Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Spark: Make two lists: Those who leave. Those who stay. 
Fill each list. Entries don’t have to correspond to each other.

I couldn’t abide those categories.

Mine became:

Those who are taken: hemlocks, trillium

Those who are thrown out: diseased iris

Those who arrive uninvited, but are welcome: crocus, jack-in-the-pulpits, phoebes

Those who arrive uninvited, and are unwelcome: garlic mustard, deer, voles, water sprouts

Those who always leave and always come back: geese

Those who are not invited back: chipmunks

Those who are left behind: …

Those who are taken by the eagles and the angels: …

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I am the architect of my life, the captain of my ship. Ha ha ha ha ha. Those Who Leave – as though I stand there passive, helpless, handless as they walk out the door on their own volition.

The Unwelcome Who Arrive Uninvited. That would be the voles.

“It looks like a chinchilla,” I say. “It’s all round and chubby and cute. I can tell it lives under the yucca plant.”

“Sounds so sweet,” Delia says. “In a little hobbit hole under the overarching yucca fronds, weaving her nest from the dried grasses of August.”

“It’s a goddam rodent, severing the leaves at the base, chewing through the roots, killing plant after plant. I’ve kind of been trying to drown the little fluffball.”

“Live and let live,” says Delia, as expected.

“You have a less appreciative response to plants than I do,” I say. “You didn’t even know the rosemary Christmas tree was dead for two months. When it comes to flora, you are live and let die.”

She hurt my feelings last night on the phone. The trillium, who I love, didn’t hear about the cold snap we just had. They had waited as long as seemed proper, then began to arrive, three-leafed green sprockets poking through the forest floor of brown decaying leaves. I helped some of them – where the leaves pile too deep and compress into fiberboard, I pull them apart so the trillium can surface.

Then it snowed. Then it stayed cold. Then it snowed again. The trillium looked like spinach on a high-heat sauce pan.

Second guessing. Second guessing puts me in hell. Maybe the ones I didn’t help will be the only survivors.

Some of the trillium began to unwilt, hold up their buds.

“Good for you,” I said. Then I noticed the headless ones.

“The snow isn’t gone, the trillium are staggering about, and the deer are biting their heads off now before they even have a chance to bloom!” I tell Delia. Unwelcome, unwarranted, goddam deer!

“This happens every year,” she says.

“Not before the flowers! You know what? I keep meaning to string a knee-high web of fish line across what’s left of their territory. It just keeps getting smaller every year.”

“Wouldn’t that hurt the deer?”

“I hope so,” I reply. “I hope they bleed to death. Let their carcasses feed the trilliums they don’t kill, the ones they inadvertently leave behind.”

Not a good thing to say to a Buddhist. Not a good thing to say to a tired Buddhist who works in the social services arena, where the “greater good” is frequently steamrolled by egos, politics, agendas, Republicans.

“There might be better ways to spend your time than fighting a losing battle against the deer,” she finally says.

I know.

I know I should be working for world peace. I know I’m selfish, but what’s so wrong with wanting some beauty back? The endlessness of ephemeral blossoms, those drifts of white trillium in the spring… nature untouched, prettiness, a living glimpse into a dream world for all.

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Writing Through the Rough Spots in-class. April 2016.