She is stood under the hawthorn tree at the southernmost corner of the farm. And she is resting: rest the likes of which her ancestors could never have imagined, but also refused not to. And she has come to remember them. 

She has been doing the slow, rooted farm work they dreamed for her because they knew they would never quite taste its full sweetness in their own time. Still, they carved it out whenever and however they could, for each other, for her, and for others they could know only in their hearts and hopes. 

Today she harvested sweet potatoes from the polytunnel. And as she gently tugged at the sprawling vines to expose their crowns, up too came the memories of her great-grandaunties, whose stories were passed down as precious gourds and songs. Half-exposed, the sweet potatoes looked like creatures gathered together at rest. She took a moment to rest with them, gently curling her nails into the loose, loamy soil. A helix of her hair hung in front of her eye and she could see the tip bleached copper-red by long hours spent in the sunshine. She remembered her abuela’s verano hair.

Her great-grandaunties had brought over seeds and slips to a place made from the ruin of their own homelands. They grew them in tiny greenhouses and in community spaces and on windowsills. They planted gardens and saved seeds. And with their communities they built the collectives that refused to stop rooting or imagining. 

They are the reason she is stood here now with her hand pressed against the old hawthorn. 

Between its rough, gnarled skin and her own, even in just the span of her palm are moss and ivy and something writhing—a tiny fern, some bryophyte she cannot name, a gathering of tiny mushrooms. She imagines how many of her handprints it would take to cover this whole tree and wishes to place each and every one. 

In this moment, pressed against each other—this woman and this tree—time is distorted, distended. Veins and capillaries are rendered indistinguishable. She can hear the vasculature of the tree. And though she is stood on the grass amongst the exposed roots of this old tree, she feels as if her feet are submerged in a shallow stream. Something is flowing beneath her.

There is something else there, too. Some others. The fungal hyphae, the mycelia, which are curled about the roots of both this tree and this woman. Together they burrow deep into the old soils of the farm around them, striking toward the bedrock and into the memory banks of the land like daggers of slow lightning. And it is in this moment she understands that it isn’t just she who remembers. The land remembers, too. 

It remembers her great-grandaunties, yes. But further even, farther back. It remembers whose blood and whose soil. It remembers when it was carved and divided to keep out those who looked like her. The land remembers, especially those who are kept from it, whether through cost or violence. And it longs for them as they do for the land. 

This farm had been all-but-impossible so recently. Owned, run, and stewarded by a collective of melanated, queer, trans, and disabled folk. Yet here she is and here they are, and in its southernmost corner this old tree has been calling out, casting her mycelial nets out into the cosmos and up into the crowns of the sweet potatoes, which she harvests and holds as gently as her abuela’s arm. 

All to say: the land remembers you.