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ovenbird
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Last night I sat in a small concert venue that was once a church and listened to Aleksi Campagne sing an encore about a potted geranium withering from neglect on a windowsill. “We don’t say the geranium didn’t try hard enough to reach the rain,” he sang, then spun that metaphor out for half a dozen verses while I thought—he’s singing to me. And maybe he’s singing to you too. Maybe you’ve felt like a leafed out stalk burnt by the sun and you’ve wondered how your spine became so bent under the weight of too many days. Maybe you’ve wondered what personal failings led to this perpetual state of thirsty desiccation. But we don’t say the geranium didn’t try hard enough to reach the rain. And you, and I, we did all the trying we could to make something of soil stripped of all its minerals, hardly more than a scrim of dust on bedrock. We tried and tried to force our roots into the cracks in this life, looking for hidden springs in all the driest places. We’ve learned the tricks of air plants, pulling moisture from the breath of passing strangers, licking humidity from the corners of our lips. I would never say you didn’t try hard enough to grow from the cracked clay pot you were planted in. Sometimes the seeds of who we are fall on fallow ground and don’t stretch into what they might have been in more fertile soil. So isn’t the tenuous whisper of your searching roots miraculous? Isn’t your life, however small, the most beautiful and unlikely thing? You’re purslane rising from a concrete desert. You’ve tried harder than anyone I’ve ever known to reach for the drips that overspill the eaves.
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