Dandy Note #3

I’m more chilled this winter than any before, and irritable. I learn I am not alone on the first Saturday of the New Year when I write a poem for T who has just moved to town from another town several towns over. 

Her heart is broken. She wants a poem about hope, but it’s winter. She wears purple tie dye overalls and does not want to hear Rumi speak of the thousand half-loves it takes to take the real love home. I might be misremembering.

T is happiest when she is outside. She appreciates potatoes, which grow no matter where you throw them, pretty much. Recently, she left her partner and their farm and it’s too cold to live in the dirt now. She likes how potatoes keep on growing beneath the ground, though. She understands wanting, for a season, to be imperceivable. 

In exchange for a poem T gives me a sachet of lavender she grew herself, and two pieces of quartz she dug up in North Carolina. The rocks are legitimate crystals from long, long ago, resurrected from the state she grew up in, and sometimes returns to.

You’re probably only the fourth or fifth person to ever touch this, T says, and unwraps one of the sparkling stones from crinkled tissue paper in her overalls pocket. It is splashed inside and out with stars, tiny and shiny and jagged and sparkling in each irregular corner. 

I don’t know much about crystals beyond the myth and lore you can get at a health food store. I don’t know a lot about growing potatoes, either, but I do know a little about moving to this town with a broken heart. T is right. Winter isn’t necessarily hospitable. 

The Saturday recalled in this Dandy Note was a nasty mess of sleet and rain, with just enough ice on the ground, hype in the news, and scattered flurries in the morning for the whole town to hope for a little accumulation all afternoon. There was none. At the end of the day it was still January in Virginia. Warmth won out. 

That is what I hope for T, too. For the chill to be relative. For the season to trust itself. For the exchange of earthly treasures–grown, found, and made–to be free. 

Thank you to Blacksburg Books for having me in their lovely space for pop-up poetry, and thank you to the friends who showed up to support the Dandy Line during the first week of 2024. Next up: Valentine’s Day.