The first plant-naming i remember was the devil’s walking stick. Of course we probably learned the names of the Dogwood, the Cherry Blossom, the black walnut and maybe even the Hackberry. But nothing looks so properly named as that old Devil’s Walking Stick. You can nearly see his red-scaly-hands grasping that evilish branch. But i never knew til now it would bloom. Providence in her lineage of Mother Nature, surprising in a quiet way at every turn, if you are looking.
Wilbur’s first time out on the water, brave and curious like maybe all living things should be. We was out looking for Providence and all of her spring-time-prosperity.
Out paddling, like suddenly we had so much horse-power and self-power and capability. All these island ideas and heading into marsh-labyrinths and certain we will arrive home safe. A crooked lightening-looking limb marks the entrance to Twelve Oaks, from the bayou, the home of a dozen lightening-looking limbs. And there are photos, but you can imagine this clumsy fool ain’t bring no actual camera to the bayou. A phone in a sandwich bag and an eye full of wonder. Worried for all the creatures around us and underneath us, but we are safer in this kayak than on the road, walking or driving. A maze ahead and above and below and we go on.
Signs all around for spring, every where you look. Bright buds, bright green. An unfurling over-night. Brown sticks, things winter kept for dead, greening again. Curious to see all of these strange species come to life again and again and again. Winter curling everything inward and spring taking all the underground and kiting it up and out. Quiet, first, very quiet and balled-up, hopeful. Blackberries, second named, after that old devil’s walking stick. Plain, simple, sweet.
Same as all these strange birds, you believe you know birds until you see a Shearwater or a Royal Tern, and they look so magnificently and perfectly designed, could they be just another bird? Leafs as feathers, leaves as feet, sky in the water, mist rising from that old street.
We took that kayak out looking for Providence, though it was clear she had already been moving back toward human kind. And the shift was strange, the water looks more winter, though we know she has been working. Every day is it’s own miracle, and it’s hard to think about ever leaving. We walk our highway road and know the signs of spring, but these plants have begun to look like people. The photo above is the plant on the turn towards the camellias, it always brushes you and it always has done. But now it is greening, and it is a thought like a dream to see the path green and obstructed with that fine life.
A hundred-years old tree and a young azalea. Time demands to teach us, but if we don’t write it down and take care to remember, we will never really know to recall. Superstitions last over time only because they are told again and again, finally trusted, true reasoning behind lost to time. This old oak stands, it has stood; all of these tests. It is strong, it is supportive, it is rooted deeply, it carries it’s young ferns, it lives. It cares for it’s canopy, and by that - all of the trees around it. The azalea grows, blossoming every spring, or pre-spring, careless, but on time (in it’s own time.)
(we had been to the Christenberry exhibit before it closed down, and the whole museum seemed like a home, a place where we had all been together as a family for the past several years. Now we are faced again with moving, with loss, with death. Christenberry painted with strikes of color to bring a whole landscape together, made a graveyard the same as a heaven with pinks and blues and stars. His greens the same dark green-bright-green as the spring around here. It feels like New Orleans has already been sunk, it seems like the Ogden was lost into the deep dark of the Mississippi, i love you all so much and the distance seems too far to bear by walking or dreaming or talking, and i was crying in an old metal rocking chair, like the kind Muriel had on her porch in Morganton.)