At 10, I believed all rivers flowed south, pulled by gravity, down the face of a map. These many years later, such a notion seems naïve. Yet that idea – built upon a certain two-dimensional logic, however erroneous its foundation might have been – is difficult for me to shake. For the past quarter century, I’ve often followed a stream through the state game lands on the mountain just to the west of our house. We think of this as “our” mountain, an extension of home. The stream here flows north, and even now, I imagine this current is somehow defying gravity.
As a child, I gazed at the map on the wall of my father’s bedroom, imagining what was hidden in its creases and folds, in the blank spaces beyond the map. I hoped we’d explore these places – real and imagined – together. I dreamed of old forests where bears clawed downed logs, while I watched from a perch on a hemlock bough. The trout in those envisaged streams colored the water, and my rod bent with the power of their runs. Sun filtered down through the dense canopy, providing just enough light for flowers to bloom in rich profusion. And in those northern lands I invented, I wished for the flow of time to be arrested, its physical laws slowed to a crawl, allowing those I loved to live a bit longer and stay by my side for at least one more spring.
My father, who’s been dead for 15 years now, adored wildflowers. On Saturday afternoons in springtime during my childhood, he and I hiked the woods in search of pink and yellow lady’s slippers. While I cherished this time with my father, I would have been embarrassed to tell my friends about our flower-seeking walks.
In the midwestern factory town where I grew up, men were supposed to like football and guns, have calendar girls pinned to the walls of their garages where they worked on their trucks. My father did none of this. Instead, he remembered the names of spring ephemerals his farmer father had taught him when they walked the Appalachian woods together, after the plowing was done but before the cows and hogs needed to be fed. His mother taught him the medicinal properties of different native plants, including lamb’s ear, which they used to treat a calf when it got scours. She grew violets through the winter in the front room of their small farmhouse and gathered ginseng to treat all sorts of maladies.
In the months of April and May, I visit our mountain’s deeply creased hollow, taking in the return of the sun and honoring the memory of my father and his parents by seeking out what blooms. It’s on the first warm days of spring, when the pink light lingers late into evening, that I recognize how much I’ve missed the renewed life of this season during the cold months of winter, and with this flowering exuberance, I feel almost youthful.
On that first 60-degree day, my joints feel like they’ve been newly lubricated, and simply seeing the delicate, white flowers of trailing arbutus or hearing the song of a Louisiana waterthrush – one of the earliest warblers to return to Pennsylvania in the spring – erases decades from my psyche. My stride lengthens, and my confidence that a rock in the stream will hold me sometimes does not match the truth.
My mother’s favorite flower was painted trillium, although she struggled to remember the name and always seemed surprised when she was told for the umpteenth time. On Sunday afternoons during my boyhood, my father and I would take her to the woods. Sometimes we’d bring along a blanket and a picnic, eating simple sandwiches of turkey adorned with lettuce from our garden, a thermos of strong coffee for her. We’d talk about the past week and praise the beauty of those flowers. She’d laugh at my father’s jokes and beam at the white petals, dabbed with purple at their center, spread around us like a field of miniature windmills. No one had planted them. No one tended them. They were a simple gift the woods offered up once a year. Our only obligation was to admire them and protect the land where they grew. Without any speeches, my parents taught me the importance of caring for the land – whether private or public – of noticing what it provided, but also where it had been hurt and how we might help it heal.
I realize repetition can lead to boredom and the possible devaluing of what’s been repeated. But, at least for my family, the brief season of spring ephemerals is about magnification through repetition – of returning to the same places, of saying the names of the things we know. We embrace the unaccounted-for extravagance. We chant the names of so many: foam flower, fringed polygala, bloodroot, trout lily, bishop’s cap, blue cohosh, wild ginger, purple fringed orchid, round-lobed hepatica, wild geranium, speckled wood lily, sessile bellwort, hooked buttercup, spikenard, wild sarsaparilla, crinkleroot, Solomon’s seal, starflower, doll’s eyes, wood anemone, Jack-in-the-pulpit, and on and on.
I learned this catechism by my father’s side and have tried to pass on our shared belief in the green world to my sons. I’ve long since ceased to be embarrassed by my father’s love for the woods and what blooms there. He showed me what lasts, what’s worth hanging on to. I wish I’d known when I was a teenager that manhood includes unapologetically embracing the beauty of this world.
My father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in April of his 82nd year. While we didn’t know for sure if it would be his final spring, we suspected, given the high mortality rate of the disease. He died that July. Before those final days in hospice, he and I walked the woods. The litany of those precious flowers becoming that much more essential. I see him bending with effort – abdominal pain already pronounced – to lift the umbrella leaves of a mayapple so he could appreciate the unfurling flower on its stalk. I wonder what might be the last flower I see and name in my own lifetime.
The last five years of my mother’s life were spent in an Alzheimer’s haze. She still could recall the lyrics from songs she listened to on the radio in college and, thankfully, could recognize and name us. But so much more fell away, including her ability to walk on her own and to go to the woods with us.
In the last April of her life, I would describe to her what I was seeing each day. I wanted to bring the spring forest to her. The smell of wet earth pushed aside by turkeys as they scratched and foraged beneath last year’s leaf litter. The brightness of the sun as it fell through the branches before the trees began to leaf out. When I described how bloodroot is heliotropic, opening its blossoms to the light, only to fold back up when clouds crowd the afternoon, she said she’d never heard of anything like this, although when I was a boy, I’d heard her exclaim the same thing to my father when he explained about this special flower. She died a year ago, 24 days shy of her 90th birthday.
This past May I walked deep into that hollow on our mountain, where the water runs to the north, and thought about the farm in Virginia where my mother lived as a girl with her parents and grandparents during the Great Depression. Our mountain here in Pennsylvania and the mountain that rose up behind that long-ago farmhouse are part of the same vast and ancient chain.
In the hollow, above a long gliding pool – where most days I can see pods of brook trout holding, their tails beating against the current – grows a bankside of trillium. I took some of my mother’s ashes with me on that walk and sprinkled them around the base of those brilliant flowers. I smiled remembering her smile, at the fact her bone will become blossom in another season, in another time in this place.