Cousins

Summer memories from my childhood are full of cousins. The families visited for cookouts and fish fries or occasional weekends at the lake. The grown-ups sat on the patio or the porch. The kids played endless twilight games of kick-the-can, hiding in the spirea bushes and the flowerbeds. My oldest boy-cousin picked me up and dusted me off when I fell and helped me catch the others when I was It. There were 13 of us on my father’s side; I was the fourth. I thought my cousins were the coolest people in the world.

Only the older ones remember the butcher shop and grocery store our Grandad and his sister owned. Cookies were kept in jars and bins, pickles in barrels. A pot-bellied stove held pride of place near the meat counter. My great uncle displayed his collection of stuffed birds of prey on the back wall. Beneath the store was the Pit, a primeval man-cave smelling of tobacco and beer, where the old men played card games, usually pitch but sometimes poker. One cousin recalls being sent there to fetch Grandad when it was time for supper.

We played in the concrete moat that surrounded the church across the street from our house. The boys loved it because it was full of toads. We held all-day wars with weapons improvised from cedar branches and cowboy gear. The cousins who threw rocks at the wasps’ nest were not as keen to play there afterwards. My father turned a packing crate into a playhouse and installed old-fashioned crank telephones in it, on our back porch and on a neighbor’s porch. The cousins played operator with the neighbor kids for hours.

 We played tag with the German shepherds at my youngest aunt’s house in the country. Those cousins liked to lead the rest of us out into the fields and lose us temporarily. Their corn-on-the-cob was the best, and there always seemed to be new kittens. The wildest girl-cousin once asked her father if she could bring home a litter of feral kittens from the woods. He told her she could keep as many as she could catch. He was appalled when she came home with seven.

We played in my grandmother’s garden, hide-and-seek under the lilacs. She died before we were born, but we all felt close to her there. Years later, a cousin showed me a picture of her surrounded by flowers, her hair flying free. “She looks like a witch,” she told me. “You look like her.”

We get together rarely now, more often than not at funerals. Each time, we gather apart from other friends and relatives. Our memories are all different, even when they are shared, a mosaic or a jigsaw puzzle we piece together, one point of view at a time. Things I’ve forgotten rise shining to my mind’s eye when a cousin describes them. We laugh a lot.

Last time we met, we lingered after the others left, telling over our memories one more time. While we talked, my nieces and nephew took their six offspring to a nearby park for lunch. The youngest girl, six months old, demonstrated the fierce tiger growl she had just learned. The oldest boy, at eight, is already looking out for his younger cousins. He checked on the girls on the swings and then followed his youngest sister, 22 months, as she made her determined way up a complicated ladder, rejecting all the lower slides until she reached the tallest one. From that pinnacle she slalomed down like an Olympian, landing on hands and knees. She picked herself up, brushed the wood chips off her fingers and started back up again.

Roses Survive

Bubblebath

This year almost all of the roses my friend Quickbeam gave me bloomed, even after a year of drought followed by snow in early May. Bubblebath blossomed first; she makes great fiendish faces when she blooms, and she puts on a show for quite a while. Greenmantle had a hard winter, but she came back in late May and bloomed until the solstice.

Bleu Magenta bloomed in the first half of June; Quickbeam told me she might show more of her blue coloring this year. She made a little nook for herself alongside the lane, near a wild black raspberry patch. My neighbor helped me mow a clear path to show her off.

Alba Semi-Plena

Celestial and Alba, the white rose of York, both bloomed this year, probably because of the extra sunlight created by the local electric company when they chopped down a swath of trees to replace a power pole. Alba is the classic white rose. Celestial is one of her descendants.

Seafoam is almost a mini-rose, white and cream. She had a hard time in early May; some of her petals were nipped by frost. The potted mini-roses, Sweet Fairy and Cinderella, shed their leaves in late winter but came back quickly once they could finally go outside.

Greenmantle

The wild roses and feral multifloras bloomed along the roadside in June this year, about the same time as the wild grapes and rough-leaf dogwood. The fragrance blows up from the woods south of the house at dawn. I wake up each morning breathing an unearthly perfume.

A couple of weeks after Beltane, Quickbeam loaded his van with roses and headed to a party in the country. I volunteered to help him ask people if they wanted rose bushes — free roses, folks, really. While I was roaming around offering roses to random people, our friend May, one of the party’s hostesses, told Quickbeam that she would take everything left in his van to start her own rose garden. I didn’t know about that when I asked May’s neighbor if he needed a rose bush. “My wife’s middle name is Rose,” he said, “and tomorrow is Mother’s Day.”

Bleu Magenta

We stood peering into Quickbeam’s van as May told her neighbor, “You can pick any rose you want for your wife, except this one, and — oh, I want that one, too — but please, choose any rose you like.” Eventually they worked it out. I’m getting to be quite proud of the trouble I cause.

Quickbeam is our local Johnny Rosebush, spreading the word and the blossoms to all and sundry. A week after the party he loaded up the van again and gave away a dozen rose bushes at the Really, Really Free Market in town. I’m honored by the survival of his gifts, even here in the shade of the wild wood.

Kitchen Dramas

I can’t watch the television shows where cooks scream at each other or swear vehemently at the food they’re preparing. I would not want to eat food that had been cursed. My kitchen has seen its share of drama, though. The time the kids were being careful with a candle resulted in impressive flames, a dishwater flood and an enduring scorch mark.

The week when two Sagittarians took the kitchen apart and put it back together again was fairly spectacular. They did a great renovation job, ultimately, but for a while it looked like a herd of wild horses had been let loose. I eventually located my pie plates a couple of months later.

Cider is safer.

Our friend Rowan gave us a bottle of mead from the first batch he had ever brewed. We put it away for a special occasion. The mead, however, chose its own holiday. It exploded in the kitchen on the Fourth of July.

The cats consider the kitchen prime hunting territory, with accompanying feline territorial disputes. The mouse hunts are not limited to the kitchen, of course. They ramp through the house, usually in the small hours of the night, with a tendency to end up in somebody’s slipper. The time I woke up with a cat offering me a live mouse in my bed was a definite low point, from the human-monkey point of view.

My daughter clipped one of Jim Davis’s Garfield comics for me. John wakes up appreciating nature, then wakes up a little more and wonders how it all got inside. Garfield is responsible, of course. This seems to happen regularly around here. My daughter and her cat once kept an opossum from coming through the screen door by means of a circus performance requiring claws, a broom and a long-handled duster.

The opossum I evicted was already inside. I first saw her in the living room, ambling down the stairs. The cats sat up attentively but made no move to intercept. Their postures expressed various levels of “I’m not touching that.” The possum sauntered across the floor into the kitchen, cruising for catfood dishes.

Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana).
I was too busy getting rid of her to take a photo.

When I was ten or so, my father rescued an opossum from the local dogs. He grabbed it by the tail and hoisted it up above his head. It wrapped its prehensile tail around his wrist and held on for dear life, all the while pretending to be dead. Accompanied by half the dogs in town, he walked out toward the timber. The neighborhood kids turned out to try to call off the pack. We yelled and threw things at the dogs. The dogs yelped and leapt at the possum. The possum opened one eye, then shut it again quickly: “I’m still dead.” Eventually our entourage reached the end of its territory. My father and the possum went on across a pasture into the woods and disappeared into the trees.

I had never caught a possum by the tail, but I knew it could be done. I opened the back door, put on my wood-hauling gloves and followed the interloper into the kitchen. She hissed and squirmed when I seized her tail. I lifted her as high as I could and flung her out the door. She landed several yards from the house, still hissing. I was certain she was female because of her righteous indignation: “Don’t you understand? I have babies to raise!”

“Sorry,” I told her. “Not in my kitchen.”

Kitchen witch, a little cracked but still flying.

Western Buckeye

Most springs I notice the buckeyes only when the flower spikes peep out from among the trunks of taller trees, behind barricades of greenbriar and buckbrush. This year the slow spring left the timber open for me to watch more of the cycle.

The woods and underbrush put out leaves later than usual, but the buckeye kept close to its solar schedule. I cleared a new trail during the winter. Hidden under a hillside, the path led through a thicket of slim trunks with bark like mosaic, bare branches and saplings with large end buds. By late March, the buds had taken on rich reds and browns, some of them swollen to show shiny golden beads inside.

I missed a couple of days of walking in early April. When I looked down the hill again, the thicket was bright green. Each bud had released six compound leaves with seven leaflets each, plus a budding flower spike — like clowns bursting out in all directions from a circus car. The rest of the woods had barely begun to change color.

The bud spikes grew slowly, standing tall above the branches. The weather turned chilly again. The leaves drooped a little but lost none of their color, vivid as green fire beside the bare hickories. When the sun finally returned, the buckeyes rushed to bloom. The flowers rose almost six inches tall in golden pyramids streaked with red and orange.

Watching the buckeyes, I learned to spot them in thickets along the roadside, at the edges of the neighbors’ timber and in the deep cuts of creeks. I began to recognize the spreading shape of the larger trees, broad at the base with an overhang of branches above.

Western buckeye (Aesculus glabra), also called horse chestnut, grows in thickets because of the seeds produced by those abundant flowers. By late September the fruits ripen into dark brown nuts, each marked with the pale deer’s-eye scar that gives the tree its name. The nuts are toxic and not considered edible, although indigenous people boiled and leached them for food. The wood was used for cradles; tannic acid was extracted from the nuts for curing leather. It’s good luck to carry a buckeye in your pocket.

My father made a necklace of buckeyes for me when I was in junior high. He pierced each one and strung them on a piece of twine, with the larger beads in the center. They clacked like a percussion instrument when I wore them. Years later I learned that in some Wiccan traditions, women wear ritual necklaces of nuts or seeds or shells — something that was once alive — to honor the Goddess.

I wear my buckeye necklace to honor the spirit of these woods, the genius sylvestris, and to honor my father and my ancestors. Holding a buckeye in my hand, I touch the life of the woods: the seed that will become root and branch, the bud that will burst into leaf and blossom. Stag looks out of each buckeye, watching over generations of wilderness to come.

Buckeye was one of the National Arbor Day Foundation’s candidates for America’s national tree. 

(Oak won the competition.)