Anne E. Wallace:

In April 2023, I led an online eco-poetry workshop for the Native Plant Society of New Jersey. In one of the assignments, I asked participants to take their notebooks and spend time in the same outdoor space several times over the span of the month, observing the unfolding of a new season. I participated as well and selected a small urban community garden, three-quarters of a mile away at the end of my street, as my location. I walked there most days, so it was an easy choice. On the day I wrote “The Day Another Gun Law Is Repealed,” I was upset over the news that Florida had joined a growing number of states that now permitted concealed carrying of weapons and firearms without a license. Florida — where not so long before, the horrific shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland had taken place — was now turning its back on the activism of young survivors, on the grief of victims’ families and communities.

But that April afternoon, when I stepped from my Jersey City street into the garden, I saw bright spring flowers unfurling from the rich soil. I slowed to take in the new life that hadn’t been visible just days before. I crouched low to the ground to take a few photos with my phone, and I marveled at how wonder and despair so often exist side by side within us. On my way home, I thought about the scrappy flowers that take root in cracks in the pavement and similarly inhospitable places each summer in my city. And I remembered that life continues, in spite of us.