Weightless Snarl
I almost don’t see it because I am looking up at the tiny saffron leaves twirling down from a tree above me. And then I am upon it—a tangle of slender stems, tan with only a hint of green left on one stalk, a ghost of a lavender blossom dangling from the end of one branch. It’s round like a hollow globe.
“A squirrel’s nest?” my friend, Marcia, asks. We are walking around the circle on which I live, a walk I take several times a day.
“Petunias,” I say, noticing the shape of the single faded bloom, the way the dead flowers thin out at the end of each little stalk. The leaves and stems almost look as if they’ve been woven together, and at the end of the knotted branches is a small clump of dirt attached to some roots. “Former petunias,” I correct myself. I bend and scoop up the weightless snarl.
Marcia raises her eyebrows.
“I need them,” I explain. We keep walking, the entwined branches dangling from my fingers.
Fall pruning, I imagine. Formerly sticky mint-green leaves supporting a profusion of gaudy grape-amethyst blossoms spilling over the edges of a flower bed replaced by more sedate chrysanthemums in shades of russet and burgundy and lemon. Chrysanthemums behave; petunias are more like unself-conscious toddlers, tumbling, undisciplined, in joyous abandon. Perhaps yesterday or the day before, someone yanked these from their bed or pot and tossed them aside. Perhaps the wind caught them up, blew them to this sidewalk square just at this moment, discarded now and already almost all the green is leached from the leaves and stems. They are beige, lighter than brown, the color of milky coffee.
At home, I place my orb of branches on a table in our family room, where over the course of the afternoon, the sphere melts into an elliptical shape, more like see-through driftwood than dense greenery. The stems, the stalks, the dry leaves are still attached, their architecture elegant, though they are too far gone to be revived.
“What’s that?” my recliner-bound husband inquires, as I place an icepack behind him and rearrange his towel.
“A thing I liked.” The tangle moves me. I, too, feel mixed up and unrooted after a dreadful week—a difficult incident at school, ensuing anger and rippling consequences, my husband’s surgery—a shoulder replacement on his left side. I am pulled in too many directions—dealing with our menagerie, running the school, nursing my husband, feeding my son. I have trouble quieting my mind in the dark loneliness of my bed. My husband has to sleep in his recliner, summoning me from sleep for ice or painkiller. Last night, disoriented, I found myself at his side without remembering how I had come down the stairs. I curled up on the loveseat and finally drifted off, comforted by the ambient glow and murmur of whatever he was watching on TV.
I often say to the girls in my school, “You are not a tumbleweed; you have agency, choice.” But some weeks feel as if they carry us forward on a momentum not of our making, a great current of need and obligation. I am tired, full of feelings, stiff from my time on the couch. Tomorrow, I will carry my summer relic outside. Tonight, I enjoy its beauty, translated. I decide not to photograph it, to keep it as a picture in my mind’s eye, a reminder that I am not a tumbleweed, but that objects in the natural world, accidental or not, can remind us that the world is made of wondrous items, that we, too, in our humanity, are both vulnerable and durable, full of nuance and complexity, that it is good to pause and look and breathe and feel.
Not the weightless snarl, but milkweed, equally lovely.