Forget Me Not

For weeks after the snow melts there are only damp dead leaves from last year’s bounty along Averill Road.  Then one day there are forget me nots, brilliant blue in the dull leaf litter, each with its golden center.  A whole cloud of them appears overnight in the annual magic of spring.  My mother loved forget me nots, but then, who wouldn’t.  Still, it’s Mom they make me think of.  I think of her often, but especially as winter gives way to spring and new life is everywhere.  Mom treated the birth of new life in spring as the miracle it is, with delight, with reverence, with fascination.  She learned where plants would appear first in the spring, and when.  In the days when she still tromped around in the Amenia woods she would set out on the spring weekends to look for some plant she knew was due to appear.  I think about those spring weekends when she was still teaching school, when we could only be in Amenia for two short days each week.  I didn’t understand then how precious those days were to her, how much she needed to be in the woods to restore herself.  This was her religion, watching the natural world, learning it, loving it, being quiet in it.  Every season had plenty for her to study and revere, but spring was special.  So it was no wonder if she begrudged the time to feed us, to wash dishes or sweep the floor when the sun was out and she could have been hunting for new births, for marsh marigolds where there had been no marsh marigolds the week before.

My life is and has been different from my mother’s in many ways.  But there is this thread, this delight in the unfolding of new life every year.  Charlie took me to a patch of bugleweed on our afternoon walk.  I had to look it up to get its name, and I thought I hadn’t seen it here last year.  But there it was in the record of flowers I looked up last year.  I found its name on May 24th last year, so either it is early this year or Charlie just did a better job of finding it for me this year.  I had forgotten it.  Perhaps if it had a more memorable name…

I’ve been watching the miracle of leaves the last few days.  There are the hard barren branches that have surrounded us all winter, and then one day they break out in tiny soft, pale green leaves.  Day by day the leaves unfurl and grow.  Day by day there are millions more of them.  And each one is a little miracle of design, a perfect flexible little solar panel birthed from the stiff wood to catch sunlight and feed the tree that bore it.  Each leaf will do its work of growth for the season and then fall to the ground to do the work of decomposing and nourishing the earth.  What a brilliant system.  How could we not be in awe of it?  How can we destroy it so thoughtlessly?

Silent Spring came out in 1962 when I was 14 and my mother was 40.  I remember her copy, with its dust jacket torn from much handling.  I remember waking up with Mom to the terrible harm we were doing to our planet.  She didn’t become a political activist, it wasn’t her way by then.  She channeled her concern into teaching everyone who came into her sphere about the life around us, its beauty, its mystery, its fragility.  She turned us all into stewards, showed us that we were all responsible for knowing about the life we were part of and the harm and the good we could do.  She knew that children should have the chance to watch the chrysalis of a monarch butterfly turn translucent, watch the new butterfly pump fluid into its limp wings.  She knew that those children would grow up to do what they could to work against the destruction of the delicate web of life. She didn’t say, forget me not, but she didn’t need to.  We remember her all year round, but most of all in the spring.