Rewind

June is strawberries and bumble bees, puffs of willow seed floating through the air, ice cream for lunch, and fresh fruit for dessert. A little extravagant because we have daylight hours to spend — a little reckless because heat makes us surrender.

In June, we say yes to the sprinkler, white wine with dinner, sandals, frayed cut-off jeans. We say no to hate and genocide, to deer ticks, and to sitting indoors, cut off from the natural world. Let lightening and thunder tell the plants to grow faster. Let the night owl lull us to sleep, our open windows a portal for their knowing serenade.

Peonies pink like cotton candy.

Chive blossoms drying, soon to be chive-infused salt.

Yellow loosestrife grows for days in the lower garden where rain water collects from afternoon showers.

Pink yarrow after a Chelsea chop.

Snap peas plucked from the vine a little too early, but their blossoms make for a pretty photo.

Rosemary + dill + mint + lemon balm

If you harvest peonies when they feel like a squishy marshmallow, you’ll get them to bloom in a vase for several days.

Chive-infused salt (recipe adapted from Mad River Garlic Grower’s garlic scape salt recipe).

A long view of the kitchen garden.

Giant snapdragon harvested on Saturday, my first flower to bloom in the kitchen garden.

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I know the importance of building trust with readers; it’s not just a virtue, it’s an invitation for strangers to believe the images we conjure, the memories we recall, the stories we craft. So it’s important I share what’s behind these photographs.

I live in Minnesota.

I live in a Minnesota city targeted this past weekend by a monster.

Since January, life has felt like an endless series of near misses, a roller coaster that only plummets, an inferno I barely escape as it scalds the earth. No amount of snapdragons, picturesque and cheerful, nor peonies, so generous with their floral scent, can settle this world’s turbulence. We live with monsters everywhere, but they seem especially emboldened to haunt us these last six months. Zombies with no hearts, making us run for our lives.

-Betsy