Wednesday was one of those days when, even when waking up to a new morning, I still felt some sadness. I woke up, and anxiety was right there with me.

I got up, got ready eventually, and went to an appointment I had that afternoon. I cried in the parking lot before I went in.

It was a sadness I haven’t felt in some time. The kind of sadness that is deep and I am not sure why it’s there. Maybe its because all of this change.

I looked up at the clouds. Rain was in them.

As autumn approached the clouds gathered unwillingly in the sky, small light clouds, and in the village street one could see men standing about, idle and anxious, their faces upturned to the sky, judging closely if this cloud and that, discussing together as to whether any held rain in it.

The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck (70).

Despite completing a few errands, I wanted to go home. But before I did, I wanted to connect to the earth, to feel soil in my hands.

As he had been healed of his sickness of heart when he came from the southern city and comforted by the bitterness he had endured there, so now again Wang Lung was healed of his sickness of love by the good dark earth of his fields and he felt the moist soil on his feet and he smelled the earthy fragrance rising up out of the furrows he turned for the wheat.

Buck (212).

So I bought a bag of dirt that smelled like mint to me. The neighbor’s cat looked at me through it’s window as I repotted a plant, curious about what I was doing. Surely it seemed strange to her.

She meowed and I answered. “This makes me feel better, Kiki,” I said. The feeling of soil in my hands reassured me of it.