It is a fresh, March morning. Dawn mist hangs low in the air. The year is 2011, and life is simple. Teenaged angst is an abstract, future concept: you love to climb trees, swim in muddy lakes, and paint your face colourfully with your mother’s makeup. You exist moment to moment, and take nothing and everything for granted. You’ve always been a little quiet, a little cautious, but you’re not yet self-conscious. You haven’t yet learned to be ashamed of your appetite, or be afraid that your body takes up too much space.

This morning, there’s only one thing on your mind. You wake to amniotic light soaking through your bedroom curtains. Excitement slowly bubbles at the possibilities that arise with each new day. The sound of the kettle boiling, and your parents’ soft, morning voices float up the staircase. Early mornings at home are saturated with love; family means cosiness, silliness, adventure. You leap out of bed and flutter down the stairs, to the smell of buttery eggs and hot toast. 

Despite a chill in the air, spring has definitely arrived. You can see it in the scatter of sunbeams through cobwebs. It is in the bluetit’s chirp, and the coo of the collared-dove: a bright symphony to greet the morning. The garden is still quite new, almost bare, and the plants are still recovering from a late February frost. But, look closer, and you can see the first buds beginning to show.

Today is for planting. Your mother kneels in the grass beside you with her gloves and trowel, but you will use no such tools; you love to dig your hands deep into the earth, feel the dirt gather beneath your fingernails. Scrubbing them clean will be a problem for later, but at this moment all that matters is the immediacy of the soil. It is rich with red clay and sandstone: the precious earth sustaining the ancient forests which surround your hometown.

Your father stands behind you; you hear the rhythmic, scraping, thud of him burying his spade deep into the turf before turning over the soil. Every so often, a pink worm wriggles up to the surface, disturbed by the digging; your father says to leave it. It is a better gardener than you could ever be.

You don’t know how long you’ve been there; the only indicator of time passing is the musky smell of your mother’s sweat as the sun burns higher into late morning. Finally, an interlude marked by “shall we have a cup of tea?”, you didn’t realise how tired your arms were getting, and your thighs ache from crouching for so long. You look up, take a few steps back, and survey the morning’s work. A rectangle of raw earth, fertile and pungent, is laid out before you.

You planted strawberry seeds, but come late June, there was nothing to harvest. In your mind, you had pictured juicy, red fruits in abundance, but a few fan-shaped deep green leaves were all that emerged from the ground that year.

Life went on. You started high school, met new friends and fell out with old ones. You had your first period, which brought along with it a unique combination of embarrassment, confusion and pain. Long days playing in the forest were slowly replaced with long days in town browsing shops and sitting in cafes. Your birthday passed, then bonfire night, then Christmas; the cosy family feeling remained but was beginning to be punctuated with anxiety at finding your place in the world. The next summer, again no fruits came. 

…

On a soft, bright June morning, the world aches with confusion and life feels disjointed. The year is 2020, and normalcy is being redefined in painful and disorienting ways. You wonder when anxiety became the baseline mode of your existence. Home is changing, a definition and a time that morphs unrecognisably yet is achingly familiar. You struggle under the weight of trying to be the perfect daughter, a granddaughter, partner and friend.

Yet throughout, somehow, you manage to find small joys. Your neighbour’s playful ginger cat, or the fresh, fragrant air summer meadows in full bloom. You spend most of your time in the kitchen, cooking, loving people through the food you create. You take from nature and you give. This June morning, nature decides to teach you something. 

The sun streams through the curtains, falling diagonally across the room in front of you. You go to check your phone, the ever-present knot of anxiety already in the pit of your belly. You resolve to go on and begin the day, regardless. You pad softly down the stairs to where the coffee is brewing.

“Come and see what’s in the garden, Soph.” Your father’s voice breaks the sacred morning quiet, but intrigue pushes you to follow him out the door. The summer lawn is prickly on your bare feet. Rounding the corner of the house, you come to the dry, overgrown patch of earth you dug all those years ago. You are greeted by a small bowl on the ground, filled to the brim with bright red, huge strawberries.

Quietly, unobserved, the seeds you planted all those years ago had spread across the grassy bank, crawling a few inches further every year. Previous years had yielded one or two small, sour berries, yet this year something had changed. Suddenly, as if cued by a great conductor beneath the earth, dozens of fruits had emerged and ripened to a gorgeous deep crimson. Your father had picked twenty or so already that morning, but the plants’ green stems were still dripping with ruby-like fruits.

You lower yourself to the ground. You pick up the bowl, and when you bite down on the first strawberry, sweet juice like liquid sunlight explodes all over your chin and hands.  A tiny piece of your childlike urge to experience life raw resurfaces from its hiding place.

…

Intuitively, we know that the day we plant the seed is not the day we harvest the fruit. My strawberry plants took nine years to produce fruits in abundance. For some, it lay dormant, for others, its roots slowly crept beneath the earth, laying the groundwork, invisible to our eyes. But nature takes her time.

We expect ourselves to be constant, always making, always working. Yet, we accept nature in all her seasons, all her facets: from hibernation and decay to her abundant harvest. We often forget that our bodies are soft, vulnerable things. After all, we come from nature and to nature we will return. The culture of hyper-productivity that capitalism demands of us proclaims that if we are not constantly producing, there is something wrong, and we have failed in some way. However, laying foundations, learning, absorbing, resting: these stages are equally as valuable as the end product we judge ourselves by.

Can one connect with a stranger in another language, without first spending hours poring over vocabulary and grammar structures, feeling frustrated and overwhelmed? Can one compose music, without spending years learning an instrument, and experiencing the heartbreak required to write beautiful songs? If the pandemic year has taught me anything at all, it is that progress is not linear. You need to have patience with yourself, trust that your body knows how to navigate rough waters, and trust you will learn from the process. You never know – one day, you might reap benefits in ways you could never have imagined.