Some geese coursed through Columbia Heights as I lay, cheek down like a restrained patient on my little bed. The dogs, giddy at wilderness come true, barked well past their visit.

And so, after a trip to see my brother in Wyoming, I’m moving to Downeast, Maine, to my family’s century-old cabin on a lake in the truest woods I know. If I bathe, it will be on a rock and with fish. If I’m awake after dark, I will have a small flame to carry. If I touch anything, I’ll be tracing private property, not rented space, but land so dense and personal you can only rise up from it.

In weeding a garden, if you wait too long, you’re liable to have so much work to do that your momentum bowls over the actual flowers. Some flowers root so closely to weeds that you can’t take one without the other. Morning glory, blades of grass, dandelions aside, in Maine I’ll be in soil years worked over. I’ll have no garden there, but tall, hard pines with root systems meant for sitting and writing in. I’ll net the beginnings of a book, that ancient dream — I am an old fighting dog eating through chain link as if the soft bones of wild game.

All week, I’ve been having salads with lead-laced romaine I sawed out of my garden with a bread knife (the soil lab came back roughly amenable to eating). While the zinnias bore flowers like bright, frozen, textured spit fanned out at the tips of their stems, and while one cherry tomato swells out, a bunch of tightly rounded veins at the end of a vine in a cover of leaves, these benchmarks demonstrate nothing but a late blooming spring. 

Though I am going to miss the zucchini and tomato harvest, though I would have been proud to eat them, I have been given the chance to grow something heirloom, to write a book about the land’s history and my own. I have to leave the fledgling garden behind, ferret out of the dirt yard, and pioneer past roofscapes towards the simple beginning of things.

Carolyn Petri