Hayden Saunier

I grew up in the woods under the hickories and maples above a creek behind our house, inside a privet hedge fort between driveways, or in the forests of Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains where my mother took all five of us each fall to gather mosses, seedlings, wintergreen, and cedar to make terrariums so that we could always smell the woods in winter. She gave up corralling us into church clothes and church and instead we rototilled a garden on Easter mornings. When we were upset, we were sent to find a quiet place in the woods, or a field, or by a creek to sit. It always worked. During the many years I lived in cities, I was bolstered by each single tree, by a row of plants in coffee cans on a windowsill, by weeds in the concrete cracks, by any seed of a plant trying to take root. Like a mirror that reflects me into my place in the world, trees, plants, grass, earth, and mosses give me myself back again. Ten years ago, my husband and I moved to the farm where he grew up and now I wake and sleep between a sugar maple and a sycamore, surrounded by walnuts, cedar, black cherries, and sassafras in the hedgerows. These poems have all taken root and grown from walking and working and living among these fields and these woods.