Letters to My Daughter: The Bench

 

Dear Daughter,

It was June 2025. We had just sold the old house.

The floating shelves your father built for me in that kitchen—the ones I loved most—were gone. The orchard fence we had planted with wildness had been torn down. The memories were packed, boxed, and left behind. We were living in the back of a steel shop on a friend’s five-acre lot, tucked into a 400-square-foot casita. It was temporary. It was kind. But it was not home.

You had no room of your own. No bed to call yours. Christmas had come and gone in a house half-packed, with a small live tree and a few gifts tucked beneath it. We had been through a lot. My resolve was thin. My spirituality was quiet. I was tired.

The contractors had just finished the framework of the new house. Massive support beams lay scattered across the site—wood that would one day hold up our porch covers. And from those scraps, your father made me a gift.

He knows my love language. He knows that the things his hands make for me are sacred. One day, while I was out, he crafted a bench from the leftover beams. Solid. Heavy. Warm.

I came home through the shop, drained from the day. I looked to my right—and there it was. Glowing orange in the afternoon light. Waiting for me.

I walked up slowly, stunned. I sat. And I nearly cried.

It was the most lovely, grounding spot I had touched in months. I had lost my sitting porch when the bees died. I had lost my rhythm. But this—this was something new. Something meant to return me to the hum. Your father had built it for the bee yard. A place for me to sit. To watch. To think. To let new wild urges rise.

He came out of the apartment and smiled as I cooed over it. He didn’t need words. He knew what it meant.

We moved the bench to the bee yard while you were at school, just before we came to pick you up. I chose the spot carefully—where I could see all the hives, where the wind moved gently, where the sun lingered but didn’t scorch. It was perfect.

The following Saturday, I woke early. I kissed you on the forehead, made my coffee, and drove to the bee yard. The morning was quiet. The bench waited.

I sat with coffee in hand and let the morning unfold around me. Lizards of every kind scurried toward the hive stands, feasting on bees that had passed or clumsy flyers who missed their takeoff. I welcomed them. Their presence was part of the cycle—cleaning the dead is good for the colony. A roadrunner flashed by, swift and certain, its feet barely touching the earth. Behind me, a sweet male hummingbird perched in the palo verde and sang his best song, as if to greet the day with me.

Some weekends, I’ve watched mule deer—tall, graceful—move through the washes behind the bees. They don’t startle. They glide. They move like memory. Like myth.

And some weekends, I take you with me.

You sit beside me, watching the bees, asking quiet questions, or simply listening. Other times, you look at me with kind understanding and wish me well as I head out alone. You know what the bench means to me. You know when I need its silence.

This bench has become my peace. While the house rises behind me, it offers a place that is truly ours—a space we can shape with intention. Over the past four months, I’ve returned to it again and again. Some mornings joyful. Some quiet. Some aching.

There was a weekend I came out and cried.

Fall had arrived. The air was cold. I felt out of rhythm. I missed the rituals of autumn—the meat chickens, the daily chores, the sense of purpose that came with raising and harvesting. I missed the way the season used to carry me. The way it gave me structure and meaning. I missed the smell of straw, the sound of feeders, the sacred work of whispering thanks with every harvest.

But that fall, I had no birds. No rhythm. No hearth. Just the ache of transition.

I did not know I was grieving. Not fully. Not until the ocotillo turned yellow and I felt something inside me mirror its fading. Not until the moonflower was torn from the soil before it could bloom. Not until the apartment walls began to echo with a silence I couldn’t name.

I had been carrying the weight of disconnection for nearly a year—quietly, unknowingly. The land had gone quiet. My rhythm was broken. I was planting, hoping, waiting. But I wasn’t listening. Not really.

And then the mimic bee came.

I spotted it from my bench.

Not a bee, not quite—a native pollinator dressed in borrowed stripes. A guest from the land, drawn to a bloom I had planted in the bee yard. It was the first I had seen of its kind. And in that moment, I felt the land speak to my grief. Not with words, but with presence. With wings. With pollen.

I took it as acceptance.

I had planted something not originally there, and the land responded by sending something of itself to benefit from it. That felt sacred. That felt like a beginning.

I bought a native seed blend for regeneration. I began working the land again. And on this day—this turning point—we saved an ancient barrel cactus uprooted by the build. We replanted it in the bee yard, gave it a new bed, and I sat on my bench and spoke aloud:

“You and I may not speak the same language yet, but I hope you will get to know me like I want to know you.”

That was my vow. My offering. My druid’s promise.

The grief hasn’t vanished. But it’s been witnessed. The silence hasn’t broken, but it’s begun to hum. I am not yet home. But I am returning.

This is the hollow season. And I am listening.

Lesson for you, my daughter: Even in the in-between, there is rhythm. Even in the ache, there is life. Let the bench hold you. Let the land remind you. You are still becoming.

Love, 

Your Mother 

The Desert Druid