Yesterday afternoon, Eliot sat on the couch in our cabin at Wa Wa Segowea, leafing through the glossy pages of the Audobon wildflower guide. "This is a fezziwig flower," he informed me. "This one is a starfish flower." I nodded, agreeing. He leafed from one end of the colored plates to the other, naming at least one per page. "This is a dead fezziwig," he said of the drooping petals of the purple coneflower. "This one is a paintbrush." I appreciated his approach to plant identification. After all, who says that this white narcissus in my garden should not be called a Trumpeting Tissue?
We had seen some tiny, purple-ribboned patches of white cotton scattered around camp. This was why the book was out. I know nothing here, nothing about names. I might say it is because these are the Berkshires and I am unfamiliar, but that is just today's excuse. I have been uncomfortably ignorant of the calls of birds and the families of trees and even the rocks beneath my feet since I had a baby. Since we move so often. Since I pretend to be a poet and would rather name them myself. Those are yesterday's excuses. So now, I have a moment in the woods, a son who is pliant if unwilling, and a book.
That is this morning's reason.
The boy had the sniffles and the day was a wet blanket by 9:00am. Unfortunately for Eliot, the biting flies were as uninterested in his woes as his determined mama. I dragged him out to into camp's endless woods as soon as our morning got moving. How can he know yet what all of us fight until we submit? Once we get off our butts and stroll into the cool canopy of leafing oaks and ash, the day becomes the one our beleagured imaginations had not even thought possible. It becomes the right day.
First, we strolled down to the dewy green of the parade field to a welcome patch of shade near the edge of Harmon Pond. There, on the ground, lay a small carpet of the four-petaled, bluish blossoms. Each on a stem, small as a pinkie nail. Audobon informed us they are called "Bluets" -- a name even a preschooler could appreciate and his mother might actually remember. After a few too many seconds of admiring the almost aquatic motion of the blooms in the breeze, Eliot decided he needed to stomp them to oblivion. He attempted a sudden frontal assault, but I managed to yank him back before there were any noticeable casualties.
Our walk took us across a wooden bridge and we prepared to hike into the woods, Eliot whining every step of the way. "Let's go
home," he begged. Home. Our cabin is hot in the morning sun, and his spring cold was making him just as irritated about his indoor boredom as he was about his outdoor discomfort. We are what we are, wherever we happen to be. What he doesn't yet understand, and I am only just beginning to, is that home is right here. Right in this moment, in this place. Nowhere else is better. Nowhere else is this.
Ignoring him, I stopped just below the cabins as another glint of purple caught my eye. Deeper, this one, without the white, and a bit larger. Dimensions of a thumbnail, perhaps. We bent together, Eliot even quieting his resident grouch for a moment. We leafed through the pages until we landed on it, this bearded, low-tongued gem. A violet. Of course. Well, even if I should have known it before, I do now. And so does my son.
Before he could shred the purple petals, I hauled Eliot up onto my back. We bushwacked past the council ring's array of benches and stone fire circle, finding the narrow path into the forested place above camp. Up the hill, Eliot spotted a trail marker and realized what we were actually up to. "I don't want to go on a hike! Turn around!" I laughed merrily, because he was only a sweaty load on my back, not a hiker, and anyway, he was stuck there. I kept going, turning right at the trail crossing to head back towards the upper village. As the trail leveled out, a flash of red at my feet made me stop. I slid the boy to the ground and we squatted together.
This little beauty was bigger still. A crimson bell hung low, belying the bright yellow fur of its protruding stamen and its ruby-dripping threads below. We leafed. Ah. A columbine. I hefted Eliot again, his damp fists digging into my collarbone. The columbines were suddenly everywhere, scarlet flashes in the green.
Out to the road and looping all the way back to camp, we stopped for a breather and visited Toby on the Lodge porch. We told him of our flowers, and he mentioned he had seen some purple flowers along the path towards Keller cabin the day before. He had not wanted to point them out to Eliot, though, for fear of the boy's apparently insatiable need to control the natural world by destroying it.
As we headed back that way, we passed a several clumps of weeds ornamented with floral heads growing tall in the sun and rock of hillside. Clusters of miniature four-petaled blooms, even smaller than the bluets but entirely white, burst in fluffy spheres from the tips of the hardy stems. Their large, lobed leaves looked thin and a little tired in the late morning heat, drooping low. I could only identify it as belonging to the mustard family, perhaps a rock cress or a garlic mustard. Those limp leaves had the wrong dimensions to be the former and the wrong scent to be the latter. As I pondered, trying to compare image to being, Eliot grabbed two handfuls, stalk and leaf and petal, and tried to rip them from the earth. Fortunately, the roots of such wild things are tougher than one devilish boy could have known. I freed the stems and they sprang back, undeterred. Sighing, I gripped his wrist and dragged him to the side road towards our cabin.
We spotted the wide, merlot faces of Toby's earlier discovery almost immediately. These, I recognized. At last. Trillium, of course. That distinctive troika of triangular petal against the inverse leaf stood proudly all along the path in the deciduous shade. We thumbed our guide, just to be sure, but yes. So they were. This time, Eliot tried to yoke the blossoms with his inflatable swim ring. Thankfully, this was our last stop, the cabin in sight. Once I closed the book, he was an angel of acquiescence. I did not even need to carry him the rest of the way.
A child's only job, it seems, is to arrest and hold the gaze of his mother. This must be one of survival's uglier faces. Any living thing capturing her interest is a threat and must be smashed flat and eliminated entirely. This brutal approach serves two purposes. First, remove the offending competitor. Second, receive a holler or a time-out or some other reminder that, yes, her sights are firmly set on me, me, me. All the experts tell us even negative attention is welcome attention.
Is it worth the weariness, the frustration on the part of both mom and kid to interrup the cycle? There I am, crouching low, trying to force a conversation about color and size and leaf shape, arguing over who gets to hold the book and whether the name fits, while trying to anticipate the moment of attack. Perhaps Toby was right. Perhaps walking by, pretending these small lives do not matter and do not, in fact, even exist, is the only way to protect them from his brutal touch.
But I refuse to believe it is best for these small blossoms to be spared the attentions of a three-year-old. Doesn't he need to see them, to notice, to learn their names? One day, he will not be three. He will be ten, then he will be thirty. His vote will weigh as much as mine and his footsteps will weigh even more. If my child does not become acquainted with the purple trillium, the violet, the columbine, how will he protect them from harm? If he does not go through the painstaking work of learning the true names of things, how will he know when they are gone?
