Seeking Creation at the End of the World

Bringing almond blossoms inside to bloom

Welcome to My So-Called Feminist Life: Essays, interviews, and book reviews that wrestle with what it means to be a feminist today. I’m a freelance journalist and if you’d like to support my work financially, you can subscribe here.

When we moved into our house five years ago, my partner and I were not gardeners. We’d been apartment dwellers for our entire adult lives, and we’d always pictured our future selves doing the same. Raising kids in an urban environment so we could walk and take public transit and live amongst others. Maybe with a balcony where we grew potted basil. And then, the pandemic, and a toddler in a small space and, well, we bought a house with a yard. Not just a yard, a yard full of trees: Apples and pears and cherries, a peach, a plum, an almond. The trees are actually a huge pain, in my opinion. The apples and cherries are extremely difficult to grow without the bugs getting in unless you spray them (which we don’t want to do) and the pears have some disease caused by growing in the same neighborhood as another kind of tree (yes, I know this sounds made up).

We also had to learn to prune. When to do so. How much to cut. Why it matters. My dad used to work on fruit orchards as a kid and came over the first year, just before spring started, and showed us his methods. How cutting things back will cause the tree to grow stronger, or produce more fruit, or grow more balanced. But my dad, though an engineer by trade, takes gardening as more of an art than a science. “Just do what looks right,” he’d say. Or, “Take a little more there, or don’t.” Or, “As long as the blooms haven’t opened yet, it’s not too late.”

In the years since, my husband typically spends most of the winter looking out the windows at the trees and sighing exasperatedly that he really should be pruning — or that he should have pruned earlier. And then in spring and summer he sighs about how he should have pruned more. This year, to stave off the sighs, I took the kids on some weekend adventures out of the house for a couple of days in a row last month so he could prune in peace. He cut branches down aggressively, especially on the trees that don’t produce, or that we have trouble every year with the fruit, anyway. To be fully transparent here, if it were left up to me, I would probably just let everything go wild. I don’t have the patience my partner does when it comes to things like yard projects, but I do appreciate them aesthetically.

And even though my dad told us that it doesn’t matter if the buds are already on the branch, I was sad to see a gigantic pile of almond tree branches with pink-tipped buds in the offing. The almond tree has grown immensely since we moved in. No, we don’t really ever get almonds (but have you seen how an almond grows? It’s kind of miraculous that we just can buy these things in bags, by the pound) because the squirrels usually pluck them from the branches and hide them away before we can get our hands on them. But the most magical thing abuot the almond tree by far is the blossoms. A pale mauve, the petals are paper thin like cherry blossoms, but they don’t bunch together in the same way, they line up evenly along the branch, about every inch, instead. They bloom bright and gauzey at the same time, with the sweetest, faintest scent of spring. And often, the bloom is quite fleeting. We get a lot of spring rain around here and the lawn below often looks like it’s grown a carpet of flower petals within a few days. There were plenty of bud-ridden branches still up on the tree after the prune job, I just felt sad about those branches on the ground. The buds that wouldn’t bloom but got so close.

I had a memory of a friend saying almond branches are big with florists, so I brought some inside and put them in a vase in the window. I wasn’t totally sure if they would bloom if I put them in water. But within a day they had, bringing days’ of color and fragrance and spring and life into our house even before the tree outside had begun to bloom. It felt like a little magic trick.

Since, I’ve been cutting little branches off the pile outside, filling up jars and vases and mugs around the house. When one set starts to droop they go to the compost and I replace them with more.

The tree otuside is in bloom now, so, too, is the bright yellow forsythia, and the cherry blossoms around Seattle are just beginning to burst. But the weather is still a mix of rain and gray most days, with a day or two of sun here and there. But there is something about giving these pruned branches a chance inside, stretching the bud and bloom and life of spring a little bit more than it might have been that feels miraculous; like creating light in darkness.

I asked on social media platforms this week about what others are creating and seeing created in this time of destruction that is bringing life and joy. Here is an incomplete list of responses I got and things I have noticed:

• Collaborating with artists to bring writing and research to life

• Macrame house plant hangers

• Learning to bake French macarons

• Very intricate doodling

• Gardening, gardening, gardening (lots of enthusiasm for gardening)

• Dinner with friends

• Sending and receiving snail mail

• Visiting Islands in Animal Crossing that are artistic oases with loved ones

• Appreciating neighbors’ art and public art

• Taking a poetry workshop

• Crocheting

• Smiling at strangers

• Journaling and drawing with children

• Writing a sci-fi/fantasy novella

• Learning to watercolor with the aim of making art for their kitchen

• Underwater photography

• Spending time with grandchildren

• Watching a 6 yo and 3 yo listen to a live symphony orchestra for the first time

• Planting seeds for vegetables and flowers

• Witnessing the creation of music

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I’m taking heart in the fact that all of this destruction of systems and jobs, and legal due process, and democracy, and schools, and the general notions of truth and equality… is happening at the same moment that spring is providing absolute proof that the act of creation cannot be taken from us. Let me know what you’re creating and appreciating in the comments.

I’m Teaching!

If a thing you’re thinking about creating is writing that depends on or would be enhanced by research but you’re not sure where to start, I’m teaching this class at Seattle’s Hugo House this April/May. Please spread the word if you know of someone who might be interested.

Sign up here.

Fantastic things I’m reading lately:

An Interview With A Fired USFWS Fish Biologist by Sabrina Imbler, Defector. This is a fantastic series where Imbler is interviewing fired federal workers, mostly scientists, about their work and what will be lost as these government cuts continue. It’s important work documenting our current reality, and makes me think about the incredible, beautiful diversity of work and knowledge in humans all around us that we may never have noticed or thought about before.

Garden of Earthly Delights by Anna Merlan, Flaming Hydra

Because this essay about going to Disneyland in January 2025 as an adult completely sums up the feeling I’ve been having of trying to live my life in the midst of … everything. “In the moments when I wasn’t thinking about measles or the end of history, I was enormously appreciative of a day to simply not be anyone or anything in particular.”

Vivian Jenna Wilson on Being Elon Musk’s Estranged Daughter, Protecting Trans Youth and Taking on the Right Online by Ella Yurman, Teen Vogue

If you haven’t yet read the first in-depth interview Vivian Wilson has given over at Teen Vogue, with a gorgeous photo shoot, you absolutely should. If she can stand up to her terrible father, then maybe the rest of us can, too.

What’s Wrong With Episode 147: “Will You Be My Lorelai Gilmore”? Forget Logan, I Wanna See Rory’s New York Times Interview!

My incredible co-author of Gilmore Women, Megan Burbank, has penned a gorgeous episode recap this week that delves into how a season 7 episode is actually very sweet on the front of Rory and Lane’s friendship and gives us a lot of what we wanted — except for Rory’s NYT informational interview, like please let us journalism nerds live!!!!

on writing as a spiritual practice: melissa febos in conversation with jeanna kadlec

This gorgeous interview with certified genius Melissa Febos by Jeanna Kadlec of astrology for writers is an oldie, but so helpful for me right now as I think about writing and the purpose of it. “But I never doubt the value of what we're doing in the classroom because we are using writing as a tool to learn how to be in the world, how to be in relationship with each other, how to be in relationship with ourselves, how to move through life in a way that is opening.”

---

Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.

You can find me on Instagram: @maggiejmertens and on BlueSky @maggiemertens.bsky.social

You can order my book Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books) from your favorite local bookstore, request it from your local library, or push this quick order button from Bookshop.org. If you’ve read it, I’d love if you’d leave it a glowing review at Amaz*n or Go*dReads.