I feel the earth’s rhythm.

Born in the hum of the growing season in a small farming community in Minnesota, the time to plant, grow and harvest seeped into my soul. My ancestors worked and lived off the land for centuries. And even though I toiled in a different line of work, those rhythms ground me.

My brain still registers the earthy smell of newly tilled soil ready for seed and rain. I can still hear the corn grow on hot humid days. Harvest time quickens my pulse as I recall the race against the dying light and the weather. And then there was the autumn drone of John Deere combines working the fields all night. I fell asleep to those sounds – a lullaby to the harvest.

Nature restores my circadian rhythm, battered by too much stimulation and light. She’s the ultimate authority on time.

For years I became disconnected from time in my creative work. I also became untethered from time in grief. There’s no timetable for grief – it takes whatever time it needs. It forces its way into every waking and sleeping moment. You’re not in control. Past and future become muddled. You spend the present in the past to see and laugh with the departed. The future? You can’t evoke a future without them. You’re in no man’s land – severed from the roots that held you. But tend you must.

I’ve been sleeping more, my internal clock confounded by these pandemic rhythms.

They slumber too, those 60 bulbs I planted last October. But they know when it’s time to force their way up through the sodden earth and the leaf litter.

They know the right time.