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"I only went out for a walk, but finally decided to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in." --John Muir

Monday, July 22, 2013

Tricked

My husband and I like leaves.  When we lived in forests, we dipped them in paint and pressed them on our skin, then lay in piles of them, trying to be them.  Now, we add them to the yard.  We plant raspberries, an apple tree, a cherry tree, currants.  We tend a crowded garden, guiding long arms of pumpkin plants out onto the lawn.  His father brings up clippings from corkscrew willows, black-eyed Susans, a yellow lady’s slipper.  They drive to the woods and come back with two maples and a cherry that look like tall but emaciated children, plant them far apart, each supported by two square wooden stakes wider than their trunks, twine looped around their middles, torn squares of t-shirt slid in between to prevent the twine from cutting into them.  My father-in-law gives us a spent moonflower pod, a branch of rose-of- Sharon that we thrust into soil in a pot, hoping it will take root.  In two short rows, we plant eight spruces picked up for free on Arbor Day.  We mow around common mullein whenever it appears, let its low fountain of furry leaves flourish, then wait a year for its towering five-foot stalks of yellow flowers to spike up ridiculously from the lawn.  Watching for growth, I notice that even the evergreens in the front lose their leaves en masse in two year cycles, then sprout new needles from small brown, grape-like clusters of soft tissue.

            Some things thrive.  Even through drought, the spruces reach half-Christmas-tree height in six years.  The apple we watch carefully, dreaming of pie, and when we notice one year a clump of leaves gone missing and then clouds of tent caterpillar nests in the crook of almost every branch, we pull the caterpillars off with our hands one-by-one—easy to find along the wispy web trails they leave on the branches—and smash them beneath our feet. 

Sometimes we are neglectful caretakers. Occasionally chance steps in to reverse our errors.  The leaves of the transplanted maples and cherry wilt and brown, making the trees no longer look even like emaciated children, but like sticks poked into the ground.  We stop watering them, wondering if we should.  And then it rains, a long pour that lightens but continues over night, and the next day on the way to the garden I see new leaves, the greenest green, growing from twig-ends on two of the trees.  In our bedroom, the rose-of-Sharon sits dormant for months then suddenly does the same thing. 


And then there are the moonflower seeds.  My husband carefully shakes them from the flower pod onto a plate and lets them dry on a bookshelf.  Then he plants them in two rather regal, blue flower pots and puts them outside. Sprouts shoot up.  We water them religiously, courted by the thought of broad white blooms opening at night, dying before morning. They grow, but the leaves seem odd, glossy and bright rather than the grey-green we remember from his parents' house, linear rather than broad, each marked with a dark thumbprint at its center.  We water them anyway, certain they are moonflower.  We avoid the internet. When my husband finally does look up moonflower he says he can’t make out the leaves in the pictures.  The plants prosper and spill over the edges of the pots.  Then, one day in the garden, I realize I am pulling up the same plant we are nurturing in those containers on the patio—lady’s thumb, an invasive weed.  I tell my husband.  I walk to the front of the house and look down at them, the racemes of miniscule pink flowers among the sprawling green so stately in the dark potting soil encircled by the shiny blue pot-rim.  In on the joke, I decide I’ll continue to water them, these stand-ins, these goblin children.  I’ll give them one good season.