The Eternal Forget-Me-Not

In these times of U.S. terrorism at home and abroad, of an estimated 60 million displaced people (per the United Nations) around the world, land and sea confrontations in regions that overlie mineral wealth and persistent speech denying that there is a climate crisis, I reflexively feel like earth's advocate more than that of any particular people. A week ago I stepped backward in time once again, on my own among family ghosts (not seen, though felt.) There still are on earth rocky, thin-soil places with dark nights and extremes of temperature where you can still lose yourself in the manner of a lone, last survivor, the experience facilitated by doing without a phone or other electronics. My sister and I are heirs to a piece of shoreline known most of all for cliffs, boulders and cold water. Any neighbor was at least a mile away while I was there estimating the scope of roof repairs, wandering among trees and rock outcrops, renewing familiarity with the nature all in all of June, and ultimately painting the flower called true forget-me-not, Myosotis scorpioides. The plant crowds the borders of our up-and-downhill road full of seeps and swarming puddles and mosquitoes. It fills the crown of the road with early summer blossoms the size of your smallest fingernail, most sky-blue, some white, with a yellow pore in the middle like an eye-hole.  My acquaintance with this region goes back to early childhood.

When we were growing up, the cars of family and friends came and went here, especially in August. For years our Daddy, our uncle and cousins sawed fallen trees for firewood with chain saws and hand saws; an engine would be squalling or puttering some time or other--alternately a saw or either household's gasoline-engine pump. Our pump filled two fifty-gallon tanks from the lake with water that for years was fit for washing and drinking, provided we treated a pitcherful with halazone tablets before we drank from it. Neither of us middle-aged sisters runs that equipment now; we don't want the bother of spark plugs, oil and gas, chokes, filters and small-engine repair because the mechanisms steal precious time from us and highlight our incompetence. We carry our water, and there is a whole variety of benefit for me to hand-saw and split firewood with the exact same saw, sledge hammer and wedges our dad used to ply before we had the chain saw, even down in Indiana in the 1960s.

Everything in the house or its distant, mouldering shed, and all the wavelets lapping or the surf, the Swainson's thrushes' song with the tonal quality of breath blown through the stem of an air mattress, the red-eyed vireo or the warblers in the tree crowns is a throwback to the 1960s and 70s for me. Now I feel I'm one of the last human beings left hearing it. The songbirds seem fewer in number than in those times, even if the same variety is still around. I don't crave civilization but how did I get to be this single person free to talk to myself, read fiction and essays, wild plant handbooks and the French-English dictionary? I have moved on to a lifestyle more than ever innate to me, leaving behind a man or two whose priorities will only ever differ from mine. Is this much independence really the choice of the many single women and men moving through, then beyond, their prime years? Often there would seem to be no choice, and an unmated state can become our destiny alongside many creatures larger and smaller than ourselves:

                                      The spoor of a moose


So often I find I'm living in the glow of memory as much as anything else, with family lingering in my heart, and wondering what's to come, and what course my inevitable dwindling process will take. But I have a youthful sort of zest yet, an oblivion to the sorrows of aging. The forget-me-nots were my best focus for new spring floral art, upon completing a root system for my illustrated miterwort, a less than common plant growing on the land of my neighbor Deb in Minnesota. The drawing of the miterwort, or bishop's cap, is bordered with sprigs of forget-me-not.

Every day I'm reminded that what doesn't want to be forgotten is not really lost, even as its form duly passes into memory--this is the nature of change. In spite of calamity and outrages that fill news pages, the greatest share of death or breakup in this world, wrenching though the experience was, even past the weeks when it was fresh, ends up taken as a parting of the ways based on foreseeable causes. One soothing realization for me has been that the sharpest grief need not be equated with depression, which I think grows out of aggravating circumstances such as anger at long-term fate. Grief as I have known it is a packet of feeling that can swell, not necessarily crippling but grabbing hold on the inside of a person, wringing the tear ducts in the next moment. It seasons the present with a powerful tang from the past.

                                                           The miterwort, Mitella diphylla

My forget-me-not is featured this way on the newest of my cards:

                                              See the 'Card Images' page at www.epiphaniesafield.com



The text on the back is: Forget me not, though I recreate myself. It took me a while to decide between that wording and ...though I regenerate myself .

Days, weeks, months and years after the loss of someone dear, any one of us may still be thinking of the departed: 'if you could only know what I'm up to/who I've become/what happened to me/her/him/them' ...in light of all the many things that may happen to re-shape each soul under consideration.