My garden is down to dirt and insects. It’s sprinkled with soggy yellow and orange cherry tomatoes and potatoes that pop up like prizes, as I turn the soil.
The wheelbarrow is full of black, year old donkey manure, alive with beetles, spiders and worms.
I toss a shovelful of manure onto the garden and Mandy texts me from the Brooklyn Museum. She is seeing Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party for the first time.
I picture the installation of dinner plates with vulva imagery, each one dedicated to a woman who made history, as I nourish my garden with donkey manure.
I bend over and pick up the bright orange cherry tomato that I stepped over twice already on my way into the barn yard. It’s firm between my thumb and finger so I pop it into my mouth. A syrupy burst of sweet, then skin too tough to chew. I spit it out the skin, but the sweetness stays as I fill up the last load of manure.
There’s an acorn in the manure pile.
It’s rusty gold with dark green stripes running from top to bottom. The nearest oak tree is way off in the woods. I wonder who buried it there. I think of the chipmunk that Zip chases. I put the acorn in my pocket, as if it’s a trinket to be saved.
Then I take it out again.
I poke it deep into the pile of manure so it has a chance to grow.
I think of the oak trees I keep seeing in my visualizations and dreams. The oak tree that grew in the back yard of the house I grew up in.
I picture a thin twig with a single oak leaf on it growing from the manure pile. I think…. I will put a fence around it to keep the animals from eating it.
And maybe when I’m gone, it will still be there.
