Prelude

I started identifying native plants when I was twelve. Looking back, I realize I have always been drawn to quiet, hidden away places in nature. I grew up in farmland, but my immediate family didn’t farm, so I watched with fascinated interest as the fields around my home played out the seasons of farming like I was watching a filmstrip.  The corn stubble was left in the fields to overwinter. As an adult I understand this is good for the soil, the stubble protecting it from erosion, but as a young girl, it simply made me happy that there was something for the cattle to eat on those cold, wet winter mornings as I waited for the school bus.

Big tractors would appear in the fields as the days grew warmer and the rains stopped. I became aware that the appearance of the tractors was not dictated by the calendar, but by the weather. The second wave of tractors came along and planted seeds in impeccably tidy rows. I waited for that first pale suggestion of green. I distinctly remember venturing into the neighbor’s field to see those tiny little blades of green coming up in the black soil. I laid down and looked across the top of the rows, the green intensified with the repetition of the blades stacked into the horizon, giving a teaser of what would be obvious from a distance in a few more weeks.   

By early summer everything was a rush of growing, reaching, green all around me. I began to walk to a small woodlot that remained untilled and unfarmed, probably for as long as anyone knew. A natural spring kept it too wet to farm. In early summer I stepped across the rows of corn, counting to thirty-eight. After thirty-eight rows, I turned right and followed the row down to the woodlot, walking carefully between the growing plants. My method became troublesome as the crop matured. It was sweaty, humid going across the rows of corn when it was taller than me, but the woodlot waited, cool and dim down the secret alley created by the growing corn.

It was in the woods where I learned about Trillium, Mayapple, and Yellow Trout Lily.  I learned from my mother that you could eat the fruit of the Mayapple, but not the leaves, stems, or roots. As summer headed into fall, even the woodlot got dry around the edges. Only the darkest part with the tallest, oldest trees remained spongy wet.

I watched as the crops began to turn from green into a golden color. I awoke to a strange sound one night to see the lights of multiple tractors moving in tandem across the fields that faced my bedroom window. Farmers working through the night, signaled to me the immediacy of harvest. My next walk through the fields would be easy, the woodlot visible far before I reached it. I felt the loss of all that life, all that green. The loss felt significant, but I understood it as a cycle. I had been witnessing it for all my dozen or so years.