On Sundays I check the house plants and work in the garden. (Could it always have been this easy? Pick a day and get to it? I know that's not how depression works, and yet again I can't help but ask the dumb questions from the transient other side, which is really the other side of a simple mound of earth not impervious to scattering.)
In the last pre-pandemic spring, I had been working into a similar groove on Sundays. Get outside and read, then tend to the houseplants. These were rubber plants in terracotta pots I hoisted onto my hip and carried down the hall into the bathroom for a shower, wiping the leaves dry after. Bottom-water the violets in a sheet-cake pan and spritz in a little fertilizer maybe. I had just started reading Braiding Sweetgrass. This helped—the sun and the little tendings. (When did it stop—little by little or all at once?)
Now, pots of last year's soil are mixed in with worm castings plus maybe perlite or another kind of fertilizer, waiting for the seedlings in the little greenhouse to grow—tomatoes, peppers (poblano, shishito, Calabrian, Hatch), parsley, and basil—and for nights to keep clearing 50 degrees so beans can be planted. I mix this soil with my hands, squatting over the pots with my dog, Sue, nearby, sniffing—The baby needs enrichment! I say—until he grows full of yearning for the soft bed inside and I crack the door to let him go.
On the slab of uneven stone beneath me, a beetle (a junebug?) wiggles belly up in exhaustion. He wiggles belly up in exhaustion because I have just inadvertently crushed him with the heavy stone pot I am busy moving the gardenia into. I keep pausing to offer him a leaf raft to climb onto so I can carry him somewhere else, somewhere stones do not rise up like waves to throw him, already injured, as the decorative intention of 1968, like perhaps down the stairs into some soft earth instead. He rejects my leaf raft. I don't need a leaf! his thrashing cries. I use the stiff, dry leaf to flip him right-side up, but he loses his footing and falls onto his back, again and again. From the top, he is a beautiful smooth coffee bean. Viewing his exposed underside, segmented abdomen and squirming legs, I force myself to overcome my aversion to his shared features with the American cockroach, flipping him with the leaf again and again. Don't you have therapy tomorrow? I imagine him yelling. Perhaps you can work on facing your fears then!