One of my favorite things about doing what I do is experiencing the early summer morning, the quiet chill that comes over me like a vapor, as the screen door shuts behind me with a brutal thud, and I slip out into the semi darkness, quiet and alone. It is so early still that I’ve left my sleeping family behind, having walked through the house, so quietly so as not to wake them, not even bothering to change out of my night clothes but rather throwing some big boots on with them and slipping out into the dawn like a thief of time…
Out here – in a time and place that feels like nowhere, I push through the dew, moving swiftly, harvesting and foraging flowers. In these moments I am utterly exhilarated, the wild grasses dampening my legs, and I move quickly, quickly, not simply for the thrill, the rush and pure greed I feel when chance upon the extraordinary burr and bristle of a sedge in flower, the patch of Soapwort I hadn’t known existed, or a monumental Bull Thistle’s bud transitioning somehow seamlessly from green to lavenders - but thrilled by the way I become a sort of natural spy.
Pushing through the dim, through plant life that in the barely discernible light looks only like dioramic silhouettes of plant life, I wander through the brush and I see that the pasts that were created in the night. I see the scrimmages that occurred from the little clumps of fur left on the ground and which tell me of nocturnal creatures who duked it out, for one reason or another … I see the broken branches of a cherished, perennial or shrub and the way the deer tasted them – and then fickle-minded moved on to the next forage … I smell the heady musk of some creature who’s marked its territory, or see a coyote’s print, stamped into the mud, , and the shorn limbs of what must have been a small groundhog.
All of this happens almost silently in the night while we sleep in this seething, breathing land – and I succumb to the peace and grace of being humbled, reminded that this is not our land at all – these 12 wild acres. I can try to tame them as much as I like, I can carve out plant rows and flower beds and cutting gardens, I can plant trees and shrubs and perennials, and then can take from what I plant. But this swarming, teaming landscape, soaked in birdcall and dew, drenched in the whos of distant owls and the high pitched, relentless trill of thousands of swamp peepers, I am reminded that it is I, no matter how many marks I make on this land, not them, who is simply passing through.
