More on: Jill Peláez Baumgaertner

Mornings their garden greens and flowers, tomatoes ripen fat as babies’ bellies, hollyhocks tower straight-laced as fence rails. This is not the black-topped yard of her childhood, weedless, grassless, without tree bark or squirrel. Here she follows behind her husband’s wild planting. Where Adam has sown, she is Eve weeding, creating order and the simplicity…

Weightless as a float into the drift of water, one whose sin is forgiven. The Far Country a memory of fists and sour apples. Of that old, heavy plunge through snowfall, frozen, refrozen. The tug of gravity, slow and silent. Of no words forming on dry lips, of breath aching to a full inhale and…