Each year the wild plot behind my kitchen gets more exciting.

Right now there’s lemon balm, oregano and yarrow enough for the taking, healthy rosemary, thyme, parsley, bergamot, basil and lavender, nettle that’s resetting. Chickweed and sorrel, spearmint and fleabane nestle in clumps elsewhere; so too wild blackberry bramble and so many wild messes of black-eyeds it makes me dancy thinking how soon the whole place will be in happy floral bloom.

At the nearest forest edge we’ve got walls of multi-flora and honeysuckle. I will never wholly eliminate them despite the invasive tendencies. The edge space of every good setting of my growing up smell like it, yes, honeysuckle rose. That’s a quotient good enough to feed my mental health, that soul.

In the ditch we put in 8 species a total of 16 plants last spring and about 6 or 7 fully overwintered without our tending them or the rest of the ditch at all. My heart stays on a low maintenance turn over to mostly native perennials there.

This week I am unplugging a bit and going solo to the earth again. I’ve begun making the rounds in the out back wild to tend and gather herbs and flowers and other wild offerings for our Solstice ceremony, which will be it’s own public offering this year. Right now is the full moon and it’s big wide loud quiet is what I need.

The fauna-light, which in golden hour this time of year looks like frozen sugar droplets in the air.

I think about Tom’s promise to me in the backyard in Bishopville the spring we first moved here. I promise you’ll always be able to sit on the earth and pick flowers and write your little lines.

Love knows us in the simple things.

Bless you, delmarva. Thank you every living day around me for right out there.