FIELD NOTE: Three Summers | Lavender
💜 Third in a three-part Field Note cycle: one body, three summers, and the harvests that followed me home.
This is Not Neat, Never Small’s ongoing FIELD NOTE series — a rhythm of snippets, meanderings, and moments from the journey.
In between longer-form pieces, Field Notes offer something lighter. A little less polished and a little more present. Length and tone will vary, but my intention is this: to share something worth your time at least once a week.
Finally, the lavender came.
Sparse at first — a little shy — when I noticed the bundles begin to appear at the farmers market at the start of the month. But now, as July eases into its détente, it’s harvest time.
Cherries. Peaches. Now lavender.
Three crops that have followed me – or perhaps that I chased – across the globe for three waves of abundance in just over one year. Three back-to-back summers.
It’s not really fair to compare, of course; the urban edge of an American city isn’t the same animal as Aotearoa’s rural South Island. And yet — the sequencing of my seasons invites the comparison anyway.
In New Zealand, I missed Seattle (or at least, parts of it).
In Seattle, I miss New Zealand.
No qualifiers.
And I wonder why humans so often long for what they don’t have — and then, once they do, miss what they had before.
Maybe it’s just me. Restless-hearted thing that I am.
Always charting the distance between the soil I stand on and the dust already on my shoes.
Never quite done wanting what was — even while holding what is.
And eyeballing the horizon the entire while.
As far as lavender is concerned, the Pacific Northwest — and Washington state in particular — is the epicenter of American cultivation. Sequim, on the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula, calls itself the Lavender Capital of North America. But last weekend, I wasn’t on the coast; I was inland, in the Sammamish Valley.
There, tucked between Woodinville wineries and techie Eastside sprawl, a pocket of farmland still holds its ground. The lavender farm I visited unfurled its rows like purple pincushions under the rich July sun. Cultivars of every kind — Grosso, Melissa Lilac, Royal Velvet — all luxuriating in dry, blue-skied heat; row upon row, playing at scale, but unavoidably bounded.
This lavender is ringed by weekend traffic from the suburban Eastside. It sits shoulder-to-shoulder with the monolithic sameness of new housing developments — all bland in the kind of postmodern aesthetic detachment that favors function, resale, and beige minimalism over soul. Woodinville, Redmond, and Kirkland – all rushing and racing to build.
Amidst cul-de-sacs and Costco runs, the farm pushes for the illusion of not just space, but expanse. A final gasp before the valley is paved over entirely.
And yet — even in the chokehold of urbanization — it was still the same vivid slew of violet shades I last saw near Lake Pukaki, in January, where bees danced across the fields at New Zealand Alpine Lavender and the whole world smelled like ascent.
That day — my skin sticky with sun, my eyelashes crusted with the grit of wild spaces — my partner and I were finishing our road trip around my little corner of the South Island. We stopped at the lavender fields on the way to hike the Hooker Valley Track. And the most striking thing — more than the scent, more than the color — was that I wasn’t alone. He had flown across the world to join me, to intertwine our threads again, even as our tapestries — for a season — were being woven to different rhythms.
That whole week-long visit felt like a miracle. A stolen season I didn’t want to end.
I remember clutching it too tightly, afraid of the leaving.
I remember the airport a few days later.
It’s not a memory I like to linger with; the gutted-ness is still too potent.
But now, somehow, I’m home.
And he’s here, too.
This time, he stays. And so do I.
We get to revel in the lavender together now.
I’ve had three summers in a row.
Seattle. Then New Zealand. Then Seattle again.
No frost in between. No pruning. No dormancy.
Just abundance rolling in.
And I don’t exactly know what that means: to gather blossoms summer after summer without witnessing the winter.
It’s not just greener grass syndrome. It’s thornier than that. More tangled.
And more revealing, too.
Because even in this lavender-fringed city that raised me, I think about gravel heat and glacier-girded mountains baking under a southern sun.
Even cradling peaches from the market near my home, I picture a dusty roadside stand on Highway 8.
Even surrounded by Rainiers — in the state that made them — I find myself aching for a moment of stillness in a cherry tree six thousand miles away.
Maybe that’s a sign.
Not that I’m broken — but that I’m not done.
That I still rely too heavily on circumstances — season, setting, sunlight — to conjure a joy that lasts. To anchor it.
It’s not wrong.
But it is telling.
The cherries are still coming — the last of them now.
Peaches are holding steady.
The lavender is still blooming.
Yet I find myself bracing.
Not everything can stay in season forever.
But maybe that’s alright.
I am, after all, a restless-hearted thing — never quite done wanting, even in the midst of plenty.
This summer, at least, I’m trying to stand still.
I’m daring to wonder if perhaps joy lives in that tension: in the reaching and the rooting. In holding what is, while still remembering what was.
And maybe letting the horizon linger on the edge of my gaze — not swallow the center.
