I don’t have the words to make this week feel better. I don’t think there are words to make this week better. So much generational, community, and individual pain has been pushed to the forefront of our national conversation this week, and rightfully so.
There are many more powerful, more knowledgeable, and frankly more important, voices than mine to help you understand and process what’s happening right now. And please, PLEASE, take the time to understand and process what’s happening right now. If you are looking for resources, shoot me an email and I can try to help.
My offering to you on this Saturday, instead of useful words, is plants. Today, I spent about 2 hours messing around with a new lens and photographing plants. It was the most peaceful 2 hours I’ve spent in a long time. How lucky am I, to be able to sit in the hot sun on the cool grass and spend two hours watching plants sway around.
A warning: while most of this article is dedicated to my very soothing plant pictures, there is some discussion of tragedy and this stressful week down below. If you really can’t take any more of that right now, for whatever reason, I would urge you to look at the pictures and maybe skip the text.
This cactus started out as just one or two little paddles… She’s clearly decided that this corner of the yard is hers alone now. Sometimes I think I should take my succulents outside to meet her, I think they would be very impressed.
One of the things I do, in the real world, is freelance translation work. This week I was translating a police report from Spanish to English. It was about a man who was murdered. I did not know that when I started it… Then again, neither did the author. He started his day like any other, before he got the call about a body on the side of the road.
Above, you can see the meeting of the fences. I honestly had not noticed how much the trees in this corner had grown, or how lush this little area looked until I was looking at it through my camera. Those three white trees had to be mostly cut down because they were dying. Now they look like three friends having a conversation, and sometimes birds sit up there.
When you’re translating, it’s hard to just glance ahead. So you work through sentence by sentence and you start to think “is this going where I think it’s going?” But even as you cringe and lean away from the keyboard, you have to keep translating to find out. That’s how I found out a man was murdered on the western side of a highway, just past the fork in the road.
I spent most of my time, once I figured out the general range of this lens, looking at the masses of wildflowers that my mom has going on this year. I was looking for snails… I was going to write a little story about the snails and I was very excited, but it was too hot for them to be out. Instead, you get to look at this pretty little guy that I found tucked away, hidden between all the greenery.
Just as the investigators did not know who the murdered man was, I also had no idea, until half way through when I translated the formal Identification of the Deceased. Sometimes the formal language makes these things harder to read, not because it’s confusing, but because it’s so devoid of emotion that you feel obligated to read between the lines, to put your own heart into the place of that father, positively identifying his son’s body.
My mom is a pretty good gardener, especially when it comes to flowers, but the plants she does BEST are Coreopsis. They’re the lighter orange ones that are behind this stunner in the front. Seriously, our coreopsis are like… legendary. But look at the volume on these flowers, so much poof! No structured English garden here, just a little bit of this, little bit of that.
I translated the autopsy report too. I don’t want to get into it really, but let’s just say I hope I never again have a reason to use the Spanish phrase for “exit wound”. On Wednesday night I didn’t sleep at all. It was too easy to imagine the similar reports that have been written up for Ahmaud Arbery, Jordan Edwards, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, in painful detail.
This is my favorite of all. This crazy mix of colors, the roses in the back, the manual focus… This photo makes me happy.
The police report that I translated didn’t end with an arrest. The family said they would not press charges, and I can only assume that was the safest option for them. So now that father’s son is listed in the records as a “Death by Homicide, by Unknown Assailant”.
I finished that translation yesterday. But I know that even now the same tragedy is playing out again and again. In my head and on the streets. Here, however, there is one key difference: here the assailants are not unknown, because they are the ones writing the records.
I wish I had better words, something useful, something tangible. Instead, I hope you enjoyed my plants. I know they can’t erase the tragedy and stress of this week, at all. But I can still smile at the riotous growth, the joyous energy of flowers reaching for the sun, and I hope you did too.