by Marin Sardy

I’m thinking of the word nurture, how it’s so often placed in opposition to nature, with versus their slippery hinge. But that has always felt wrong to me, maybe because when I was young and my family at odds with itself, the things that fed and watered me were the wild ponds of our Anchorage neighborhood, the crooked old spruce trees, and the moose that wandered among them. Now my husband is the green thumb in the family, the one who has for years grown succulents and cacti from fallen pieces he picked up while running and carried gingerly home. They thrive in his care—that spiny nopal, those serrated aloes—in the earthenware pots we bought in Tucson, heavy-glazed and shining. And each winter when the darkness comes on and the nights grow long, he brings them inside and arranges them at the edges of our dining room, safe from the frost. And in the mornings as I sip on my coffee, I’m surrounded by a pulpy menagerie that hides the cold tile floor. In those months the room grows close, secret, as the plants breathe out their oxygen, green lobes glowing in the low light. It feels sort of fetal, maybe—or feral, if that’s a good thing. I travel back to my beginnings, to the forest moss and the long pale lichen. Do you know the feeling of rescue, of escape? It’s in the way there is someone behind this. Someone for whom versus is not a necessary word. Someone who offers up love like it is contrary to nothing, just a part of the earth.

Marin Sardy is the author of the memoir The Edge of Every Day (2019) and co-creator of the Substack Psychic Telephone (marinsardy.substack.com). Sardy’s essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Guernica, and many other journals. She teaches writing for Authors Publish and Writing Workshops.