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.
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