So, a couple years ago I sprinkled about a single seed pod from the most needed species of milkweed in our region into what I now refer to as my butterfly garden. It looks so trashy at the moment that the name would seem a delusional misnomer. There’s a pot laying in it that I once used to deliver kitchen scraps to the chickens and since have never remembered to grab. There’s a mountain of donated (read: dumped by linemen clearing downed trees) wood chips sprawling out over its boundaries and into the driveway and probably ten species of weed growing in it that I need to tamp down. My husband never, ever looks at it and wonders what his life might have been had he married someone normal.

But there are also dozens of dried up stalks of the milkweed plants that served bees, hummingbirds, and other pollinators all summer the last few years. Every day of the season, we get to walk up to our kitchen sink and watch monarchs a couple feet away silently dancing on air between feedings because this is literally the only plant on which they can complete their life cycle.

I wrote an ad yesterday offering free seed pods to any locals interested in starting their own butterfly gardens and the response has been overwhelming. Just finished passing my first bag of pods through my vehicle window in a gas station parking lot around the corner. So, yeah, I’m now a seed trafficker. But as I left, I got goosebumps from head to toe.

One minute sprinkling one seed pod, and now there are going to be an unknowable number of way stations for an unknowable number of the forgettable, habitat-bereft, gravely endangered animals who protect every other species on Earth — including ours — from starvation by pollinating our crops. I may never get to personally bring Big Oil & Big Ag CEOs to justice. But getting to be a tiny part of something so, so big that will almost certainly outlive me got me remembering how most of the things we do that really matter, borne by fleeting wisps of hope and humanity, are so small and so quick that we barely mark them in the moment and rarely know their net future impacts. But those gentle smiles and seeds tossed and supportive witnessings and quick expressions of gratitude matter — maybe more than our mistakes, maybe more than everything else.