Ann Fisher-Wirth

I’m sitting on my front porch on the last day of 2022, mid-afternoon, a few days after the record-breaking freeze that swept the country and sent temperatures here in Oxford, Mississippi, down to zero Farhenheit.  Things on the ground look pretty dreary. The vinca that usually spills vivid beside the front walk and nestles around the bases of the quinces and forsythias is a mass of brown stems and dead leaves. The oak hydrangeas and nandinas in the bed outside the living room, nothing but bare sticks, and even the pesky, nearly indestructible privet that separates our yard from the yard next door got zapped. I composted the frozen pansies and snapdragons, and emptied the pots in which they had lined the walk. The grass looks finished, like everything else. But the sun is shining in a sky mottled with clouds, and the leafless branches of the pecan trees and crape myrtles that line the front edge of our yard tower and tangle against the blue. And when spring comes, fierce and lyrical here in the South, what Dylan Thomas called the “force that through the green fuse thrusts the flower” will have its way with death.   

This chair, this porch, this yard, kept me company through my broken knee surgery and recovery; through my hip replacement surgery and recovery; through the pandemic, with its months of near-isolation. “Pecans,” my poem in the current issue of Plant-Human Quarterly, speaks to how deep they go in me.