Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
by Kathryn Kulpa
1. Remember that winter chills the earth each year, chills with hardness and refusal and what will look like death, but that cold, bone-chip soil where nothing grows is not the end.
2. Read seed catalogs, pages bright with splashes of iris and zinnia, sugar snap peas, beefsteak tomatoes, rainbow chard, and believe these colors will return to your life.
3. Share saved seeds with friends; let last year’s leaves mulch like cozy blankets for the sleeping ground; be faithful, be hopeful, be patient.
4. Press your heel into the spade, when the day comes, and the air smells of rain and renewal; when the wind is a whisper instead of a howling curse; when the sun’s light is no longer a cold prison searchlight but a warm lantern; now you can turn the earth, and think of the millions before you who have turned black dirt, red clay, sandy brown loam, who have sorted out rocks and roots, watched worms and centipedes hasten away from pitchfork tines.
5. Pound stakes, mark off rows, dig holes, strew seeds, more than you will need, and know that you will lose some to cold or too much rain, or too little, to birds and woodchucks, squirrels and beetles, but you will not lose all.
6. Trust that pale shoots will push their way through earth, that small green stems will fork into two leaves, that leaves will grow, that beauty and love cannot be kept underground forever, that bitter fruit will never take root for long, and that someday you will clasp hands around a table with friends once more, that all of you will have a place at that table, that you will cut a slice of sweet pie for everyone and there will be enough, there will always be enough.
KATHRYN KULPA is a writer, editor, and librarian with work in Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions. She is a 2025 writer-in-residence at Linden Place in Bristol, RI, where she hopes to grapple with the ghosts of history.
