Dispatch from the garden

the invisible accumulation of tending.

Howdy,

Lately I’ve been literally melting into my bed at the end of the day. Once I’m in it, I’ve become liquid, and the idea of getting back out, even to plug my phone into the charger, honestly sounds impossible, and I’d rather just evaporate at that point.

Billy asks me what I did that day, and I draw a complete blank. Which is weird because I KNOW I did things. I feel like I did...a lot?? Enough things that I somehow became a different state of matter.

The big stuff I remember: a photoshoot, a walk with friends, making pesto pasta for dinner, swim class with Woods.

It’s everything in between that disappears.

The invoice I finally sent after staring at it for three days. Calling American Airlines because somehow I’m always calling American Airlines. Washing bottles. Ordering more dishwasher pods. Watering the plants. Remembering we were almost out of dog food before we were actually out of dog food.

None of those things are particularly memorable on their own, but stack enough of them together and suddenly it’s bedtime, and you’ve accomplished seventeen invisible things that nobody, including you, is going to remember tomorrow.

Maybe this is just adulthood.

---

This spring honestly felt like watching my life play out as a real-life audiobook narrated on 1.5x speed. Anyone in a book club knows what that sounds like.

When I had Woods last fall, I had this very sweet little vision for how returning to work would go. I’d ease back in. One shoot here. One there. Maybe finally update my website. Maybe make his baby book before he turned eighteen.

Freelancing heard that plan and laughed.

The weird thing about this job is that when work comes, it really comes. You don’t know when it’ll be quiet again, so you become a bit of a yes person. Which, unfortunately, I am. And honestly it’s served me really well.

But it’s also how I ended up somewhere around May feeling like I was sprinting on one of those moving walkways at the airport. You know when you’re going so fast you stop questioning it because momentum has completely taken over? That.

Somewhere in there I also attempted to stay hydrated, keep a baby alive, respond to texts within a socially acceptable amount of time, pay my quarterly taxes without crying, remember what vegetables were in the fridge before they quietly became a science experiment, and occasionally acknowledge my husband when he walked into the room.

So not to be dramatic, but I genuinely can’t decide whether this spring was amazing or terrible-

We booked our bucket-list trip to Europe. // The brakes went out on my car on the way to one of the biggest commercial shoots of my career.

Woods said “mama” for the first time. // Our dishwasher flooded the kitchen.

I spent an afternoon swimming with friends and our babies. // A bee immediately stung me in the face.

Life just kept refusing to pick a side.

zine coming late summer

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Around the same time, I kept finding myself in gardens.

I’ve spent the last few months photographing women for a personal project that’ll eventually become a zine, and almost every conversation happened outside. Yet very few women wanted to talk about flowers.

We talked about businesses they’d built from scratch, and marriages that had weathered hard seasons, and aging parents and children, and creative work, and friendships, and all the little invisible things they were trying to keep alive at the same time.

The gardens were part of the conversation, but after a while they mostly felt like somewhere beautiful to stand while we talked about everything else.

---

So then one night Billy asked me what I’d done that day again, and I started trying to remember. And all I could come up with were these tiny maintenance tasks: formula, laundry, dog food, the text I’d finally answered.

I wouldn’t put any of this on my résumé or tell friends about it over dinner. It was just the quiet work of keeping a life running.

And somewhere in there, I realized I’d gotten really good at maintenance and less good at curiosity. I’d stopped leaving myself much room to be bored. Or to follow an idea that didn’t immediately become another task on the list.

I guess that’s true of gardens too. You skip watering because you’re busy. But then you’re busy again. Then one day your tomatoes are crispy, and your basil has entered its Victorian fainting era.

Eventually, I realized I’d gotten really good at keeping things alive, and less good at leaving room for things to grow.

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So in the middle of trying to hold my little corner of the world together, it hit me that I’d spent the spring living inside the very thing I was trying to photograph.

The gardens were never really the point, they were just the visible part. What I cared about was everything underneath.

The business no one sees, the marriage that takes daily work, the grocery list, the unanswered text, the mental tabs you keep open all day long. The million tiny decisions that somehow become a life.

Maybe that’s why gardens are fascinating me right now. They’re one of the places where tending leaves fingerprints. Everywhere else, the work disappears almost as quickly as it’s finished.

But the work is still there, holding everything else up. (Hi Mom. I see you.)

Anyway, I somehow looked at my completely unreasonable spring and thought, You know what this needs? Photographing twenty women and publishing my first zine.

Which feels deeply on brand. And I can’t wait to share it with you later this summer!

xx,

Michelle

P.S.

One little newsletter update before I go, I’m planning to start sending these a tad more frequently.

I’ve decided it’s finally time to turn on paid subscriptions, which means every other newsletter will be only for paid subscribers. Free subscribers will still get a newsletter every so often, but the deeper essays, behind-the-scenes, creative process, and a few other things I’ve been dreaming up will live on the paid side.

If these newsletters have made you laugh, think, or feel a little less alone over the past year, I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription. For a whole year, it’s about the price of one week’s worth of coffee, and it genuinely helps me keep making work like this.

Thanks for being here from the beginning. It means more than you know!