April 25th,
Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. 57 F. Cloudy.
I have scanned the forest floor for your gray, yellow, black-nailed fingers every year for many years now. In late April, Dad and I head out with two canvas bags wearing camouflage. We’ll walk till dark for you, peering behind logs, below backbush thorns, between mayapple heads, often finding nothing at all.
Your arrival marks a different stage of Spring. Not the type 2 Spring of early March, when sprits of rain bash wayward geese on their way to some half frozen pond. Mid Spring. The Spring with peepers in the ponds. The Spring of cherry blossoms and dogwood heads and great red sunrises that shake the earth from its dream of winter, when sparrows chase each other down the street, the kind poets rave over.
But you are unlike trees and flowers and birds because your return never feels guaranteed. Where you pop up is purely, entirely speculation and superstition. Your habits known only in relation to those of other things: one third dead apple trees, half dead elms, eastern slopes with mayapples a third way fanned out, or in the grass of an ATV path. When the forest has greened up to its shins, we hope for you.
Now I’m out of Ohio, and I don’t know where to look for you. I see apple quartered with nylon ropes and coated with poison ivy, their trunks sprinkled with broken glass rather than dandelions. The eastern slopes above Dollar Tree have a few newly planted trees trapped between barbed wire. No elms have grown old enough to die.
It might be too late anyway. Things grow quicker here. Even the plants on the east coast are in a hurry.
I want to find just one of you in this place I do not belong, in Fairmount Park. I need to go far off trail and look hard, be patient. Thursday. Yes.
But if I don’t find you, if this year, for the first year, I do not dawn camouflage with Dad and sneak back into our woods until dusk, if we don’t circle those huge, dead elms off Mengert Road like vultures on a racoon carcass, grinning wildly, the whole sky cracked open from the sight of ankle-high yellows, if this year Dad goes alone, a beer in his hand instead of a walking stick, I still find some satisfaction in knowing you are out there.
That you’re poking through some dark, undisturbed patch of ground beside a dying apple tree, or along an old elm in a low, wet bank, facing the eastern sun. I imagine I76 roaring all around you. The trash. People running by. Nobody noticing the magic just yards away, tucked below the loosestrife.
Maybe a possum comes in the night and nibbles you back to your stalk, in silence, your mission to be seen, to be eaten, fulfilled. Or you melt back into soil, untouched, a small sign of magic we all are too busy to see.
