I hear crisp leaves scratch each other as they fall through the trees. Sailing down yellow in the mist, they are like lost boats. The spiders are gone; just a few sticky strands of silk left behind. A hummingbird hums past me and I wonder what she is finding to eat. A robin tweets in the orchard. I see her sitting in the top twigs of the persimmon tree. She seems lonely. The orange balls dangling from bare branches look like holiday decorations. No one eats persimmons anymore. The farmer put up a new no-trespassing sign in front of it, just in case a person like me should think to snatch one. I asked him why, and he couldn’t explain it. But I saw the love in his eyes. They were his mother’s favorite fruit; now they remind him of her. He lives alone with his persimmons. Such small things matter so much to us.
Between bouts of typing, I have started a new project in my garden, a tiny place on rented land. When the sun is so far south, it changes color. The light is a darker yellow and the sky is teal. My circadian rhythm is adjusted by the light. This new busywork is making soil in containers, barrows and metal trash cans. I’ve drilled holes for air and water to make a layer cake of rot. It’s an old family recipe. I crush dried leaves in my fists over a barrow of old root balls like I’m breaking parsley stalks into soup. A tablespoon of fish emulsion, a pinch of mycorrhizal powder, the empty husks of snails, a chopped Halloween pumpkin. For three or four months I’ll let it ferment in the winter rain.
The skin of the pumpkin is disappearing under fuzzy white mold. The mold changes how it smells. The smell changes how I feel. Smug. Mold is my winter crop. Microbes swarm between me and my garden in a foreign exchange program. My cells, my gut bacteria, my immune system, my neurotransmitters, my blood make me what I am. On my knees in the damp, I imagine the soil as Earth’s placenta mediating life above and below to protect us. The beneficence of that idea reassures me. Placenta mediates the immune systems of mother and child to enable them to live separately in one body. Microscopic organisms communicate and collaborate to protect life. Our cells have the intelligence to keep us alive.
Over Thanksgiving with family we were exposed to covid and now my partner’s lungs are phlegmy; his breathing is slurpy. I squeeze a fresh lemon into a shot glass with a teaspoon of honey and a few dashes of cayenne, pop it in the nuke for twenty seconds and serve scalding hot. He shoots it and says Wow. We’ll never know if it helps. But I get some satisfaction from the look on his face. Emotionally, I’m pouring hot pepper on a slug, marking my territory.
The lesson I take from the pandemic is that the microbes are apex, not us. We are big dumb materialists. We could live without the internet. But without the microscopic life forms, we could not exist. There will always be pandemics. In the ongoing war between biota, we are just collateral damage. I get it. I was once a single cell organism. I once lived inside another person’s body the way a seed lives in the soil. I had an immune system before I had a brain. I was home to bacteria before I could breathe. I was assembled cell by cell by other cells who existed before me. I am an organism of organisms.
In the new theory of everything, we humans are just the manifestation of the microbes. Consciousness is the product of biochemistry. My body is a process that appears to be me. There is no separation between my mind and my body. There is no mental and physical. My body generates my experience of mind. That theory makes sense to me. I’m not a religious person, but I do talk to my bacteria. I tell them happy stories to encourage them not to kill me. So far, it’s working.
I know it’s my microbes that crave my garden and I’m giving them what they want. My jeans have brownish stains over my knees. When my hands are dirty, I feel a sense of belonging. My plants know it. Even my houseplants know it. This time of year we lean on each other for support. I feed their microbes, they feed mine. Next year when I eat a bean from my garden, I’ll be eating the soil I’m cooking up now. That’s the cycle of life, broken only by the porcelain bowl that stops me from burying my excrement in my garden. Also, the dogs. What a mess that would be. I’m all in for the cycle of life, as long as it doesn’t leave footprints on the rug. Call me a hypocrite if you must.
I wish we were smarter. I wish our brains weren’t so slow to evolve from the essentialism of hoarding to the fast and small ways of minimalism. It’s as though we are in a race to kill the planet so we can buy more Labubus. Why isn’t there a virus that kills plastic? Viruses adapt so much faster than we do. My partner and I have been vaccinated against the various invisible threats. We went to the clinic to have his lungs examined and it turns out he does not have covid or the flu. And yet there is a microscopic motherfucker inside him generating those same symptoms. We douse it with more of my hot shots. We go for walks outside to freshen his blood because the pharmacy is out of leeches. I try to talk him into befriending his gut bacteria by putting less sugar in his coffee. That’s not happening.
Now I’m in total escape mode talking to you instead of him because I’m getting more juice from the alphabet than from this Nancy Nurse routine. Meanwhile, he’s gone out to run an errand and take the dog to the park. He’s well enough to do that. Hopefully an hour from now he’ll walk in the front door singing. That would produce microbial joy in my dopamine receptors. Persimmons in winter, white mold in fermenting soil, the sound of a man singing, the smallest matters make a big difference to me. Probably you, too. I hope you’re well. Thanks for reading.
