Hey fam. It’s been a while, and I’ve missed you.

I watched Tim & Charlie plant strawberries yesterday in the first rows of this year’s garden. It’s a garden we’ve fought over mostly, some years doing better than others, and some years giving up altogether. It took three weeks and too many hands to clear it this year for planting.

It has been over two years since there lived anything in that dirt besides weeds and briars. I used to think it was ugly. There were too many stalks of dog fennel to ever get it to go away. Too many tomato cages covered in vines. The mint swallowed everything. This thing designed to offer life in return for labor offered only overgrowth.

But these strawberries. Tim found them in a mess of thick weeds, they huddled under dried grass and a tangle of thorns, survivors of two years of absolutely no care, peeking out into the sunlight as if they’d been sheltering in place. He dug them up one by one, and Charlie replanted them in a row like breadcrumbs leading the lost, christening the earth with tiny heart shaped fruits.

Today, I thought about what grows again.