silphium

so, apparently the heart symbol dates back to ancient greece, and a plant called silphium. the fruit or seed pod of the silphium plant was heart shaped, and was at the origin of that particular shape as a stand-in for the seat of human love and emotion. silphium also happened to be a critically valuable cooking herb for most of antiquity, worth its weight in gold, with a very distinct taste that has never been adequately reproduced, and that is now considered to be extinct. i am looking on my computer keyboard for the broken-heart emoji, and not finding it. wait, here it is: 💔

rooster hackle (neck) feathers

that awkward age

these are ferns caught between fiddlehead and fern. their hormones are surging. they don’t know which direction their lives are going. they just want to have sex with everything and go to parties, and they are so mad at their parents for being pretty good parents. they really want to be understood. but secretly they don’t want to be understood, because it’s more satisfying to be misunderstood and then be angry about it. jesus. ferns these days.

fiddlehead ferns sprouts

20 years ago today

on the morning of may 8 1998, after a night of startling but bearable contractions,  i arrived at the hospital believing i could probably handle a natural birth. i got about an hour into the very beginnings of serious contractions, with my husband leaning over me with coffee breath trying to get me to breathe my way through the pain, before i decided that modern western medicine in general, and the epidural in particular, were the greatest inventions in human history, worth a dozen relativity theories, polio vaccines, and apples falling on the heads of mathematical geniuses put together. once the anesthesiologist had numbed my lower half, i enjoyed a restful, talkative delivery of a baby girl, who came out howling, has been an intense and self-assured anchor in all of our lives ever since, and who turns 20 years old today. everybody thinks their child will be one who changes the world. but not everybody still thinks that when their children have finished their teenage years. eva is another story, and whether she changes the world in a big or a small way, she is the only daughter, and the only kind of daughter, i would ever want to have.

white oak leaf

dry storage

plants hanging upside down normally make me think of root cellars with garlic and onions drying in bunches against winter’s hunger. but what if you get hungry for beauty? ah, well then you hope you have hung some tulips the prior spring, and stored them against some long, cold day, after too much aesthetic and spiritual fasting.

dried tulips

pretty or interesting

my husband and i have a pattern. when i go foraging for STILL blog material, my eye tends to come to rest on the prettiest thing i see. when i send my husband out to forage for me, his eye is drawn toward the most interesting thing he sees. he will sometimes say to me, “that is very pretty” in a tone implying that there is more to life than pretty. i will often greet him on his return with the phrase, “i see we’ve chosen interesting over pretty again today,” in a tone implying that “interesting” isn’t always so interesting that i particularly care to take its portrait. today you get interesting. an interesting that i was not too thrilled about until i started playing with it and realized that almost no one ever takes photos of may apples in this state, when they have just emerged from the ground looking like waterlogged palm trees, and their great leaves are unfurling like umbrellas just after you’ve just unsnapped the little belt down by the handle. very interesting. ok, well . . . back to pretty tomorrow.

emergent mayapple stalks