Barren Becoming Fallow

        When I look through my bedroom window, I see a house’s concrete skeleton, adults and children ambling in the heat, and brown – yellow dirt expanses pockmarked by trash. By the time I moved to Mango last November, the rains had left and the fields were finished around my quarter. I’ve never known this space any way but how it exists today. Recently, however, unseasonably early storms have invited small green patches to break up the monotonous paysage. With grasses and weeds sporadically growing again, the farmers will follow with crops in a few weeks. This land, that’s seemed so arid and dead, is alive again. Perma-barren was fallow all along: fertility accumulating underground, waiting for the weather to change. Bettering itself as life comes closer by the day, a fecund renewal for the community and everyone in it. My own potential energy, recently building as I reconnect with work and hobbies, is feeling more kinetic. I’m moving more, laughing more, meditating more, and feeling more like myself than I have in ages. My final chaleur is coming to pass, and one last rainy season is about to begin. And then, return, autumn in America. Hopefully thriving in the harvest of whatever my service has sown.