\ we're not so native

"The cottonwood's redeemed in May," she says, and I agree along the drive, the air nearing white-out conditions, reminder of one more winter added to our rings. "The scotchbroom, too," I think, its yellow more intense than forsythia, though I know she'd disagree, blasphemy, a reminder of the natives displaced, brought here long ago by settlers longing for a glimpse of one more winter escaped from discontent, whose descendants would eventually leave the farm and become biologists and horticulturalists and engineer all manner of methods to eliminate this invasive weed. "We must protect the natives," they'd argue to their grandparents, with not a hint of irony, or the least recognition of their own roots. My favorite relatives are the oldest, who still remember how to roll their eyes. You won't want to know me if I get anywhere close to 80. I'm already crotchety and disapproving (stomp stomp).

I pass a woman, pulled over on the side of this long stretch, clearly wavering behind her oversized sunglasses, clearing a patch next to the road, but nowhere close to the nearest flowers, noxious purple weeds called Herb Robert. What can she be doing, I wonder, clipping at the overgrown grass, a growing pile of yellowing fescue at her feet. I realize it soon enough.

I wonder what color my redemption will be. A lonely old woman clearing a spot in the grass to lay a simple tribute? I know what she was doing now, some 10 miles down the road, after passing four or five makeshift crosses, carnation and lily bouquets for untimely passings in no passing zones. I wonder what she feared the most, losing a son or being abandoned? Either way, one less man in the house. How do you pick husband over son? Nightly warmth, I suppose. God bless the children, sometimes they handle all the decision making (hoo ray).

"You are growing like a weed, little boy," she tells my son, and she packs the kids away in the back seat, and off they drive. It's just hot enough to remember the burn of the vinyl on your bare legs, leaning forward over the backs of the passenger seat to feel the timid blow of the air conditioning. In the car he says, "I know why you pick us up every Friday. You're lonely." He doesn't mean to be cruel. Better him than me.

I'm getting desperate to pick up and move, settle somewhere else now. You can get just as far away by dreaming as by running, but with the dream you're on your own. I've gotten too used to the tiny voices connected to actual, living beings. They occasionally say things I wouldn't otherwise think or even dare. They make me happy (clap clap).

When I finally do it, when I pick up camp and douse the embers, load the wagon and salt the earth, I know I'll sit backwards in my seat until the new country drops below the angle of repose, all the grains fall into the bottom of the past. Take a few transplants with me back to the land of my ancestors' birth. Join the incomplete failures who found the huddled masses too huddled, the tired, hungry and poor too tired/hungry/poor, and jump ship, go back. Try and drop those old seeds back where they belonged once upon a time ago.

The descendants of those nostalgic settlers might be surprised to find how poorly the flower grows in its native soil.