass grow

On a spring day three years ago, the river climbed out of its banks.

Unseasonable heat and heavy rain had hit the snowpack high in the mountains, sending a winter’s worth of meltwater in a pulse down the tributaries, into the mainstem, and spilling across the valley floor.

Work seemed unlikely under these circumstances, so I visited the flood instead.

In the park, the river wrapped its arms around cottonwood trunks and overtopped the grass in gentle, reaching puddles. I watched the river push up in roiling parabolas against bridge piers, then drove to the thin riffle where it dashed across the highway. I stopped at a friend’s property, where the river filled swales and ran through the garden and lapped just short of the house’s back stairs. “It’s the Everglades,” my friend said, as we stood on the porch surveying all that mirrored water.

Inside, my friend’s teenage daughter showed me into the bathroom, where she was fostering seven kittens. She placed the smallest—a gray fluff of a tabby—on my outstretched forearm. The kitten toddled up to my shoulder, then curled against my neck and fell asleep. She chose me. And the next day, I chose her.

One week later, I was in a car accident so bad it is hard even now to talk or think about.

It wasn’t my fault; I walked away physically unharmed. But the person who hit me left the scene in a flight-for-life helicopter, and afterwards, I discovered that something inside me had tilted at a dangerously steep angle. Over the coming months, as I wrestled with nightmares and the persistent sensation of falling into space, Israel began its genocidal campaign in Gaza, murdering tens of thousands of people with U.S. support. Then, a relationship with someone I loved, and with whom I imagined a future, came to an abrupt end.

Nothing felt safe or within control. And yet I was safe, and the kitten remained, warm and wiggly, her body unaware of threat, determined to thrive, growing every day in spite of everything. When she settled purring onto my chest in the evening, my muscles would unclench, and I would realize that I’d been bracing for hours as if for a hit. My boyfriend and I had named the kitten for the tall wild grass in my yard, where she liked to hide. Now, I stood alone and watched her among its blades, squinting her eyes at the sun, lifting her nose to the breeze, and I felt the tickle of something growing and green in me as well.

To be alive, I suppose, is to try to hold the strange all-at-onceness of beauty and pain, good fortune and tragedy, love and atrocity.

Most summers, wildfires burned in our mountains, in surrounding states, in Canada. Under a sky copper-colored with smoke, I watered houseplants, lingering over fresh leaves opening like hands, the unfurling stems of begonias, the fragrant, preciously-infrequent night blooms of cacti. In the yard, the ponderosa I planted added a whorl of branches each year, its trunk filling to the thickness of my wrist. The aspens leafed and spread and the deer ate their tops and made them bushy. The sagebrush took over its corner by the front walk, full with the buzz of bumblebees. The kitten became a joyous lunatic of a cat.

Then, last fall, my dog of 15 years—keeper of all my stories, coyote singer, full with the wisdom of smells—began her slow slide from life. I laid her on a sheepskin on the porch on a warm October day. While she slept, I scattered native wildflower seeds in all the bare patches of the yard. Two weeks later, she died in my arms.

Winter came—lonelier without her, with less snow than I’ve yet seen in these parts—then gave way to a spring much warmer than it should be, teetering on the brink of global warfare. Walking barefoot through the bunchgrass, I spotted a single green leaf covered in silver hairs sprouting from cracked earth. I dropped to my hands and knees and found two more, then a third. The first shoots of arrowleaf balsamroot—a perennial sunflower that grows in clusters with furling leaves big as mule’s ears. Each morning after, I crouched on the ground in my pajamas with my coffee, finding the starbursts of tiny lupine leaves, feathery baby yarrow leaves, more arrowleaf. Tiny new lives, rooting in our small plot land ground, whatever future may come. The cat followed after me, padding soft through the dust.

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