There are friends who know where the bodies are buried. I have hands that know the earth: an intimacy that tells me that the ferns will come back to us. I know his tender fingers and I know their wisdom: where to dig for worms, plump and unhurried. They slither away from my son’s tiny hands, but he is too swift.

The land is a calendar: Plums in July. Two months after that, there are apples and pears. Figs in October. In January and February, we pray for rain and let the grass grow as tall as it pleases. At the end of March, we put in the tomatoes. By May, the hummingbird is building her nest in the red flood of the bottlebrush tree, the one that lit up when I was away giving birth. We turn water into life, rain into sacred fruit.

I have friends who eat the plum jam straight from the jar with a spoon. It’s the cardamom, I tell them. It warms you from the inside. I whispered some black pepper into it as well, some spice for your soul. The sun on your kind face in the middle of winter. Holding your cheeks with the same hands that turn the dirt into something life-giving. The ones that bring things back to life. Eyes that turn to the sky to wait for the rain of fruit.