most of us have heard of the red car game. youāre on a road trip, youāre bored, you start looking for red cars to do something.
and then theyāre everywhere. you notice them nearly every few minutes.
there arenāt suddenly more red cars now, of course. you were seeing them already, but you werenāt noticing. you werenāt looking.
I am noticing things.
there is a plant I notice everywhere now, a small bushy plant in suburbs, along streets, by shops on the highways. dwarf umbrella bush is what the internet tells me when I look for itās name. I did this because I wanted to know why,
every time I ever saw it, every place,
it was always dying. always the leaves turning yellow, the branches small and scraggly. inside out - nitrogen definitely. their soil drained.
I am noticing how many of these landscaping plants are yellowing, how small and sickly they look in just a few years. I am noticing how often the grass outside the house is replaced when it once again turns brown and dry, how the type never changes and the cycle starts again. I am noticing how the unmowed, unkempt spaces on lakesides and roadsides look more alive than this. how the preserve I grew up next to was miles of āmessyā unmanicured nature and the ground was covered in leaves instead of grass and there was life.
I am noticing the birds that come by the lake. there was a flash of blue wings and red chest - eastern bluebird, male, relatively common. I had never seen one before. there is a family of ducks that appear every spring; i cannot say if itās successive generations or different ducks, but I can always look forward to ducklings. there are little brown birds with white heads whose names I do not know - are they some kind of piper? why donāt I already know?
why is it so hard to learn about my native plants (accurately, that is)? why are so many gardening sites littered with people who think a plants value is based on how pretty or useful it is to them, who think a tree shedding leaves is āmessyā?
why is knowing about the world we live in soā¦ odd? why is it a hobby and not vital knowledge? I learned about polar equations. I taught myself about mycorrhizal networks and species of insects.
(did you know there are shiny green bees? a special species of wasp pollinating figs? that white flowers bloom at night for moths? do you know? have you looked?)
I cannot look at a lawn and see life anymore. it is a wasteland, devoid of life, dying slowly itself. everywhere is grass, grass, doused in water that runs over into storm drains, soaked in fertilizer and pesticides and a hundred other poisons and sending one clear message:
this is a place of death. life is not welcome here.
I do not think I could live in a city. too loud, yes, too busy, yes, too many people, yes, but the plants would bother me. a tree allotted only a convenient square, surrounded by dead stone and metal.
a forest cleared for this, for burning asphalt streets and racing cars and shops whose bathrooms are āfor paying customers onlyā.
this is a place of death. life is not welcome here.
and now I am noticing.
