1.

As a child, sitting in front of
the bookcases at home,
I often revisited Beth’s death,
in Little Women, that morning in May
when a breeze blew floral scents
and birdsong into her bedroom.
In illness, Beth was resigned,
buoyed by her Christian faith,
yet the scene imbued me with
a lifelong yearning to be outdoors,
to waft through days among lilacs
and lily of the valley,
those briefest of blossoms, I learned.
I’d finish the chapter and run outside.

2.

Handyman Seth’s sanding
our windowsills before glazing
and painting, my peripheral vision
picking up the sweep of the sander,
my ears its high-pitched whine.
A painting in the dining room
of New England apple trees
reflects Seth at work on the ladder.
I’m inside, ordered off yardwork
while my tick bites heal,
looking outside at vines run amok,
at an untended garden where leaf litter
provides perfect tick habitat
and where I’d rather be.

3.

Sophia, the little girl who lives
next door, stands under our bird feeder,
outside the kitchen window,
looking down. She looks up and sees
my husband in the window.
She waves. He waves. She points her finger
toward the ground and looks again
at my husband. He waves. She runs back
to her house, returns with a piece of paper.
She’s printed, “You have a really cool
leopard slug in your backyard!”
He goes outside. He tells me this story
when I get home, and I wonder:
Is leopard slug a real name?

4.

A friend of mine wrote a novel
called What Girls Learn.
I am older now and I think
of knowledge as slow accretion,
a layering of fresh paint over old,
of vines climbing and twisting
around the deep-rooted holly tree,
of the return and the vanishing
of ticks and apple blossoms,
the amassing of this idea or that
about art, the novels and paintings
we live among, or a girl’s discovery
on a summer morning in Massachusetts
of a limax maximus in a neighbor’s backyard.