plant wisdom

By: | February 10, 2023

Six or seven years ago, I bought a small, lopsided aloe plant from a holiday market for $7. I have neglected it for years, never changing its soil and rarely giving it enough light. It grew more and more crooked, and last year, its leaves (wait, do aloe have leaves? the fact that I don’t know feels like proof of my neglect!) shriveled and paled, so I was sure it would die. I decided fuck it, if it’s going to die, I’m going to put some of that nice aloe goop on my face. And then: what do you know? The damn thing sprang back to life somehow with not one but TWO clumps of sproutlings. The top popped off with new growth for no good reason.

I was reminded of this post I wrote in 2020 about the wisdom of plants, and how much I still have to learn from them. Is it corny to mention that this all happened during a period where I was feeling stuck in my writing life, and that the aloe’s rebirth coincided with a burst of new ideas? Well, it’s true.

Here’s my 2020 post, in case you missed it the first time, or would like to revisit some more corny plant lessons.

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Science Poem: To the Sylacauga Meteorite

By: | February 8, 2023
Colored pencil drawing of a gold meteor streaking downward through a dark sky.

NOTE: The images in this post are best viewed on a desktop device or tablet, not a phone.

One dim November afternoon in Alabama in 1954, 34-year-old Ann Hodges curled up on her couch, pulled the quilts around her body, and fell asleep. She woke in pain and disorientation to a house full of smoke, a hole in the roof, and a large, rough rock on her living-room floor. She’d been struck by a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite.

Ann checked in to the hospital the following day. The enormous, eerie bruise on the left side of her body would eventually fade, but the event itself changed the course of Ann’s entire life. She became a celebrity overnight, appearing on the cover of Life magazine. She stopped sleeping. The military seized the space rock, then returned it, and then the Hodges’ landlady sued them for custody, arguing that the house and everything that crashed into it was rightfully hers. Ann’s marriage ended, and her health disintegrated. She died in a nursing home at age 52.

Every single aspect of this story is haunting, but what stood out to me the first time I heard it years ago was the prologue: a 34-year-old woman lying down on a Tuesday afternoon in the mid-1950s. I have no evidence to support this, save my own experience and projections, but something about that scene feels like depression to me. My heart goes out to Ann. I imagine her feeling simultaneously adrift and trapped in her own life, powerless to make a change. And then—

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A Shooting, a Storyteller

By: | February 6, 2023

mary-ellen-toya-storyteller02big

This post first appeared in July 2016 and sadly, this is the kind of story we are still having to tell.

I was with a group kayaking and camping on the coast of south-central Alaska — seven adults, five kids from four years old to twelve. One of the adults was a muscular late-20s man named Everett, a friend who came along to get out of the city for an adventure. A street cop from Aurora, Colorado, Everett quickly became the favorite of the children. They hung on his arms, begging for a lift or a twirl.

Everett wouldn’t tell them he was a cop. He kept his work a secret.

Called uncle by the kids, he was soon the group story-teller. For hours they gathered all over him as he spun story after story to their breathless anticipation. He became our babysitter. The rest of the adults were free to hike or start food cooking in our mobile kitchen, while Everett picked a rock outcrop near the water’s edge and kids crawled onto him as if he were a bean bag.

Everett happened to be working the intersection in front of the Century 16 Theater in Aurora the night of July 20, 2012. He was the first law enforcement on the scene of a shooting that left 12 dead and 70 injured. He had run into the thick of it, blood and smoke, the movie playing at full volume, the killer still present.

He didn’t tell the kids this either. Continue reading →

The Abominable Mystery

By: | February 1, 2023

I wrote this post in 2019, and am still gobsmacked by flower hormones.

Last November, my mother gave me several crumpled paper bags full of flower bulbs for my birthday. Daffodils, hyacinths, snowdrops, paperwhites — the bulbs promised frilly, fragrant bounty and I couldn’t wait to plant them.

Then life got hectic. The bags sat in a corner for a week, then a month. By the time I opened the bags again, in early January, some of the bulbs were dusted with mildew. I’d lost the instructions for when to plant the different types of bulbs, and what bulb belonged to which type of flower. As I brushed the mold away, I contemplated how little I knew, not just about these flowers, but about flowers in general.

Understanding flowers is not trivial. Darwin referred to the awesome expansion of flowering plants during the late Cretaceous period as “the abominable mystery.” The ability to manipulate flowering has always been key to crop domestication, allowing humans to expand the range of rice, wheat, corn and other staples. Despite this, scientists only recently discovered how flowering works on a molecular level. 

The story is surprisingly brutal, and begins with chrysanthemums. In the early 1930s, Russian plant physiologist Mikhail Chailakhyan was trying to figure out how plants sense light and dark, and decide when to flower. He shone light on different parts of chrysanthemum plants — the stem, the leaves — and found it was the leaves that sensed light. When leaves detect a certain daylength, the plant bursts into bloom, he discovered. 

By then, scientists knew about hormones, signaling chemicals that travel through the bloodstream in animals. Hormones are molecules of transformation, controlling everything from the sprouting of hair to the thickening and thinning of the uterine lining.  Chailakhyan proposed the existence of a hormone in plants that travels from leaf to stem and triggers flowering. He dubbed the hormone “florigen,” or “blossom-former.”

Chailakhyan performed experiment after experiment to prove that florigen exists.  He transferred sap from the leaves of a flowering tobacco plant into the Chenopodium rubrum, or goosefoot plant, and showed that it induced the sprouting of tiny purple blossoms. A similar infusion in potato plants triggered the formation of tubers, he and his colleagues showed.

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Bee Lines

By: | January 30, 2023

A fuzzy bee

I’m on an email listserv for people who study bees. Not honeybees (goodness, no, not honeybees). All the other bees. There are some 20,000 species of bees in the world. Tiny metallic green ones, big fuzzy ones, and everything in between.

I rarely read the emails – it’s more fun to imagine what they might be based on the subject lines. So I share, for your delight, a few from the last year.

When did bumblebees arrive in South America?
Multi-egg days
Bees on a vacation to Egypt
Bees on American chestnut
Bumble bees sleeping in flowers
Alaska bumble bee guide
Bees in space
Hylaeus defending flowers

Imagine the bees with little sunhats and cameras, gawking at the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Photo: USGS Bee Inventory & Monitoring Lab

After the Rain

By: | January 27, 2023

It is still January, but the plants here don’t seem to know it. The evergreen pear trees along my street burst into flurries of cloud-colored blossoms last weekend. Along my neighbor’s garage, the hedgehog aloe shows off its orange flowers. Elsewhere, there are fingerprints of the recent storms’ destruction: beaches scoured of sand, roads crumbling like pie crust, water-logged homes and sealed-off harbors. But along this strip of road, everything the rain brought seems soft and spring-like.

This goes, too, for the giant spike of agave flower that has risen up in my backyard. I wish I was sure of the species—I plant with enthusiasm and then forget what it was that I put in the ground. My best guess in this case is Agave attenuata, also called foxtail agave. Usually, the spike droops over, sways gently like its namesake in the wind.

This one shows no sign of bending. The flowers are starting to open and spiral up the plant. Bees weave in and out in the midday sun.

How it started (November 2022)

But this false spring can be spiky, too. The flowers mean that the end is coming. A blooming agave pours its energy into reproduction, and then the plant dies.

In a poetry class I took this week the topic was impermanence. We talked about impermanence, sure, but we also talked about the things of the world that we couldn’t help being attached to: stones and family heirlooms and trees and the ones we love.

How it’s going (January 2023)

I am attached to the impermanence of a January after the rain. I am attached to the bees and the sunshine and the blossoms. I am attached to the roads that are now broken, the sand that has been washed away, the land and life as it was before the storm. I am attached also to the reservoir, which soared from 36 percent of capacity to full and spilling over the course of three days. I am attached to the agave and its tall spike of flowers, to its blue-green flames of leaves. And when the flowers begin to bend, as gracefully as a fox’s tail, I’ll become attached to that, too, even though the agave is already letting go.

Ratched Down

By: | January 25, 2023

I was having an email exchange with a longtime friend a few months ago, and we got to talking about our long-ago youth—specifically, the workplace where we met, when we were both in our teens. As is often the case in these late-evening conversations, the discussion turned to the subject of who else among us has survived from that ancient era: 1974 to 1978. No, that’s not quite right: The discussion turned to who hasn’t survived: a roll call we occasionally catalogue and, now and again, update. In this case, the subject in question was that guy a couple of years older than us who worked in a different department but in the back of the same office. The dude with the cool, round-shouldered affect. Heavy drinker. Heavy shrugger. You know.

We didn’t know. And then, the next day, we did, our emails arriving in each other’s inboxes nearly simultaneously. I remember now! His name was Jimmy C—.

My one salient memory of Jimmy is the evening four of us from that office attended the world premiere of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the 1975 Chicago International Film Festival. Why Jimmy was part of our entourage, I have no idea. Possibly he just perked up when I announced, from the front end of the office, that I was buying tickets to this amazing event-to-be. Also probably—almost certainly—on the night of the event we stopped for drinks along the drive from downtown Chicago to the far North Side. Also also probably—no, definitely certainly, because why wouldn’t we?; we were immortal—we timed our arrival at the Granada Theater to coincide with the opening of the outside lobby doors for general admission.

The ticket-holder line, a haphazard assemblage measuring four or six across, stretched from beneath the theater marquee to the el station a block away. The Granada, dating to the movie-theater-as-palace heyday of the 1920s, could hold 3,400. Apparently 3,396 had beaten us to the scene.

We started down the sidewalk, at least one us resigning himself to his eventual lot in the back row of the uppermost balcony, but then Jimmy did maybe the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. He stopped, said, “I think we’ve gone far enough,” and about-faced. Then he stood still, next to four or six oblivious cineastes. Just like that, he was near the front of the line.

The other three of us hesitated, our incomplete prefrontal cortexes pinwheeling between the disappointing, if morally irreproachable, position under the el platform and the satisfying, if morally risible, position adjacent to the theater marquee.

Of course we chose the adjacent-to-the-marquee position.

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January Is Not Our Friend

By: | January 23, 2023

January is such a bitch. I have personal reasons to feel this and so do most of the people I talk to: bad things are happening or anniversaries of bad things have come around again. People are losing their jobs; they’re having non-trivial surgical procedures; kids are having urgent psychiatric problems; relatives are seriously sick; people’s mental abilities are slowly sliding away; people are dying before they should or even when they should. These are terrible things. They are no one’s fault and under no one’s control, and I can’t do a thing about them.

January actually has a range and includes less-bad things. These lesser things are also unwilled and uncontrollable. January does this because it can, it doesn’t care. This situation is not fair, it shall not stand, and I vowed a mighty vow to fight January, at least the lesser bads, even though my weapons are feeble.

I saw a Facebook post from a chocolatier and because the chocolatier is, or was, local and because the chocolates had a Frenchy name and are quite good, I re-posted it and then our Helen commented: was I offering to send her some Frenchy chocolate, she said. Why yes, I said, and so I did. She said thank you, chocolate helps with the January blues. You too? I said. So we discussed antidotes to January.

Aside from chocolate, Helen’s antidotes included weekly exercise classes and altogether, she said, she felt she was doing everything she could but thought she’d be happier if she took more walks. I couldn’t get myself to exercise class for any reason but I do walk every day. Well, she said, her exercise class had other real live people in it but a walk for the sake of a walk? she couldn’t get herself out the door. She needs a destination, she said. I see the charm of real live people, sweet baby Jesus, I really do; but I don’t need a destination because the way I get myself out the front door is: get dressed, walk downstairs and outside to see what’s going on the in the world, and here’s the thing, it’s a dense neighborhood and a LOT is going on. That is, a person wouldn’t need a destination when there’s all this to keep track of.

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