...the world of grass was never meant to be shortened to a carpet so that the outdoors is like one big wall-to-wall room. (p225) - Louise Erdrich

Maybe this was what being in a pandemic brought forth. When everything big is out of control, you start taking charge of small things.

She slowed to pick her way through places where water was seeping up through the mats of dying grass. Rain tapping through the brilliant leaves the only sound. She stopped. The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song.

I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents’ house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it.