The Peach Tree
A project about neighboring, living memory, stewardship, and reciprocity
“There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory… To us, trees seem to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.”
-Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses
Winter
I always avoided making work in Harrisburg during the winter months. The winters in the Northeast feel pretty brutal to so many of us who live here. And it’s not just the cold and the snow or ice, it’s this thing that my crew calls “Pennsylvania Grey.” Now, Pennsylvania Grey is a particular weather, dampness, chill, and colorlessness. And I am fairly certain there is a direct thread from Pennsylvania Grey to Seasonal Affective Disorder. Toward the end of February, I feel like I am affectively circling the fucking drain.
And maybe in response to this overall feel of the season, I tend to overlook the particular gifts some days offer when the sun shines in spite of the cold. Not this year, baby. I’ll let myself rest in the fog and emptiness of Pennsylvania Grey and when the sun comes out, I will put on my winter coat and gather just enough light to feed me through the end of my wintering.
January
The cold air, the skeletons of my garden, the orange sun touching the houses and reaching down the alleys. It makes the tall structures glimmer at their tops.
Julie is walking the dog. She apologizes for wearing sweats because she’s been working from home. I’m just so happy to see her during hibernation months.
Phil sees me walking and pulls the car over to tell me he’s working on Peter’s folks house around the corner, that our birthdays are coming up and he loves me.
And Tyler arrives on my porch with his laundry in tow—his cousin broke their washer and he is out of clean clothes.
February
The seed pods of the milkweed that someone before us planted are poking out of the snow. I know we’ll be seeing the monarchs again this summer.
The figure of my jade plant moves down the front of the dresser I saved from the basement of my parents house. I am astonished that both have survived this long. I hope they both outlive me with minor pockmarks.
Back in November, I tucked Smooth Blue Aster that I picked from the treeline of the lake into the pages of a large book. I’m pretty sure they were planted by Rocky and Sandy, unofficial gardeners of that part of Italian Lake. Their house on the corner and the hill down to the lake blooms in succession through the warmer seasons. I managed to pluck the last of the blooms before the winter hoping to make cyanotypes at some point–forgot about them until now.
They are another thing that comes from the earth that is the color of an amethyst. A birthstone flower for my birthday.
Snow in the city starts out so beautiful but gets gross fast. The empty Plan-B box discarded in dirty snow in the alley outback of Kate & Phil’s doubles down on how gross.
Kate stepped out the front door wearing tights! And earrings! She had a job interview down at Gettysburg Hospital. Her clinicals to become a midwife will end sooner than I realized–she’s well on her way to “catching 40 babies.” In practice, the language is meant to decenter birth workers and distinguish them as support for the person who is actually delivering the baby. But the phrase still makes me giggle–implying that the babies are being thrown to her.
From the alley we see Veronica coming down the street. She’s walking Daffodil and on her way to the store to get eggs.
The two of them are working on opening the Harrisburg Tool Library with some other folks and right now they’re dealing with a very particular flavor of adversity–a man who is big-mad that he didn’t get his way.
