Garlic Days
by Megan Baxter | A time to plant.
Today I split open my garlic seed, bulb to clove. I found a clump of my hair in the compost, saved from the salon, now the color of grass clippings rotted black. I built the garlic beds back up by hand; for some reason, this felt right—the soil had an odd texture after a summer of drought.
Everyone who doesn’t farm tells me I should write about farming. No one asks me to write about writing. Writers are always writing about writing—forever trying to reveal the trick. The truth is, it’s too arcane to matter, even to other writers. But farming, that’s something you can sink your hands and teeth into; you can really get a grip on that shovel and dig deep.
Garlic makes me sentimental. It’s planted around my birthday, and for years on big farms, the crew would celebrate with me as we pushed the cloves into the ground. I turned forty yesterday. I’m imagining garlic planting days twenty years ago. I write using the language of agrarian people. We all speak using this language born from the earth. We reap and sow and plow and harvest, though very few of us have done any of these in the literal sense. To feel the rhythm of cut and step, the sickle handle oiled with sweat. To sharpen the knife, the axe. What are you doing? my boyfriend asks over the phone. Sharpening my axe. For what? he asks. Splitting wood.
As I worked, I listened to an audiobook about British spies. I drank an energy drink. I covered the can with a work glove because I fear drinking a hornet. But the hornets are all dead now. This morning, the dog found where a bear had dug up a ground nest, the combs scattered, the eggs bone white.
What you really want to know—was it beautiful? My knees were wet. The tiller that I bought five years ago has developed the eccentricities of a tool toward the end of its life. I now have to perform the starting sequence in reverse, and it will pulse to life, then thrum against the ground.
Only as I write this does it feel beautiful. Only as I write this do I feel a flush of cold, and pause, my hands dry and warm over the keys. Tomorrow I’ll plant. The soil will be cold, slightly frozen on top. My hands don’t mind the cold much now, the nerves quieted from all the years outside. I used to make the crew stand in silence for a moment before we began planting the garlic. Remembering all the hands that had shaped the seed. What a self-righteous manager. The garlic doesn’t need silence or remembering. The thing with poetry is that if you see it, you see it. And when you do, when you see rain on the fuzzy cheek of the skunk cabbage, or the goldfinch surfing the sunflower heads, or the black of your hair black in the soil, there aren’t words, really, that can do it justice.
Megan Baxter has won numerous national awards, including a Pushcart Prize. Her essay collection Twenty Square Feet of Skin was longlisted for the 2024 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She has published three books of creative nonfiction and is currently writing short stories and novels. Megan lives in New Hampshire, where she runs her own small farm and teaches creative writing through online courses and lessons. More at meganbaxterwriting.com and @meganlbaxter on Instagram.
This essay is a Short Reads original.
PS/ Next Saturday (3/28) we’ll be celebrating the three-year anniversary of Short Reads with an event at White Whale Bookstore. We’d love to see you there. Details below.
Celebrate 3 Years of Short Reads!
White Whale Books | March 28 | 7–8:30 pm
We are ecstatic to celebrate our three-year anniversary with a reading in collaboration with Autumn House Press at White Whale Books!
The anniversary party will feature readings by Robert Yune, M.S. Reagan, Hallie Pritts, and Ren Cedar Fuller.
