Amy Nelson

a trip to the garden center

The garden center — known to me as the gardeners' version of a swimming pool or a lemonade stand. It is here where I could spend hours being pulled in by every petal and plant, as if my eyes only exist for the light of pretty things that grow towards the sun. Here, a blue print for happiness. Here, an understanding that rises in my mind of how to go on living without so much worry. As I run from flower to flower, I have no thoughts that my life could be written in lowercase letters, instead, I feel as though the very point of why I am here is this. I do not know what it is about my annual goal of planning the garden, sowing the seeds, and spending the rest of what I hope to be snow-less days tending to them, but I feel like all has been mended when I do.

As I am writing to you, the seasonal blues appear to have lifted, and so I have jumped from that thin trapeze directed by winter and onto a trampoline where dandelions and songs can sprout from. Time is strange and fleeting — I hope as I grow older I can learn the way of not wishing days to pass just so I can be closer to daylight in the garden. A day is a day and so many fine things can be found there.

For previous visits to the garden center, you can look here and here.

outfit details: emily and fin dress, free people boots, thrifted beret and blouse

location ✈ Sunnyside Garden

my life in photographs

I often dream of having a giant field where I am free to garden and play my banjo. Here, there is a home where the snow never shows uninvited and the kitchen stove is always brewing something for the bellies of anyone who lives or visits. I grow snapdragons in every color, they live like they're beanstalks and ladders, beginning as baby seeds in earth and stretching well above my head, even on my tallest day. The garden grows wide with so many flowers, if one is pulled by wind or weather, I don't feel like I am losing much. When all has been tended to and the dusk draws near, I find my chair that looks out into the country and I let my banjo ring. This is my often dream, and often dream of it, I do.

I'd rather be growing snapdragons in the yard and watching the bees.

This is how to leave your head or the winter or the nagging that comes on Mondays. Decorating my house with flowers and knowing there is a certain kind of satisfaction in doing these things I want to do, instead of just thinking of them and spending my days begrudging the energy required to do so. Tiny victories, that is all I am after today.

I do not know how I survived a bad day or a bruised self before I played guitar. It is in these strings where I begin again and again and again. This is our gretsch resonator, the guitar which plays best wearing a slide and used as a tool for letting your worries slide along with it. I could have found other ways to spend my time, but playing this silver stringed machine in open D makes me feel like it's a good thing life came to be the way it did.

I have been counting down the hours, the minutes, the seconds until the first sign of spring arrives. Seems to be the only poems or stories I write in the winter appear like I have no mind and only half get written, none are finished, but when the birds begin to sing again, when the day drops light onto the skin, when the berries break through the bough and the dirt of a broken garden begins to show, I know I am seeing through my own eyes again, instead of the rust colored specs of what was a gloomy winter.

We had two kittens visiting us, one with grey lines like a wild cat and one wearing what looked like a black mask. Their fur was soft like only a newborn knows softness and their heartbeats sounded like a tiny orchestra. I watched them skirt across the carpet and climb onto high couches as their tails curved and swayed. They clawed at my hair as I knelt to get closer. They made what was routinely known as a dog person laugh and grow with joy and surrender to their sweetness. Imagine a ladder and escaping out of a grey day just by holding a kitten in your arms.

Do not let these photographs mislead you - we are still waiting for the clouds to part so we can remember what it was like to have the sun on our side. We do what we can by living in a house plenty with dried flowers and cuttings from last year's garden. I title these 'my life in photographs' and I'm not entirely sure why, considering, they only reveal parts of my life, not the whole, but I cannot imagine anybody preferring to see me in my pajamas to a bouquet of bright flowers!

How has your life been lately? Tell me, what is on your mind?

Dreams and Embroidered Jeans

I would have liked for this morning to begin with a strong mug of coffee held between my hands and somebody to listen to me as I talked about the dreams I had last night. Instead, I am sitting alone in a slightly bright mood that waxes and wanes with the weather. In black ink, I write out the dreams and as I do, they begin to make even less sense and then I wonder how strange I must be to have dreams such as these. There were talking gorillas, an endless supply of watermelon growing on trees, somebody telling me the sun was on its way out, an uncle whom I haven't seen recently telling me not to be so hard on myself, cats the size of city buildings, music notes where pillows used to sit and potatoes growing where the snapdragons used to rise. When I opened my eyes this morning, I felt different than I felt when I closed them. Have you ever had that? A dream that takes off running and when it is over, if it is ever really over, you walk down the hall towards the coffee maker feeling like a new person, wondering where that old person went, all because of a dream you had as the moon stood bright.

I have never been somebody who believed dreams had a hidden meaning, most of my dreams are puzzle pieces where every edge has the same jagged shape. They don't fit together, they just exist. I am far more curious about the leftover feeling, when it stays with you, when you have already woken and yet what you felt or seen or heard lingers on. I sit here, hours later, feeling like there is something in me that wants to begin again, like roses do even after the harshest of winters, so I trade the usual dresses for denim and I walk into the usual woods where dreams of what could be have suddenly returned to me. After months of lacking any paint on the paintbrush so to speak, it is a welcome feeling — this feeling of being able to dream again.

Hello comes the prospect of sunflower seeds, goodbye goes the dreariness of a month ago.

outfit details: american eagle jacket, thrifted blouse, topshop at hudson's bay embroidered jeans, asos butterfly necktie

we came here to visit the birds

We came here to visit the birds because in doing so — we let our expectations of the day become less trivial, less want-based, less wasted, more like slumber at the end of a night or food at the first blush of morning. Standing at the hillside and looking onto the trees feels necessary for those of us who are prone to ceiling stares when we cannot sleep, those of us who feel frantic for all the lives we'll never live. To watch the birds not only means to marvel at nature or to let fresh air replace the recycled air we're so used to breathing, to watch the birds means to wander outside of our own heads for a little while, a certain kind of walking from the mind and into the wellspring of daylight and what it means to be us.