The Maiden, The Mother, The Crone

The girl on the porch belonged to burnweed.

She sprang up wild too, all elbows and questions, appearing where the ground had been disturbed.

The adults called her too much. Too loud. Too dreamy. Too sensitive. Too curious about things polite folks did not discuss.

But burnweed does not ask permission to grow.

She comes after fire. After clearing. After the world gets torn open.

The girl sat barefoot on porch steps with dirt under her nails and the whole wide ache of becoming buzzing inside her ribs.

She did not know it yet, but she was already learning how to survive broken ground.

The mother on the porch became goldenrod.

By then, her roots ran deeper. By then, she had fed people from parts of herself nobody saw.

Goldenrod blooms late when summer starts leaning tired, and the fields need one last burst of light.

Not fragile beauty. Not ornamental fuss.
Working beauty.
The kind that holds pollinators together while seasons shift around them.

The mother knew that kind of labor.
She stood at the edge of everybody’s lives, offering medicine quietly. Soup. Comfort. Bandages. Listening. One more phone call. One more long night beside a bed.

And still, she bloomed.

Bright as mercy against the coming dark.

The crone on the porch kept company with dogbane.

The old misunderstood healer.
Strong fiber hidden inside bitter sap. Medicine and poison walking hand in hand.

By then, the crone no longer feared being called strange.

She had lived enough life to know the world fears women who can see too clearly.

So she sat easy in her rocker while dusk gathered blue around the holler, watching storms move through without needing to control them.

The crone understood edge places: widows, wanderers, burned-out souls, disturbed ground, the lonely ones trying to grow again.

She knew some plants survive because they learned boundaries.
And when younger women arrived tired from the frantic world, the old woman would pat the porch beside her and pour another cup of tea.

Because she had finally learned what all three plants knew from the beginning:

Healing does not always look soft.
Sometimes, it looks like growing anyway.