Trillium
She slid her bare feet into her LLBean fuzzball slippers still wearing her pink and black plaid flannel leggings which were soft and cozy from the night before. She snuggled into her winter coat, that puffy black coat she absolutely loved though it didn’t really cover anything but her upper body. She could get so easily attached to things that were not always practical. The Northern Exposure puffy black coat fit her perfectly. She bought it at full price, which was rare. It was one of those material things she hated to admit she was attached to. She could become too attached to so much, and much that was not always good for her. It was something she was working on.
All bundled up she stepped out onto the back porch, her dog at her heels. This was a new morning routine. She used to spend time trying to meditate upstairs after a little yoga. Yoga was easy. She had a fluid and flexible body. Meditation, sitting still for even 20 minutes was just hard. But with the change of season she was drawn to the outdoors first thing in the early morning. Holding a steaming cup of java in her “Let that Shit Go” mug, she entered the world. Forty-two degrees with a slight breeze. She filled her lungs to the point of nearly bursting. Peacefully, quietly, and slowly making her way down the front steps she started to wander around her yard, that yard she loved, nestled safely in the wild woods. Her lab wandered with her, well most of the time, as she surveyed what they owned and tried to tame.
Her yard and her home always seemed like one giant projective to her. They both reflected her how she was feeling and thinking on so many levels. There was so much in her own life that she cultivated, earned, worked hard for and yet so much that was still wild and free. Take, for example, that old school chair she painted lime green and put in her office space upstairs. It was old, sturdy, used in a rule-filled school setting and yet she painted it the color of a summertime lemon-lime cooler. She used to work in a school setting. The chairs there were brown.
She always had an eye out and on her 13 year-old yellow lab on these morning tours. Lulu seemded to enjoy snacking on old turds. In the winter her husband would say, “She’s just having a poopsicle.” “Disgusting old dog,” she would respond with. But she loved that crazy, geriatric blonde-haired dog who drove her nuts by always walking close at her heals, laying near her, whining when she was gone. “Something is wrong with that dog,” became a joke between her and her husband, that easy-going Lumberjack of a man who lay snoring away as she perused the grounds. Both her dog and her husband represented parts of her personality. Like the dog she could be erratic and irritable and may a bit needy but lovable, loyal and smart. Like her husband, she had a side of her that slept with the ease of a happy baby while the world carried on. She had both ease and irritation in her soul.
She and her husband were building a rock wall between the lawn and the woods to hold back the onslaught, encrochment, ever-evolving wave of nature. The woods were wild and free, for sure, but she and Sid, her husband, did like their lawn. Some of the rocks on the periphery were coated in lush moss which she couldn’t help touching. One rock was in the shape of a giant heart. The rocks and surrounding ground under areas of dense tree cover would be literally carpeted in that deep green soft mass of plant material taking over shady areas with neither roots, stems nor leaves. Moss isn’t able to stand tall because it doesn’t have a vascular structure, and therefore grows where it can, low and spreading on fallen logs, rocks and where there is poor or no soil. She loved that sturdy, low lying plant that cushioned her step across the lawn here and there. She felt that she too laid low in all those years growing up, years lost to her memory. It grew where it could and so did she.
As she wandered around the yard and then the gravel driveway, she listened for her favorite woodpecker. Every morning she wanted to hear that one pileated woodpecker, the biggest woodpecker in Maine at up to 16 inches long. She loved to hear it bang and drill away at an old oak tree. Usually she could turn her head to the right and hear it out in the back, just into the forest beyond her property line. Something about that crazy red-crested black and white bird with it’s long black beak hammering away on old wood, drilling the hell out of a dead tree that’s currently having it’s last stand before it drops in the next big storm. She laughed when she learned that a woodpecker’s astonishingly long tongue originates above the eye orbital and ends out the beek. It uses that 4 inch tongue to spear insects and the like, extending and retracting it into a hole of a dead tree. She imagined a sling-shot type mechanism as the tongue shoots forth and then rolls back in and around the woodpecker’s spongy skull. That’s one tough bird she thought. She could relate.
One day she noticed a brown curly-Q fern ready to unfurl. It was straining up through a dense leafy covering on the floor of the woods. A smaller version, a little fern baby was nearby. Her husband said, “Oh, those are fiddlehead ferns,” when she mentioned to him later in the day. On another day she spotted a delicate little maroon and lime green star-shaped flower, two of them out by the fence. They looked like fairy land escapees all delicate and ethereal with their heads down. She had never seen them before. She was told later that it was a trillium, trillium erectum. Her step-son told her daughter-in-law, who she had shared a picture with that he recalled buying that for his mom on mother’s day, so long ago and who knows when.
Living in the home her husband built for his former life was odd at times, no doubt. This beautiful and delicate little flower from another place and time, was a reminder of that. That four-petaled little beauty reminded her that she was not the original mother in this house, but the mother now. It reminded her that she wasn’t really even a mother at all to anybody other than herself, perhaps. And those star-shaped blossoms reminded her how once you clear away all the shit, surprises, beautiful, delicate and color surprises may be the reward. Trillium is also nicknamed Stinking Benjamin because the petals though charming, stink. To that she could relate as well.
Her home around which her yard encircled was located in the midst of the woods in a small minimally populated residential cul-du-sac. Their saltbox style, traditional New England home stood tall and proud amongst 5 other smaller houses, one a log cabin, circling a center island of mostly pine trees. Like spokes on a wheel her neighbors were neither near nor far and she liked that. Privacy and yet not lonely was her thinking. She had been privately lonely for much of her childhood. But now she enjoyed privacy without feeling a need for other souls in fact she really didn’t like them too close. She wondered in awe how her brother could live in New York City right next to, on top of, under, beneath, beside all those people. That would not work for her.
There were a lot of trees in the neighborhood, pine, maple, a few oaks and woods beyond that. In the winter the trees, except the renegade pine trees were tall, skinny and brown but as spring came around the buds began to awaken. She would wait impatiently every spring for the day she’d wake up on that morning and it would be so brilliantly green that she’d have to squint with delight. She could not get enough of that embrace of green everywhere she looked .With each prior day, trees slowly bloomed and blossomed, if you can imagine that because her husband admonished her that trees DO NOT bloom. And yet, they did bloom into the sweetest color of life itself. Her husband, though a source of strength in her life, was not always right and he did stand corrected when she pointed to a weeping cheery tree in the neighbor’s yard.
Her love of the forest was deep. She had grown up in the woods, in a small house on a small cul-du-sac with about 5 houses in another lifetime and far away. Familiar spokes on a wheel, the neighbors were way more near than far and she always hated the next door neighbor’s pastel purple house. That house where she helped hide a boy her age behind the mound of dirt, helped him hide from the beatings. That was the same house where his brother shot himself in the head. Her dad recalled hearing the gun shot and calling the police. Her own house, that brown house next to the lavender house, was much less dramatic from the outside. She didn’t seek anybody’s help to hide. A different kind of beating was going on, from what little she could remember.
Her love of nature, the woods, things turning green, was always a panacea. She loved the ocean as well. She remembers many days as a young woman stopping at McDonald’s to get a cup of coffee and then make way to the beach. There she’d muse and cry, drink her coffee and look out to sea. Now, in this time of the pandemic, that fucking, what-the-hell pandemic, which made her have to work so hard to settle her mood she found herself seeking nature once again, Mother Nature she smiled, like no mother she ever knew. She knew she wasn’t alone in this thinking. Times like this triggered all that old shit. The old shit dis-ease in her bones that would float up and onto the surface in ways that alarmed her. But, perhaps, she thought on a good day, perhaps this all came with an opportunity, like a boat, maybe a life raft, drifting by that you are ready to leap on in a flood. Maybe this was an opportunity, although she hated that fucking thought that anything positive came out of all the death and despair, but maybe she thought it’s here and now that she might dive deep. What lies beneath?
She started to review all that she could not remember. She wondered if she was somewhat like that trillium erectum in the woods, uncovered when the flower bed near the fence had been cleared away of old leaves, dead and dying trees and bushes. Trillium erectum. A dainty little flowering plant that heralds spring. She read that it was traditionally used as an aid in childbirth. One of it’s many nicknames is “Beth root” which is a form of “birth root.” Native Americans used the roots for tea for menstrual disorders, to induce childbirth, and to aid in labor. Heralding in spring and aiding in labor. She like that role of the once hidden trillium erectum. Uncovered like she was uncovering and getting to know herself, like a trillium, aiding in the labor of it all.
In these times of reverie, walking around the yard and after, she would think about the part of herself that literally saved her own soul. She was her own Mother Nature she would laugh although a few people along the way did help. “I might be stronger than I think,” she would smile to herself trying to figure out who she was and where she was going. She recalled that quote from A.A. Milne where Christopher Robin tells Pooh, “Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe and stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.” She had to laugh as she thought about stepping onto that life raft of self knowledge and embrace, floating near her soul.
Her granddaughter showed up one afternoon. Six-feet apart they stood following CDC and WHO and WhoTheFuckGivesAShitIHateThisGoddamn Virus guidelines. She wore a white T-shirt with a cartoon-looking image drawn in black. The girl in the image had deep green-eyes and she told her granddaugher that she liked that. She always tried to pay attention to her granddaughter. They shared a history and a type of mother and for those reasons she always gave her granddaughter special time and love and attention. “She’s a warrior,” the woman was informed by her granddaughter, standing now a foot taller than her, that girl who she feels so connected to who she shares a birthdate with. She loved that image for both her and her granddaughter. They both had, thank God and praise Allah, inner warriors. You need inner warriors, she knew that. Easily called forth if you are raised right, developed slowly over time, if not. Her inner warrior was all her own.
Walking around her yard, her space with grass and trees and ferns, flowers, trees and bugs, birds singing their hearts out, this new routine brought her a feeling of peace, of things makings sense in the senseless time.
Trillium errectum, she thought, welcome to my world.
