Coyote

Coyote, a photo by FreeManWalking on Flickr.

Took a wrong turn in Cumberland County while looking for the Obed Wild and Scenic River...this is what we found!

Botanist's Reverie

This morning our flowering plants class walked out for one of Dr. Blum’s infamous m ii-field trips. We walked over to the shingle oak which blew over in last week’s storm. Though more appropriate to the dendrology course I took under him back in the fall of ’09, Dr. Blum discussed the growth rings and the significance of what they represent. He asked for a volunteer to count them. I’ve always had too short of an attention span for the tedious task of counting growth rings but when no one came forward I volunteered anyway. Beginning in the heart wood center I began, keeping my place with an ink pen: one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve…seventy-one. The old tree was seventy-one.

It was a large seventy-one, owing to growth a few years ago in which it put on half an inch per year for a few good years. But in recent years the old tree had gone into decline. The last four or five years exhibited growth rings of less than a quarter inch. The days were numbered for this tree. Dr. Blum pointed out how some of the newly exposed roots already looked dead. The shallow, spreading roots of this variety of red maple didn’t allow for the strong anchoring of the white oaks with their taproot systems. But the tree had grown tall and large, much larger than the surrounding walnuts which were a good ten years older, having been planted from walnuts brought back from Mount Vernon by a former grounds keeper.

                Afterwards we walked on, Dr. Blum and myself at the front discussing the scene in A Sand County Almanac where Aldo Leopold discusses the oak he cut down for firewood and in its rings remarks on how the tree had faired under different owners (really paying overseers) of the land. We talked a little of Loren Eiseley and wondered why such a brilliant, thoughtful and somewhat dark author had fallen out of the public consciousness in the decades since his death in 1977.

                This is the last class I will take with Dr. Blum. It is a wonder that I was able to learn his botanical knowledge even now. Back in ’09 he missed weeks of class toward the end of the semester with a mysterious medical condition. As the story goes he was in the bar taking a shot in celebration of his birthday when he went down with internal hemorrhaging.

                But I’ll take what I can from these old school naturalists, who have paid their dues participating in the hard-living lifestyles of botanists of old. There is an art in the knowledge of plants. From learning the vocabulary, interpreting fuzzy differences in an attempt to find order and a sense of belonging for a specific plant, to hours spent collecting, pressing, and mounting herbarium specimens I don’t doubt all great botanists see themselves as artists in some way. What is art if not identifying the order in a world that otherwise seems chaotic to the untrained eye.

Friends: the longest four-letter-word

Good Gawd…Mother Earth & Other Pretty Girls has made it to Amazon.com, here in the U.S. and surprisingly in the U.K. as well where there are already two used copies for sale. Discovering my book was finally for sale online yesterday while sitting in the hospital waiting room waiting for my dad to get out of surgery was a little victory in a 36-hour period that didn’t hold many victories. (But one of those victories was the fact that he came through everything just fine.)

The weekend was a washout, not from rain – the weather was beautiful, likely added to the trouble – but from so much beer I lost count of how many cases were scattered about the yard and my kitchen floor. It was all fine enough Saturday morning, sitting around with Jake and Grigori, sipping coffee till my bowels hurt and my bladder exploded. Then we decided to sit outside. One beer led to another. Then Ty Paint pulled up in his little Saturn car and I could see the day might devolve into abandon and unproductivity. Kate pulled up on her motorbike and the guitar came out. And of course Eli got off work and showed up with another 12-pack of Budweiser.

But oh, so much for listing participants. We sat around the front yard on couches and office chairs and as far as I can tell no one had a care in the world. Later Ty and I walked up to the square where I promptly fell asleep on the bar for an hour and a half.

I awoke Sunday feeling washed out but okay. I had a hangover but it was the emotional kind. I realized I had finally run poor little Meadow off, not so much run her off as pushed her toward Mark. He’s younger and definitely more capable of falling in love than I am. He doesn’t play the stupid catch and release game that I am unfortunately prone to. Nearing forty I have begun to overthink my collection of years versus the years collected by someone else. When she left with him Saturday night a little of that old black magic walked out of my life.

But she came to me Sunday night. I needed her badly so I left the door unlocked. But it had all changed. No longer did she strip down and curl up beside me merging our bodies into one warm organism of comfortable sleep. We lay in bed a safe distance apart. We talked. She told me again where I had gone wrong, it was in the cedar glades when, in a moment when I had should have shown her the most kindness and tenderness, I said something more predictive than true: “I don’t see this going anywhere, I see us being very close friends.” A week hence we lay there subdued, sex verboten, only the tenderest of kisses planted on her pretty head as we stared at one another with tired, sad eyes and she told me about her ex-boyfriend.

We all know “friends” is the longest four-letter-word in the English language and sometimes it’s the ugliest. It is the ugliest when a “friend” has to watch his or her “friend” falling into the lustful, hungry arms of another who is less than “friend”. But maybe if this happens on the backside of the original lust it is more bearable. In this way a man and woman can talk sympathetically to one another about subsequent relationships, because each is a known commodity and it is forever understood that they have not been relegated to “friends” due to an unsaid lack of attraction. So all I can tell you girls is that if you like a guy and really want to be friends with him, be his lover first if so inclined, then you will find a friend for life.