I was six or seven, sitting in the dirt in my mom’s vegetable garden, the hot sun beating down relentlessly in the dry Colorado summer. Playing with the tomato seedlings that my mom gently pulled out of their plastic starter trays, I noticed the pale, dusty brown dirt surrounding the plants indicative of the arid landscape. It looked like sawdust next to the rich, brown soil in the beds my mom built. I reached out as a worm writhed its way from the bottom of one of the many holes my mom had dug for the tomatoes. Dragging it out, I was transfixed by its slimy, taught body.

The worms coiled in between my fingers. “They’re important. Don’t hurt them,” Mom reminded me. Not necessarily a scold, but a stern, data-driven observation. Typical Mom.

“They circulate all the nutrients and make sure everything gets delivered to all the different root systems,” she continued, though I didn’t ask. A quiet kid, I was always a little nervous, and tended to be more at home amongst the dirt and worms and flowers than trying to take part in conversation, even with my mom. “They digest the muck and turn it into something the rest of the ecosystem can use.”

I stared at the flesh-colored creature weaving in between my fingers, leaving a wet trail on my palm. I couldn’t understand how something so small could be as important as Mom was saying. The scene in front of me – worm, dirt, plants – looked more like the dirt cups I got for dessert at friends’ birthday parties, and less like some big, important ecological moment. I briefly considered eating the worm in my hands, to see if it tasted like the dirt cup gummy worms, but decided against it. I never much cared for gummy worms, and, if my mom is right, this worm has an important job to do. I gingerly placed it back into the soil and envisioned the weight of all the soil on top of its delicate body. Magic, I think.

“It’s not just one worm’s job, you know,” Mom continued, as if she could read my mind. “All these worms work together, with all the other critters in this garden bed. They circulate, and that’s how the soil stays healthy and the tomatoes grow.” This, like much of my Mom’s wisdom, would stick with me, and become clearer many years later.

Worms are oftentimes indicators of how healthy an ecosystem is, from a microcosm like a garden bed or compost tumbler, to understanding how well crops will perform and whether or not land will be grazable for livestock or large game. The top layer of soil that worms dwell in, also known as the drilosphere, is rich in microorganisms, nitrogen, and castings (digested, nutrient-rich plant matter). The more worm activity, the thicker this layer. And the thicker the layer, the more nutrients plants will have to grow and thrive. This circular system not only shortens the time it takes organic matter to degrade, it also helps growers maintain smaller, more circular systems in their gardens. In other words, the worms help plants grow, thrive, and decay in the same space over multiple generations of growing.

Mom learned this growing up in rural Oklahoma. Her childhood, cold and stained with abuse and neglect, is something she didn’t share anything about while raising me. Unlike the earthworms that stayed in her garden year after year, happy in their own circular worlds, Mom left her small town when she turned 18. She didn’t have the luxury of nutrients and care in her own garden bed, so she set off to make her own in the city, and never turned back.

While I didn’t grow up in abuse, the emotional distance from my mom slowly etched a chasm between us. That’s why, desperate to draw the longest line I could between me and my family, I landed abroad in Central America for an eco-sociology program as soon as I could leave home. My own ironic circling brought me there to study the very subject my mom has always loved so much – plants. It’s during this course that I learned the term crop rotation for the first time.

My fieldwork took place on a small regenerative farm in the cloud forest in Costa Rica. Each plant, I learned, gives and takes something different from its landscape. Rotating what is grown where each year can actually replace the usage of commercial fertilizers. Banana bushes intermingled with pepper vines and tomato plants. The farmer-owner explained in delicate English, how, with their roots and leaves and chemicals, these plants all speak with each other, exchanging nutrients and helping one another grow. I thought back to Colorado and the eastern part of the state’s large, multi-mile monocrop fields. Corn, literally, as far as the eye can see. I didn’t realize there was another way, more similar to the worms and tomato starters of my mom’s garden, to grow food for people at scale.

Our community in Costa Rica, a couple of thousand people in a narrow, steep valley, was almost entirely fed by small, localized farms like these. In fact, there was an ongoing joke about the produce in the grocery store constantly rotting on the shelves – it was more expensive and of lesser quality. What my host family couldn’t grow in their own small garden, we could get from our neighbors or from the various stands around town. We had enough.

I was mulling this over one afternoon when I got back to town from the farm. I went out for a drink with a friend, Elena, and while we were walking to the bar, she tugged my arm. “Emily,” she whispered, “I think I went to elementary school with that guy we just walked past.”

I turned to look. We were on a rural mountain road, walking in a drainage ditch of sorts as opposed to a proper sidewalk. About twenty feet behind us, there were two guys, both looking back at us, faces painted with the bewildered confusion that I imagine we both wore, too.

Elena got a Facebook message from the man, Jeremy, that night: Hey. This might sound crazy, but did I see you and a friend in Monteverde, Costa Rica today? I know we’re a far way from Washington.

This seemed too crazy to be true. I told her she has to respond to him. I wanted to meet this mysterious friend from Washington! I wanted to meet his friend! I was tired of talking to the farmers and biologists, the only folks who tend to come through Monteverde.

We met. Jeremy was with his best friend, Kyle, researching local coffee farming practices on a gap year. As Elena and Jeremy caught up, I started talking to Kyle. We’re on our third beer when Kyle mentions he used to live in Colorado. “No way!” I exclaimed. I started rattling off people I know who have lived in the town he was in, Boulder.

The third or fourth name I listed made his eyes widen. “No way,” he started, shuddering through his words. “That’s my ex-girlfriend.”

We both stared at each other in an awkward shock, eventually breaking the tension with laughter. “Small world!” we both proclaimed, the beers softening the jarring feeling of being so close to the one place I had been desperate to create distance from.

The following morning, I was walking to my fieldwork on a gentle incline. Patches of sun and shade surrounded me – a rare sunny day during the rainy season, when it feels like each plant and creature is trying to make the most of the light. Everything was intimidatingly green, and I can’t help but think of something else my mom always used to say.

“We move in circles.”

This cryptic and somewhat annoying phrase is something she’d respond with, measured and data driven as always, whenever I’d giddily share some weird coincidence that had happened to me during the day.

Mom had pulled this saying from the theory of social clustering, or the idea that people with similar backgrounds, upbringings, and motivations tend to move in similar ways – a long-standing tenant of sociological research. Unlike me, Mom has never been interested in sociology, but learned about social clustering when getting an advanced degree in statistics. She took a mathematical approach to this social theory to help explain why coincidences of seemingly minuscule odds happen more than a miniscule amount of time. “We think we move in straight lines, and every coincidence is the result of two points in space randomly intersecting,” she would tell me. “But we don’t. We move in circles, and circles rotating, especially those rotating in proximity to others on a similar path, have a much higher chance of running into one another.” Once again, classic Mom – always taking an empirical approach to what I considered magic.

I stopped walking and sat under a banana bush, chuckling to myself. A handful of clouds floated gently through the sky. The air was thick and heavy, I still hadn’t grown accustomed to the humidity. I moved across the world to veer away from my mom, stuck in her logic and lack of wonder, but I was still a desert kid at heart. Enshrouded by this rainforest and the thousands of plants I don’t know the names of, I felt the distance from home for the first time. The humidity feels like it will crush me. For some reason, I feel like I’m going to cry.

Then, I looked down.

Following the thick roots of the tree I’m sitting on, a single earthworm. I stared. It followed the distance of the root, and then disappeared below the dirt and leaf litter just to the left of my hand. I continued to stare, but it didn’t resurface. One tear made its way down my cheek.

Glancing at my watch, I see I’m going to be late if I don’t get going. Ignoring my better judgement, I picked up the phone and dialed the first number I learned and the only one I still have memorized.

“Emily?” Mom answered on the first ring, her voice etched with a mix of confusion, nerves, and excitement. “Mom, you remember how you always used to say we run in circles? Well you’ll never guess who I just ran into.”

This story was originally published in The Ranchlands Review, Edition 03: Lines.