Scattering Seeds

The good people from the Stockbridge Garden Club were distributing free tree seedlings at the intersection of Main and Elm on Sunday morning. There were red oak, birch, and flowering dogwood, two trees per household. We chose the flowering dogwood. Later, during a phone call with my grandson in Minnesota, I learned that the broad branches of the dogwood, abundant with pink blossoms, are the preferred afterschool treat of our neighbors, the deer, who look forward to them with the same lavish enthusiasm we once had for Cracker Jacks. The boy, almost a man now with a beard and shoulders that get your attention, continues to astound me with the easy way he engages the natural world. Animals in the wild regularly nibble at his fingers. This is not because they want to hurt him, but because he frequently crosses the line that most of us believe is intended to separate us from furry and scaly non-human creatures. He doesn’t recognize the conventions of that divide.

A small square of damp material containing pollinator seeds is attached to each tree seedling. The square, about the size of four perforated postage stamps, gets buried in the garden and calls to the bees in a song they somehow recognize, an old familiar melody. The dogwood seedlings are maybe ten inches tall and will not grow into trees in my lifetime. But we’ll dutifully plant them anyway and bury the pollinators as part of the restorative justice we’re paying to the land we’ve been squatting on these past eighteen years. Land borrowed from the bobcats and the foxes and the Mohicans and, yes, the early settlers. Shortly after moving to this house, I entrusted the land with my mother’s ashes which felt like a deep offering, but think what it’s given me in return! Vinca, forsythia, and daffodils, the first glimpse of magnolia - and that’s just this week.

A day will come when we may leave this place behind. I thought I would nestle in for the duration, maybe even arranging to have my ashes tossed in with my mother’s under a slab of marble from the local quarry. But now, I’m not so sure. Our families are singing to us like the pollinators sing to the bees. Our sons and their partners, our grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are calling our names across the expanse of the great plains and the big river in Minnesota and from there across the mountains to California. This transcontinental keening back and forth just gets louder and louder until you can almost hear the drumbeat of historical re-enactment. Balkan Jews and Sicilians crossing the ocean in steamships, setting up house on the Lower East Side, making a buck here and there, moving to the outer boroughs and sometimes to the Island, then to the countryside to mingle with the descendants of the original colonists, British and Dutch, in old frame houses with weathervanes and wide board floors, finally decamping for the West, the Frontier. We’ll plant the dogwood seedlings here in the old America, on the outskirts of a town founded in the 18th century when men went to church in powdered wigs to hear Jonathan Edwards preach about hellfire and brimstone. But there will be other seeds that we’ve nurtured and will want to carry with us and scatter along the way whenever and wherever we journey, seeds of curiosity and receptivity, seeds of creativity and open-heartedness. They don’t weigh much and don’t take up much room, but they are essential. Without them, nothing will grow.

Uprooting is literally wrenching. Fifty years ago, I moved to this corner of New England with my baby son and his father because someone else we knew had moved here first. No plans, we travelled light in those days. Used clothes, Gurdieff and Ouspensky, a blanket I crocheted for my baby, “Blonde on Blonde” badly scratched. And then somehow I stayed, through the end of my first marriage, the discovery and unfolding of the new one, the deaths of my mother and father, and all the days of fair weather and foul that have been given to me. I’ve been made to feel at home here. Me, with my Manhattan mouth, the noise I’ve made to make up for what I lack in stature. I’ve learned to get quiet here and I believe that will help me scatter the new seeds and hear the new songs.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.