The Green Doesn’t Need You
What April does whether you show up or not.
There’s a green that only comes once a year.
Not July green. Not the tired green of August.
This one. The two-week green. The one that shows up when the soil finally decides it’s done being cold and everything that looked dead proves it wasn’t.
I noticed it last Tuesday.
Coffee going cold. Me in the chair, parked at the end of the beds. The blue berries had it. The first shoots had it. The whole garden lit from somewhere inside itself.
I stopped and looked.
Nine beds. Garlic that went in last October, pushing up now like it remembered what it was supposed to do. Chamomile that overwintered and came back harder than it left. Tomato starts still inside under the lights, waiting for the last frost to stop lying. Herb bed coming in ragged and alive. Onions just breaking the surface. Beds I turned and amended and covered all winter, holding everything I put into them, ready to give it back.
I don’t know what will make it and what won’t. I never do.
You plant anyway.
Here’s the thing about that green.
It doesn’t know you’re watching. It doesn’t care. It was doing this before your grandparents were born. It’ll do it long after anyone who remembers you is gone. The blue berry isn’t trying to move you. It’s just doing what April asks.
That indifference should feel cold.
It doesn’t.
And then April shows up with this green — unhurried, unconcerned, completely itself — and something in your chest loosens.
You don’t have to perform aliveness.
You can just be alive.
The green doesn’t comfort me. It doesn’t reassure me. It just is — and I remember I’m allowed to be that too.
I can’t chase it down the hill. Can’t follow it wherever it goes next. I get what I get from right here, at the end of the beds, coffee cold, watching something that doesn’t need me watching it.
Pay attention while it lasts.
Not because it needs you.
Because you do.