I planted some flowers this afternoon as the temperature reached up toward what we can finally call warm.

Some are working to root themselves in pots that have sat for years on this deck, and some sit next to me on the deck waiting for a turn as I watch the moon come up. Behind me, the sun streaks the sky pink, making its long, dramatic exit.

I leave more things undone these days than ever before. It’s a part of motherhood no one told me about. Inside the house, the ice in my husband’s whiskey glass clinks as he walks across the room, but I am outside searching for words tonight.

So I look up. The tops of the oak and ash trees are budding a neon sort of green, trying to compete with the birches. It’s quiet out here in a way that a world waking up and winding down is quiet.

The birds are having their final say for the evening. I hear whistles and chirps and the flap of the wings of ducks on the dam against the drone of crickets and the creak of frogs.

Something big is moving on the trail in the trees. I watch for it to appear — a deer, maybe an elk or cow — but it quiets and so I look up again.

Up at those treetops that were bare this morning, before the sun shone at 75 degrees, and I wonder if those crickets and birds and frogs, if that wind and the barking dogs in the distance, if the cattle and the babies and the mommas and the daddies and the engines of the trucks rumbling way up on the highway could take the same breath and hold it all at once, at the right moment, if we might actually be able to hear those leaf buds emerging one by one.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.

We will never know. Nothing here could ever stay so quiet. I suppose it’s all magic enough as it is.

I’m anxious for the change of seasons. I feel like those leaves. It’s why I loaded up our pickup box with little cherry tomato plants and basil, petunias and geraniums, black dirt and seeds. All of the hope that is held in the small bud of a sprouting leaf I hold inside of me.

This afternoon, I filled up the baby pool with warm water as the sun shone on the backs of my splashing, naked children, and I dug in the dirt. Before I could strip her down appropriately, my youngest daughter, 1-year-old Rosie, climbed in that tiny wading pool. With her blankie clenched in her fist, she drug it with her to the water that was soaking her socks and up over the hem of her little pink pants.

And when she was where she wanted to be, she just stood there and looked out over her world and up at the big blue sky and fluffy clouds shaped to fit her imagination. A better mother might have scooped her up, but I just let her be for a moment.

We’re all so thirsty. Tomorrow it will be cooler, and maybe it will rain, but today they were mermaids and then they were fishermen and I was a gardener dreaming of plump red tomatoes bursting in our mouths and a world where we might sell them together, my daughters and me, in little Mason jars on a card table at a farmers market in town.

Someone told me a story like this once, and there are times that my dreams are much bigger, but not today.

Not on days like today.