Something strange happens to time as you age, it accelerates so much that you lose track of minutes after getting up and cannot leave the house for work in ten minutes after sleeping in as you used to, cannot find where the year has gone when it is already Christmas again, cannot understand why the white hair, where this person in the mirror came from... It is an endless cycle of springs, summers, autumns, winter, a spiral of flowers budding, opening, their petals falling, the fruit within greening, reddening, ripening...
Looking at the rectangle of my garden filled with more and more bushes, more and more succulents, cutting into the lawn on all sides, I forget how different it is now, from when I first moved in - the wide expanse of the lawn replaced by scattered baby breath, framed by what was a row of six rose bushes but is now connected into a wide border, punctuated with huge green agave that will turn wine red after blooming just once, a tall stalk of small yellow blossoms attracting even more bees than the pink crape-myrtle tree.
It is this tree that guarantees the flow of seasons - bare branches are covered with pinkish then greening leaves, big bunches of flowers open as the tree is full of miraculous sound of bees, leaves turn lovely scarlet and shine in afternoon sunlight before falling off in December and starting to grow back in April. Meanwhile, colorful gazanias provide rich palette of rusty reds, burnt oranges, and sunny yellows in their year-round daisy-shaped blossoms.
In the middle of what used to be the lawn, a grove of pomegranate trees has sprouted by itself where I planted one to replace the old tree with rotten roots, toppled by the winter storm. Seeds from fallen fruit sprouted into four more trees, the juicy pomegranates enriching my body with vitamin C and antioxidants in October through December. So many birds poke holes in the fruit, so many fruit bear marks of being bitten by squirrels on top branches, by racoons at the bottom. I do not begrudge them; they have to eat. What's why I do not use any toxins in the yard anymore. Let it all grow and feed the birds and animals; it was their land before me... From January through June, I have my citrus - clementines, oranges, grapefruit. Luckily, my winged and clawed friends do not like citrus as much...
The old lemon tree was trimmed once and sprouted new branches at the bottom, bearing flowers and fruit year-round. The dried out old trunk needs to be cut down completely. The newly planted oranges grow too slow for comfort, only the fig tree made huge progress and is a real tree after five years of a simple stick stuck in the ground. Of four rosemary bushes that were meant to outline the corners of one flower bed with the fig in the middle, two died out, the other two became a huge, impenetrable wall of rosemary green, giving me ample harvest of twigs to be tied into bunches and placed on top of all bookshelves, all windowsills in the house.
Time to trim the rosemary - again? When did the branches grow so tall? I have not noticed. Is it time yet to pick the leftover pomegranate shells so clearly seen on the bare trees? Yes, indeed. Time to feed the roses? I used to say these roses were like pets, they need food and water, they need trimming their branches, and, most of all, they need to be admired day after day, year after year...
So, one morning, while drinking tea and reading The History of England in One Hundred Places by John Julius Norwich, I penned a poem about the seasons in my garden, the seasons of my life:
All Together Now
for Marlene Hitt, great poet of the quotidian
When time stops
everything is present
in the same moment.
The gingko tree is green.
The gingko tree turns gold.
The gingko leaves fall down.
Green - gold - and bare -
All together now.
The pomegranate's twigs,
dark and sad in winter,
sprout thin, celadon leaves,
bloom with orange star-flowers,
carry heavy fruit - first green
then wine red. The leaves
fade and fall. Birds poke holes
in cracked peel of overripe fruit
to feast on tangy, sweet arils.
All together now - bare -
celadon - orange - scarlet - bare -
A baby smiles at her Mom.
A child hands her a bunch
of autumn leaves in the park.
A teen makes a snowman
in the mountains, her cheeks
bright red from the frost.
A nervous bride in the church,
red-eyed, she cried for days...
A new mom holds her toddler
on her left hip, smiling, knowing.
All together now - I am
a baby, girl, bride, grandma.
I dance the waltz.
I recite poems. I sing carols.
I make costumes for carnivals.
ornaments for Christmas trees.
I bake their favorite apple cakes
for first, second, third child,
fourth, tenth, thirtieth birthdays.
Fortieth mazurka for Easter.
Time flies faster and faster
until it freezes - all is one -
all moments transfixed into
the colorful thrill of the grand
finale - all together now -
Life well lived, errors corrected,
faults forgiven, lies forgotten,
blessings cherished to warm the heart
over and over again -
All together now
All together now -
when time stops
everything is one -
one with the universe -
one life of mine -
(c) 2026 by Maja Trochimczyk
That was quite a lot of fun... especially adding that refrain "all together now" from the Beatles' song "Yellow Submarine" visually portrayed in an animated film so full of color, it seems impossible in these times. Nowadays, feature films are dark, filled with explosions and blood... Actually, why aren't there more films with light and color? Or films about the hard work of inventors - the farmers that experimented until they grew a perfect apple tree, the researchers that came up with insulin or antibiotics, the scientists that made the lightbulb, those who discovered magnetism, electricity, semi-conductors? Would a film of efforts, trials and errors, years of rejection and ultimate triumph not be better for our kids than hundreds of films glorifying violence and destruction by "superheroes"? How about that prisoner who taught himself higher mathematics and while incarcerated had proven a theorem that many struggled for years? How about that grandma that built a huge company - Aunt Jemima until her portrait disappeared from the boxes of food she pioneered, erased by "virtue-signaling" of the misguided lemming crowd? Oh, well, that's too depressing. Let's think about time again.
Waiting for Eden
The mohawk haircut of the birds of paradise.
The emerald necklace of hummingbirds
that perch on spiked agave leaves.
The loud argument of male mockingbirds
clamoring to claim my garden for their nests
- melodiously singing for their ladies,
chasing each other with a hideous screech,
rough as their Polish name - przedrzeΕΊniacz.
Beneath the soap-bubble sky, fading
from blue to periwinkle and pale rose -
a sudden silence marks the arrival of the hawk,
stalking its careless prey. Every living thing
has to eat. I'm not that sorry for house finches,
I just do not want to watch them die.
It is January, again. What am I waiting for
in this miraculously greening, rosemary-
scented, overgrown garden? The ripeness
of winter clementines? The sweetest
fragrance of orange blossoms? The perfection
of time beyond time? When hours stand still
and clocks die with outstretched hands,
begging the sky for forgiveness?
(c) 2026 by Maja Trochimczyk
This second poem is not so cloyingly sweet as the first one, some danger shows its claws. Ah, I forgot, the Moebius strip from the title... I have always been fond of geometry and stereometry in particular. In high school I was the winner of the Copernican Physics competition of the whole school, having made most progress on the solution of movement of spheres upon larger spheres that no boy was able to solve - to the chagrin of my science teachers, surprised that a mere girl was the best. In the last year of high school I scored 142 on IQ test that mostly consisted of estimating the number of blocks in 3-d structures and counting various other things. In that I was "defeated" by one boy who scored 143, one point higher. He was also two days younger than me - being born in January to my December he appeared a whole year younger in statistics and we both were the youngest kids in our class...
The Moebius strip has no other side, everything is one, all one, back and front, the end is the beginning. As the famous poet wrote:
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation [...]
From East Coker, I, in the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
The master poet continues:
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away- [...]
This image of the "distant panorama" being rolled away like stage decor brings so many associations, from Platonic duality of body and soul trough Shakespeare to reincarnation beliefs... It is followed by one of the most famous and often cited descriptions of the purpose of life as awaiting resurrections, with the three theological virtues thrown in, just in case...
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. [...]
From East Coker, III, in the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
Death and re-birth. One test after another, one mise-en-scene set up after another, all on the way to perfection, to pure love, to pure being... Paradise. Why would anyone dare to write any poetry after this? Is reading someone else's words enough? What about my reality? My mockingbirds, my pomegranates? My termites gnawing the beams in my old house? Don't they deserve to be observed and described in my own words? So what if it was said again? So what if I repeat myself? Can I not, by my own words, prove my own existence? The Moebius strip closes, a new circle traces the old one, the cycle of reincarnation draws closer and closer... another round of the Moebius strip will commence...
Moebius strip from Wikimedia Commons.
Photos from Maja Trochimczyk's garden, 2021-2025
