An important thing I’ve learned from gardening with a toddler who waves open packets of seeds in either hand: The more seeds you plant and the more stuff you let go to flower, the fewer weeds you have to bother with. I let the shiso and lambs quarter and a sprawling tangle of last year’s tiny yellow tomatoes go to seed and this year I have great drifts of everything in layered blue and yellow greens. More in my little fifteen by twenty foot garden than we can possibly eat. It’s all tangled up with lettuces, berries, peas, sorrel, herbs, little cabbages, carrots, and radishes. I just let the beautiful scifi blooms of the angelica go to seed for the first time, and now the lovage is flowering and the mustard is sprouting tall spindly stalks with little yellow flowers that the butterflies like. I know it’s not proper, but I am as absurdly proud of all this as I am my lovely son—as if I had anything to do with the outcome of either.

I have been chatting a lot with said pink and golden son about anatomy and organs these days. He loves to listen to my heart and tell me that it’s made of meat and muscle and that his skull protects his brains. Sometimes he gets confused and thinks his brains are in his stomach, but mostly I thought he was okay with it all. I probably should have known though, by the urgency with which he wants to discuss blood and bleeding and organs, that things weren’t quite settled in his mind. The other day he fell down a short set of concrete stairs and scraped his shin pretty badly. He’s been hurt worse though and usually recovers quickly, so I a little surprised when instead of calming down he became really hysterical, screaming and begging me in both languages to please, please close his skin. This tragic roaring went on for an hour as I lassoed a cab, whispering in his ear and clutching his arching little body all the way home; and decanted him into bed, where he fell asleep in shuddering exhaustion. When he awoke, he was still pretty upset, but able to speak enough to beg me again to close him skin so his bones and his brains and his heart wouldn’t flow out along with his blood. It took some explaining and lots of diagrams about how blood clots and bones are structural, before he calmed down. He mentioned a decomposing bird we saw on the ground the other day. It was a mostly dry husk that I let him poke with a stick to see the skull better. He didn’t say much at the time, but I think the visible skeleton impressed and frightened him. I said something about how all living things turn to dirt like compost after they die and he worked on that for a while until the bird in the story became wet lettuce in the garden. He’s been testing out the words dying and dead a lot since. He claims his babydoll is dead or that he’s dying and decomposing from hunger. He explains wound healing breathlessly, with entwined fingers and an exhibition of his scabby shin to everyone from a newborn baby to a strange old man sitting in a doorway; but he still seems nervous.