Last night I had a dream about maple seeds twirling around me that felt so grounded in reality I didn’t realize I was dreaming until my dog woke me up to be let outside. I thought, “that first chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass must’ve really spoken loudly to me”. I’d read it weeks ago so truly this I believe. I dreamt of Skywoman and I dreamt that I’d found forgiveness for Eve. I woke with zest, ready for a day of hard work in the garden and a morning full of poetry and creamed coffee.

It was to my pleasant surprise that I walked out onto my garden deck, carrying that coffee in my grandmother’s fox mug, to find the glass table, my potted plants, my citronella candles, my beautiful little marijuana seedlings, all decorated with maple seeds—plucked dragonfly wings—and more still cascading down from what looked like Heaven. That was 8 AM, and in the Spring/Summer months 8 AM is yellow, the blue of the Winter mornings that I love dearly is shed in the earliest hours of 4 and 5, and I’ve not been waking up that early for a long time now.

I don’t try to believe in mystical coincidences, giving credence to these happenings to a higher power when the magic of simple healthy life is a miracle to be gracious for alone, but sometimes life has a way of making them hard to ignore. An italicized idea snug in the middle of a mundane sentence called “The Morning Routine”. And isn’t that really the moral of the Skywoman mythology/belief? Either way, I returned some of my coffee to the Earth, and I hope it was enough to say thank you for such blessed sights.

I’ve seen a lot of ugly sights in my life, and so I’m trying hard to remain grateful for every beautiful ones. Especially since that afternoon in November where I closed my mother’s dead eyes. I’m haunted quite literally by my mother’s ghost and not in the sense that we’d have hoped for jokingly when she was alive. I like to imagine, even just for my own sanity that she is in these maple seeds, in my seedlings, in the grasses, the clovers, the coffee…

Some days I don’t know what to write in the mornings, so I don’t. I study, or garden, or clean… But days like today—when the laundry has piled and the floors beg me for a mop—it all boils over into my dreams. I know I’m on fire or steaming; I’m pouring over the edge with some experience, well of thoughts, emotionally ripe and it all must flow out of me somewhere. So I find a page and I let it bleed red.

Perhaps one day these seeds of thoughts will be a great maple. Those who plant the seeds of maple trees never live to see how tall the trees grow, or live drink of their sugar even one time, do they? And it’s okay that this is the way. I believe it is so, anyway. –Paige

Paige Six | 5.22.21