Sowing Lupine Seeds

I just got back inside after planting lupine seeds that I gathered earlier in the year. After the champagne and the rain and the reaffirmation, I haven’t quite known what to do. Putting seeds in the ground seemed an appropriately hopeful and positive gesture.

I am feeling emotional. Even our victory is complicated. There is grief in it, and weariness, and after the initial burst of joy, unease and worry. The same shadows loom, and the path to peaceful transition is obstructed. I’m still reflecting on what we have been through, wondering how we will extricate, heal, reimagine, and rebuild. So ours is a shaky jubilation, a tentative one.

But joy will take root, transformed into something stronger, more enduring, and more nuanced. We’ll need to muster up sustained patience, hard work, sacrifice…there never was an easy way. Our hearts are heavy, but a better future feels attainable if we align ourselves with reason and decency again. I imagine historians will be writing about this period for decades to come. We’re just processing it in real time right now.

Also, on a personal level, I received a phone call yesterday from the brother of my old friend Rosie-of-Chicago, telling me that she had died. Rosie and I worked together in a tall, glassy office building on Wacker Drive in the early 1970s. We used to stride over to the Art Institute on our lunch breaks to warm our hands by the light of the Renoirs, worrying at the late hour on the big clock at Marshall Fields, hurrying back, inevitably late, but laughing. (When you're young, you think you'll always be young.) Rosie was a feminist, very passionate about the ERA. (To this day, not yet ratified by every state!) Her job was to edit educational materials for the now-defunct Savings and Loan Institute, and I was the front desk receptionist, and she took me seriously in a time when most people viewed me simply as the ornamental dark-haired girl in knit dresses who answered calls and served coffee to the men. Rosie had a higher opinion of me than I had of myself. She was generous, outspoken, exuberant, and kind, and I never knew anyone else quite like her.

The last time I saw Rosie was in 1994, during a quick stop in Chicago. But I sort of thought she would always be there, on the other end of a spontaneous phone call, or visiting via a chatty handwritten note. I feel blessed to have had such a friend across these many decades.

Sometimes it seems I've lived many lives. And I think I like the current one best, dazzling in its sovereignty but intricately and mysteriously connected to all the others. Outside my window at this very moment, two tiny yellow-breasted birds are perched on the highest branches of the Cape honeysuckle vine in front of the house. I believe they are lesser goldfinches, based on a hasty online search, and they are already gone. They were lovely and twitchy, trembling with the branch, not still long enough for me to get a good look, but I am buoyed by their brief visit. I am feeling thankful and astonished, as well as bewildered––it’s been quite a story, all of it.

I took the above picture a few years ago when the hillside behind my house erupted into glorious blue bloom, all on its own. I certainly don’t expect to replicate that extravaganza, but I’ll be watching for a few distinctive little seedlings to appear. It’s all about possibility.