14. Signs and Symbols

While I’ve been immersed in planting (and replanting), watching the weather like an unhinged person, not getting quality sleep (because Mr. Wiggles has decided that nighttime is the right time to swirl around in bed sheets) and tying up the end of the semester amidst a pandemic, I’ve also been feeling sad, isolated, filled with impotent rage that I aim at my husband (poor guy) and back at myself (poor me). It’s not ideal. Especially with no adequate way to decompress away from one another (dammit, I miss my friends!).

My self-doubt and creeping depression manifests itself in volatile anger. Nothing is free from my wrath when I get going, and it’s an unfortunate cycle that I am completely unaware of when I’m in it. And I’ve been in since we moved here (two months, yikes!).

But I saw two things that flipped a switch, and while I’m generally not one to assign meaning to “coincidence”, something about the timing of these things appearing when I desperately needed to see them made me take notice.

First, a luna moth.

Look at this amazing creature! The luna moth is believed to be a carrier of souls from the land of the living, to the land of the dead, and is a symbol of transition, spiritual rebirth, and new beginnings.

Nail on head, much?

I took the appearance of the moth (one of which I have never seen before, which is not surprising, since they’re nocturnal, and only in their adult stage for a week to ten days—they don’t even have mouths) as a sign.

I’m in a big transition, sure, one I took great pains to put into motion, but change is hard. For years, I’ve been the workaholic breadwinner, always taking on more than one job (sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of passion), with my husband being more of a home body. Now, I’m home, working, yes, but no longer the breadwinner. This makes me anxious because I don’t have control (or the illusion of it, anyway), and with the pandemic, there is even more uncertainty. I haven’t really been adjusting the best.

The second symbol that turned my head around was one I REALLY needed: growth.

This little seedling may not look like much, but it is a very big deal to me.

It’s a carrot, a notoriously finicky plant to cultivate unprotected, outdoors. Also, one of my absolute favorite fresh-from-the-Earth foods. The scent of carrot out of the ground is intoxicating, and even though I am anti-perfume, if some company was able to capture that heady fragrance, I would wear it every day.

Needless to say, seed I planted with crazy hope (in March) has finally emerged, even in the crappy, dense, water-logged clay soil I’m working with.

And that little carrot seedling, it’s me. Me fighting, trying to find the sun, working my way up from the muck to grow. And it’s working. The small business I’ve started from nothing is beginning to emerge: I have plants growing, chickens laying, and I’ve been accepted into the Madison Farmers Market. What began as radical hope at the beginning of the year is now transitioning into reality. And while it may have seemed like I was a cool cucumber, confident in the big change, inside, I was a bundle of raw edges, ragged and fragile.

Uncertain times? To say the least, but I am feeling a little more sun on my shoulders today, and as Martha Stewart would say, “That’s a good thing.”