The Wilderness Between

My place is soggy. The constant rain over the last few days has seeped into the decaying leaves, making them as pliable as wet napkins. The weight of the water drags the yellow leaves beneath that vicious green ivy, where the leaves will rot away completely, turning into rich brown earth. Oh, the ivy always wins. It remains hardy against the pelting rain. Water runs off of the leaves as if they were shiny plastic. If only I could remain as buoyant under the storms of life.

I am sad that this is my last entry here. I will miss this place. Though I pass through it most days to get to campus, it’s not the same. If I don’t take the time to stop and savor the wildness around me, it simply becomes another in-between place. Neither here nor there, and therefore, nowhere I want to linger.

But I do want to linger here now. Even if it’s nowhere. It’s special to me now. I’ve watched it die. I’ve watched the seasons happen here. So that even when I hurry up the stairs, huffing and puffing, I find myself glancing about, looking for changes, for signs of some new development. I see trash and litter like flashing lights. I see the ivy, creeping ever forward. I’ve seen the trees undress until they stood bare, tall and proud against the coming winter winds.

That is not something you forget.

I will worry about that savage green ivy when the snows fall. And when at last it melts away, in February or March, I will venture up the stairs as if checking in on an old friend.

I am grateful for the chance of having gotten to know a place so well. To see its moods, its different faces. I want that sort of intimacy with every place.

I feel that I have discovered something in this place that is not here, nor there. I have found a peace in the passing of time. I have watched death happen, and life. What would it be like if we all took the time to treat every place as a destination instead of simply a space to travel through? If every step took us somewhere.

In a world where so much of our lives are spent in these between places, like college, like grad school, where we spend significant amounts of time, but never settle. Places where we are not quite kids and not quite adults. Isn’t it important for us to look around at these places? To slow them down, to really experience them instead of passing through?

I’m not even sure we know how to live with such intensity any more. I don’t think we know how to slow down and treasure, notice, watch these in between places anymore. Do we remember how to identify with the trees, or ivy? I think as poets, we try. We try to rekindle those ancient connections between land and man, space and soul. But as writers, that’s our job. To look, to see, to tell others of that which they are blind to.

This is my favorite point in fall. The trees are bare. There’s something so beautiful about a naked tree.

As I walk toward my wild place, they wave their thin branches in their air like an inefficient basketball forward, trying to block the city from my sight. But since their limbs are bare, I can see right through them. So vulnerable, you can see their weakest points. You can snap off the little fingers on the branches, the little twigs. In the cold, the wood would give a satisfying snap.

Suddenly, the birds’ homes are visible, high in the trees, a clutter of smaller twigs and needles cradled by branches; a black spot against the grey sky. The birds have already moved on, but I can’t help but wonder if some will return to their childhood homes to start their own families. Finding their old nests a little smaller, a little less soft then they remember.

There’s something holy about the bare trees and their scrawny arms in the dead of winter. I remember the trees at Knox after a long sleet. The lamps along the paths seemed positioned just behind the branches, always just behind, and after sleet had fallen, the branches would shine with ice. The little fingers glistened in the light, looking more like complicated spider webs than tree branches.

The way the light circled from the lamp into the glittering limbs, it made a soft sort of halo. It was magical.

There’s nothing to distract me now from the trunk of the tree except for its limbs. I get a sort of pleasure from looking at the small collection of empty trees so close together. It’s as if a tree forgets itself with the blob of green around its top, but when all of that falls away, it remembers what it is. It remembers that it is thin, narrow, and delicate. They make a different sound now (though even dead leaves are still a noisy bunch when the wind comes calling). They are silent.

Sitting below the naked trees, I can’t help catching their new vulnerability. The sky seems bigger, grayer. The sky can see me now, and I can see it. We watch each other warily, but the trees only shrug.

I think too, there is pride in a tree’s nakedness. They stand straighter without the leaves. They flaunt their twists and broken limbs as well as their long, delicate fingers. They are unashamed of their scars. If I could wear mine so well, I would flaunt them too. I wonder how humanity would change if we, too, were forced to drop our leaves every year.

If, for half the year, we lived physically and emotionally bare. Would we sway and bend with the wind? Would we break under the heavy ice and snow? Could we really free ourselves, or, like a few of the trees by my stairs, would we cling to they ivy that covers and devours our flesh? Accepting anything that covers. Are we as brave as the trees?

No. I think we are made of more penetrable stuff. More tender, more delicate, more ego-driven stuff.

11/ 11/ 09 4:35pm

Everything here is a little more brown. A little more brittle. The moisture in the leaves has begun to evaporate, and with it goes the vibrant colors. Even the leaves that cling to the trees are so. Soon, I hope to hear that lovely fall sound: the skittering of dry leaves across pavement. It isn’t real fall until the cold has sucked the color from those already dead leaves, until the dry husks wander, aimlessly, under the direction of the wind. Like zombies.

It’s hard not to think of death and decay as you watch, week by week, the earth retreat into hibernation. I wonder how the class changes when it is taught in the spring.

In the spring, I suppose, there is that excitement as green suddenly springs forth. It’s exciting. The green affects you as you notice the first patches of green grass and clover. The first buds on the trees. Seeing the earth revitalize itself after the long cold sleep of winter give you hope as well. Music returns with the color. Birds. And fresh spring rains. Spring is a natural aphrodisiac.

But autumn is brown. The world shuts down, preparing for the dead of winter. It is an interesting experience to watch such a process so closely. It’s like reporting the decay of a loved one. Watching your parents grow old. Here is a crow’s foot at the corner of an eye. There is a grey hair, and there is another. Most of the time, we are so lost in our own lives, we don’t even notice this process until it has already run its course.

One day, it is a little chilly; the next, the leaves litter the ground. Watching it so closely, it is easy to see how slowly it really takes place. Like most occurrences in the natural world, these processes take place at a creeping pace. I wonder how the world must look to the snail or slug. I wonder if time or death make any more sense to them.

I wonder how black came to be associated with mourning, with death. Clearly, the color we should be wearing is brown. Death, his scythe, and his brown cowl. Death isn’t black, the absence of color. If fall has taught me anything, it’s that death is at least as colorful as life. Brown is the culprit.

I never liked the color brown as a child. Back then, it was a color that seemed to be lacking any beauty. It was the color of poop, of dirt. If you mixed all of the other colors together, whether using paint or crayons or markers, you ended up with a thick, disgusting brown color. Brown is what is left over after all of the other colors have been spent.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate brown and the subtleties of its hues. The differences between a mahogany and maple. The golden brown of skin and the crust of a bread. Hazel and nutmeg. Death must be the brown of dead leaves, of the leaves who still wander the streets on cold December nights, so brittle that they break upon touching.

My place is still yellow. Well, maybe a bit more brown. While last week, the yellow was as bright and vibrant as lemons, this week it has faded to the yellow of apples. Spots of brown rot have eaten small holes in some of the leaves, and brown has coursed through the veins and muscles of the leaves. Soon decay will set in completely and nothing but the brown will remain.

Still the ivy remains vibrant and hardy green.

I wonder how difficult it is to remain so beautiful when everything around you is dying. I suppose that’s what such parasitic plants do though. For all its beauty, it gets its strength from the trees around it. Those leaves that have fallen on top of it, trying to bury its shameless face are like the children trying to hide a parent’s affair.

I should not be surprised, though. Such beauty has a steep price in the wild. Vibrantly feathered male birds build those colors by sacrificing nutrients from their frail bodies. Those colors that attract females also attract predators. It’s a bragging right. If I can sacrifice all of these nutrients for beauty and still haven’t been caught by a predator, then I must be a good mate, right?

Young male syndrome. It’s a short life, but filled with excitement, beauty, and fucking.

A tree in this patch of wild has recently fallen over. It’s a steep hill, and I’m honestly still impressed by how the trees grip so tightly at the soil with their roots. How they balance so precariously. But this one has fallen. It looks so sad and thin. I wonder what made it fall. If the wind simply puffed too hard one day, and the tree teetered to the ground.

Or perhaps it was that ivy, that dreaded beautiful ivy. It wrapped its seductive tendrils around its base, winding its way up the shaft. The poor tree didn’t even notice the small sips she took of the sweet soil nutrients. Not at first. By the time he noticed, he was hollow and aching. She was already inching along to the next victim, too engrossed with the chase to notice his protests. That’s when the wind came. That bully. Talk about hitting a tree when he’s down.

Everything seems to be falling. The tree, the leaves, the temperature. I can emphasize with Chicken Little. Soon, bits of blue will tumble down like bits of fluff on the currents of air. Or rather, snow, I suppose. Considering clouds are made of water, the sky will fall soon. Little frozen water crystals. I see that it’s supposed to snow as soon as Thursday!

I am both excited and apprehensive about the Pittsburgh winter. Snow is both as beautiful and as dangerous as the ivy. Though the flakes are soft and light, they stick together, muffling even sound. Travel becomes dangerous. They trip tires and befuddle boots. They’ve even been known to float right into an open eye.

10/26/09 4:30pm

My place is yellow now. The leaves, the same color as pineapple, drift down as the wind shakes the branches. They all go about the falling in a different manner. Some ride the wind, drifting gently downwards. Others plummet, falling quickly, efficiently. Still others spin and dance, like a helicopter, like a minuet. I wonder how I would fall. If I could be so graceful in death.

Now the ivy is riddled with yellow leaves, bursting from between the tendrils like delicate blossoms. Still, the ivy is green.

I think that the leaves feel different than from when I was young. Back then, they were better made. Crunchy and brittle. Papery and thin. They would claw at the pavement when the wind pushed, scraping, skittering across the space. These leaves feel plastic, rubbery. They bend and flex, decaying with the moisture they still hold even in death instead of lingering like their dried predecessors of my youth, like mummies.

I suspect this must have something to do with annual precipitation. Or the fact that the leaves that fall now have died young. The leaves that still cling to the trees will become brittle before the wind finally plucks them from their twigs; these leaves will be crunchy and ripe with age.

When I was younger, I used to examine the skeletons of the crunchy leaves. There was a certain technique. You first crunched the leaf in your fist, grinding it between your fingers, letting the little flakes fall from your hand. When you opened your fingers, you would find the spine, the arteries, the muscles still left, still mostly connected. You could unfurl the leaf again, and hold it up. Its basic shape was still there. Bits of the brittle flesh still clung to the skeleton like a shattered windshield. When the wind picked up these skeletons though, they were as quiet as dust; I’d hurried the process.

I noticed yesterday while walking to work that the school must clean up the leaves, regularly, as they fall. I could see the shapes, the half stars of the leaves on the sidewalk. The shapes they left were the deep brown of rot. I was glad that my shiny, beetle black work shoes were kept clean. But first, I was sad. Sad that none of the shapes the leaves had traced were whole, nor would they ever be because of the efficient facilities staff.

Still, I am glad that the tortuous days of raking leaves are at least postponed for me. I always hated raking. My family always let the leaves pile up. We only raked when it was cold. We only raked when the leaves were soggy and brown, half-rotted with weeks of morning condensation and rain. As a child, it was always my job to be the scooper. While my parents raked, gathering the leaves into a pile, while my sister opened large brown bags, so large that she put them over her head, letting them fall to her feet, getting inside to open them, it was my job to scoop. To gather the wet, dead leaves into my arms and lay them to rest in the body-sized brown bags.

Here I am. The steps again. I’m glad the weather has warmed. I was not quite ready for fall. My trees here are still mostly green. I hear from second years that the trees at Chatham change all at once. One day, I’ll walk up my steps and nothing will be green. Oranges, reds, yellows, browns, maybe, probably. But no green.

I am interested in watching how fall treats my ivy. I wonder if I will watch it brown. More likely, I expect that it will be green until the snow covers it, but once the snow melts away, the ivy will be gone or brown. Some part of me suspects that the ivy is actually inching into itself. I seem to feel that it was a wider patch last time I sat here. Perhaps I will make a marker to see if the ivy really is shrinking.

I’ve been finding wildness in the strangest places lately. I mean, there’s this piece of wildness between campus and home. There’s the large “weeds” that have sprung up between two plates of concrete in front of my apartment building. And then there’s my friend’s fishtank.

I am not a friend to fish. I had many as a child, and they all, without exception, died. Because I didn’t realize—and I guess my parents didn’t either—that you had to change the water out. All my fish suffocated in their own feces. How terrible. I hope hell is kinder than me.

But my friend is a meticulous fish keeper. He keeps a constant level of water. He cleans the tank weekly. He buys the expensive fish food, and even little fish snacks. Recently, he bought a second tank to keep crawdads in to feed his fish. Now, I thought these were just regular house goldfish. I mean, sure they were black and blue and orange with electric accents, but they were in a tank. How wild could they be?

They are savage.

The first crawdad was eaten by eleven fish in four days. (The fish were still young, still remembering their hunting instincts.)

The second crawdad, significantly larger, was slowly eaten. They were cruel. First, the fish bit and pulled off its claws. Then, slowly, they picked off its legs and antennae. After that, they left the crawdad on its back for two days; all it could do was blink, wave it proboscis in the water, and wait for death.

It was horrifying. For two days, I checked on the poor crawdad at regular intervals, hoping that one of the fish in the tank had had the decency to put it out of its misery. But, no. On the third day, the crawdad was simply gone. A few pieces of its picked-clean exoskeleton drifting along the bottom of the tank were all that remained of that poor crawdad.

When I asked my friend why he fed his fish live crawdads, he told me that he thought it important to let his fish keep at least some of their natural wildness. And I really admired this answer. I had never thought of fish in a tank as wild. But they really are brutal. I still may not like fish, but I respect them now. Damn.

Fall has come. The air is crisp with a chill that already steals into your bones if you let it. But I’ll pull my coat a little closer to keep warm.

With fall, death has come, both figurative and literal. Brown leaves skitter across the wood, and corpses of bees lie strewn up and down the steps. The spiders have taken the hint and have abandoned their webs, leaving their homes to the merciless autumn wind. Only my ivy remains vibrantly green, stretching its roots into the warm earth.

I’ve never noticed how the leaves in the trees sound different once fall comes. When the trees rustle in summer, it sounds like they are whispering secrets to each other like children in their tree forts. Or maybe they are chuckling, basking in the sun. But in fall, the rustle sounds more like a shiver. Sounds more like an old man shaking the cold from his bones.

Then again, perhaps the sounds themselves don’t change; rather, the crispness, the coolness, the thinness of the air now changes the sound as it hits my ears.

There is a new sound too, besides the wind. The squirrels have come to life in these parts now that a chill has set in. Now, I see them everywhere, hear them chattering and romping across the tin roof, scurrying to fill their underground stores before the first snow falls.

It is interesting to me, the way I can categorize the places I’ve lived by the squirrels.

In St. Louis, the squirrels are bigger than in Pittsburgh, but nearly all of them are grey. They are more skittish than most because of our pets. They are also known as bullies around the birdfeeders; scavengers, they take where they can and as much as they can until their food source is taken away by angry bird fans.

Galesburg had the biggest squirrels I had ever seen and ever hope to see. They practically ran the campus. They were big and fat, and their coloring was fantastic: a sort of reddish brown. They are mostly friendly, but I know more than a few students who have been bullied by pushy squirrels. One of the most memorable sights I saw on Knox’s campus was a squirrel, running through the grass with half of a bagel in its mouth and some angry student shouting after it.

9/27/2009 5:30 pm

Today, it is wet. The exposed soil and bark are still black from the rain over the past few days. I find it interesting that I was so drawn to this spot for class. I find so much peace here among the trees and the undergrowth where it is always dark even when the sun is out. The forest does hold a special place for me, but I still think that I will always prefer the plains.

The open prairies of Montana and Wyoming are the most beautiful places in the world. The great vastness of the sky against the endlessness of the sea of grass; it’s the closest one can get to being in the middle of an ocean with both feet on solid ground. I can’t help but think of Rita Dove’s “Ars Poetica” now, when I remember my time the prairies:

Ars Poetica by Rita Dove

Thirty miles to the only decent restaurant

was nothing, a blink

in the long dull stare of Wyoming.


Halfway there the unknown but terribly


important essayist yelled Stop!


I wanna be in this; and walked


fifteen yards onto the land


before sky bore down and he came running,


crying Jesus—there's nothing out there!

I once met an Australian novelist


who told me he never learned to cook


because it robbed creative energy.


What he wanted most was

to be mute; he stacked up pages;


he entered each day with an ax.

What I want is this poem to be small,

a ghost town

on the larger map of wills.


Then you can pencil me in as a hawk:

a traveling x-marks-the-spot.

See, I want to be in this, but I have yet to run from it. I don’t find the exposure of the expanse to be frightening. Oddly, I find it familiar and peaceful where the great blue sky tries to swallow the yellow-brown of the half-scorched prairies.

One of the most influential times of my life was spent on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana. I spent only two weeks there, doing service for the community and sleeping in a teepee the men had set up for us outside of the prayer lodge where we “officially” stayed. Three other girls and I spent all of our time together, and when our service was finished each afternoon, we would wander the prairies around the lodge we were staying outside of.

There was a cattle ranch next to our plot of land, though we never saw any cattle, only horses. Some times the women who lived at the prayer lodge would show us certain landmarks, hidden by the subtle hills under the long grass. One afternoon, we traveled a few miles away to Mother Rock, a sacred landmark of the tribe. We were led in prayer with sage and given time to sit with Mother Rock and reflect with the wind swishing about, playfully batting at our hair.

When we were all finished, we made our way back to the prayer lodge. Suddenly, something caught my eye. At first, I thought it was a big, white rock, but when I drew closer, I saw the empty eye sockets and the cavernous nostrils. They were bones, bleached a creamy white, resting quietly below the grass. The remains of six or seven whole cattle lay there, mostly intact.

My friends and I examined the skulls, the long elegant femurs, the whole rib bones that stuck into the earth and out of the grass like ornamental hair combs. It looked to us like the cattle had simply laid down and died, but what did we know. We each dealt with it in different ways. I looked closely, but couldn’t bring myself to touch the bones. Another girl took pictures. One, lifted a skull to her shoulders by the horns and pranced around like it was a bacchanal, while the other just laughed.

But that night, when we lay in our teepee, listening to the coyotes call in the distance, all of us heard something that we hadn’t heard before in their cries. It was something more sinister, something more wild, and as the calls grew closer, we brought our sleeping bags together so that we could feel each other’s warmth as we waited for sleep.

9/22/09 10:34 pm

I decided to mix things up a bit by coming to the steps at night. They are different in the dark, and the wilderness feels more ominous, more dangerous. Anything could be hiding in the shadows. The night air is thick with humidity, and cicadas and grasshoppers sing from the dark. It makes me think of my home in St. Louis, where it is always humid. Where the air is always syrupy with adolescent rain.

On such a night as tonight, in the dark of my wilderness, however, I feel I must admit to myself, and you, that I am not actually from the muggy shores of St. Louis. That’s only what I tell people, and it’s true that I did spend most of my life there. However, in complete honesty, I am really from Dallas, Texas. I was born there and spent the first five years of my life on its dry, red earth. I don’t often admit this to people though because of the stigma Texas now carries.

Texas is the land of gun toting, extreme religious and political conservatives who want to take the valuable bits of earth from the rest of the world and squeeze them for every drop of oil. Everything’s bigger in Texas, but it wants even more. Texas doesn’t care about tomorrow, or you; who are you? Fill’er up, and don’t stop til you get the worm at the bottom of the bottle. Texas wants to bear arms and use them to praise to God. Hallelujah. Texas builds walls. Texas, the ultimate cowboy, looks out for Texas.

At least, that’s what my liberal friends think. And I would be lying if I said I completely disagreed with them. I know some good people down there, and they are some of the friendliest, most hospitable and giving people I know. Still the stereotype persists even in my own mind. It’s true that Texans are a proud and independent people, tending toward the conservative. But they are good people and their name should not be twined with the oil companies.

Of course, none of this is really even mine. Here is what I remember from Texas:

I remember the dry, red soil covered by green grass. I remember the pecan tree in our backyard. I remember the dry heat that rose from the black asphalt. I remember getting my mouth washed out with soap for using curse words at the age of four. I remember sneaking a piece of watermelon into the house during a barbeque. But most of all, I remember the fire ants.

It’s one of my earliest memories. I had been playing Ninja Turtles with my best friend, Jeremy, out in his backyard while our parents sat on the porch sipping beer and talking. In our game, I got shot, so I fell to the ground and played dead. Immediately, Jeremy ran to my side. “Are you all right?” he asked. I remember laughing at his concern. “Of course,” I replied looking up at him. “I’m just playing.”

That’s when I felt it. I had forgotten about the mound of fire ants that Jeremy had pointed out to me before we started playing. It was the biggest mound we had ever seen, and now, I was lying right on top of it. I must have screamed because the next thing I remember is running toward the house, covered in thousands of fire ants, while my dad and Jeremy’s dad ran toward me at a dead sprint.

After that, my memory finds me being stripped of all my clothes and thrown into a bathtub where I floated in the water, watching all of the fire ants float with me.

For me, Texas is the land of fire ants. Don’t mess with Texas.

9/13/09 4:37pm

Today, I let myself sit on the stairs and rest. Today, a Sunday, I find the stairs particularly inviting and peaceful. Few people use them, it seems, when there are no classes, and the traffic from Fifth Avenue almost sounds like waves.

It is still so green here, so shady, though soon, I expect Autumn will take hold. I look forward to the oranges and reds and yellows, but green will always be my favorite. And of course, when the leaves fall, what shall become of my ivy? I know now, that my ivy is English ivy (or Hedera helix). The leaves are bright and waxy and almost heart shaped—the ivy Dionysus claimed for the memory of his mother, Semele, and the female counterpart to mistletoe according to the English.

The ivy has already made its way up the most impressive tree in the vicinity. Oddly enough the ivy does not start until half way up which makes me think that it must have been severed at some point. But, really, it is too late: I can already see the damage the ivy is doing to the tree. The lower branches of the tree are shriveled and broken; it looks brittle for all of its thickness and height. I’m sure that in a few more years, the tree will surrender completely and die under the parasitic ivy.

Here I must stand and stretch my legs, already asleep from sitting on the steps. I also had to get away from the spiders and their webs, thick with corpses, which range particularly along the bottom rail of the stairs. One of the smaller spiders had grown interested in me, and I wanted to get away before it decided to explore this strange, large monster in its home.

I must say that I love spiders. I really, really do. They are the most beautiful, most graceful insects. I love their delicate legs, the sectioning of their bodies into prosoma, abdomen, and spinnerets. I even admire their eight eyes and glistening webs. Arachne is lucky that Athena turned her into such a beautiful insect—she could have done much worse.

However, much of my dislike for spiders comes from the fact that during my first month in Pittsburgh, I received over two dozen spider bites. (You can tell a spider bite from other bites by the white center, where the actually bite is.) The funny thing is (and this is why I respect them) I never saw a spider. I checked under my covers, between my covers, under my bed, around my bed every night to no avail.

When the problem persisted, I vacuumed and washed every inch of my apartment, but I never found a single spider. I did find pill bugs in my living room, sneaking under the alley door, and silverfish scurrying in the front window, but these are lesser creatures.

Spiders are clever. They are sneaky and make a living doing what most humans like—catching and eating other bugs. Luckily, since the cleaning frenzy, the bites have stopped. I can only hope that I’ve taught then a lesson, and that in the future, they will stay out of my bed.

09/04/09 1:30pm

My bit of wildness can be found on the wooden stairs leading down to Fifth Avenue from campus. It sits between a campus parking lot and the porches of on-campus apartments, and even when climbing up the steep steps, this patch of wilderness is like a breath of fresh air. It is cool in the shade of the trees. They block out most of the sun, and the little light that finds its way through the canopy sways with the branches, illuminating the greenness of the leaves and glinting off spider webs and wings. The undergrowth is thick here and carpeted in green ivy.

I like this place because it is neither one thing nor another, neither here nor there. It is just a place we journey through to get to campus or home. It is on the way to Grandmother’s house. It is the patch of forest we must journey through to find our way. (Though I must admit that the most threatening wildlife I’ve seen yet are the bees that hover near the rails of the stairs and the mosquitoes.)

I chose this space as my wildness because it was one of the only truly unkempt spaces I could find. Several places struck me as beautiful on my stroll through campus, but the perfectly manicured lawn seemed somehow wrong while meditating on the wild. Except for the wall of the parking lot and the brick of the apartment building hedging my wild space in, I doubt that much is done to modify this space. Probably. Maybe.

Then again, because this place is not taken care of as the rest of campus, I must admit that there are distracting pieces of garbage. Half of a paper plate rises from the sea of ivy like a capsized ship. Plastic cup tops steal light from the spider webs. And one spider has even made his home in a small potato chip bag. I can just barely make out the zigzags of his web over the shining silver interior. Perhaps next time, I will bring a trash bag to place the litter in.

But even with the trash, I enjoy these small patches of wildness, where nature is—at the very least—not micromanaged. I find myself enamored by tree roots here. These particular trees have thick roots that writhe above the soil. I suppose the trees need the extra support as they fight their epic battle against gravity, supporting an upright trunk on a very steep hill. I like how gnarled and twisted they are as they rise above the ivy like wave tops.

What really drew me to this place though was the ivy. I love the lushness of the blue-green ivy. Ivy is wild to me. It grows, reaching ever upward, on the tree in the front yard of my home in St. Louis. At the roots, it snakes along the ground, camouflaging itself under the bushes until it reaches the side of the house where it spreads its finger again. There, along the side of my house is truly a carpet of ivy.

My father tries to cut it back every year to keep it from overtaking the fences, the trees, and even the yard itself. However, it refuses to surrender in the face of such regular attacks. Instead, it bides its time, launching quiet counter assaults, so slowly that we don’t even recognize the victory until it has already reclaimed everything we took before.

The color of the ivy, too, is one of my favorites. If it were a Crayola crayon, it would be Jungle Green. I enjoy how lush and innocent the ivy looks, how brown and rich the earth looks beside it. One day, I will have to peel back a few vines to catch a glance of the hidden metropolis I'm sure lies below its stillness.