How we are all ephemera

Using the natural world to find our place on the earth

Sitting in a yard in spring is a gift, like finally getting well after days of feeling so tired, you don’t want to tackle anything. The birds are making a racket above the mossy chairs where I sit—the Carolina wren, goldfinches, titmouse, cardinal and house sparrows, and somewhere over in the woods, a Cooper’s hawk ratcheted cry tells me they are all paying attention. They are busy no matter what I am doing. It is a time of violets waving their little purple faces in the sun and there, a pine warbler’s chittering trill somewhere in the trees behind the shed. The Detroit Tigers have swept the Baltimore Orioles down in Motown and the sky is so pale blue today, anything is possible. A spring day likes this lets me forget the human world until I am well and can fight on through it again. Maybe spring is saying look! Nature does not take a break, but you can sit down and bask some in it.

The word ephemera means things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time (New Oxford American Dictionary.) Humans tend to work that word into notions like trivia or memorabilia, words that point to almost the frivolous or unnecessary. But for plants or insects, it is serious business. Down in the woods, the yellow of the trout lily is fading a bit, amid taller stands of cut leaf toothwort, and the spring beauty is spread like a picnic blanket in between the red bud trees and just off the sidewalk burr oak and shagbark hickory. Spring anemone clumps under small trees in the woods, and one group of unusual white trout lily, too. The trillium is just unfolding her tri-leaf petals above the dried oak leaves from last year. The sequence of ephemeral flowers must all bloom and grow before the deciduous leaves come out and crowd out the light. In a week or so, the woods will be trillium white, then pinky-violet with wild geranium.

Maybe we are all ephemera, our human lives a blip in the history of the world. A week ago, Pope Francis was still on earth, reminding us how to treat each other. Today he is spirit, air, around or above us, depending on your belief. I find myself wondering how much we can hold onto the teachings of our wise ones, especially in these times of need. Will the spirit of Pope Francis permeate, spread like root systems of plants under the forest floor? Can we contain the simplicity of his teaching; humility, lack of worldly belongings, valuing difference, care of those on the periphery? Notions so familiar to the forest world.

I drove to northern Michigan last week and saw the roadside bushes swelling into sage-green, almost glowing in their beginning. Tips of taller trees a faint crimson- pink against the tan and grey banks, not yet blooming. Spring comes and I never tire of watching it unfold. I think it is because the season promises us something. It offers to hold us in its burgeoning as if we get to begin again, too. This small poem from my newest book alludes to this backdrop, sad as it ends:

Small map
 
it was spring, and all the blooming trees
were talking to me as if I was a red bird,
as if I should float with them, and they would
keep me, hold me in their triangle of crabapple
limbs, fallen stone, thick creek water flowing
and bending around itself. I kept on walking,
retracing the same steps, and not getting found
or finding myself. as if I was trapped in a yellow-
white maze. no one to rescue me. my heart stuck
in its chamber, pounding out its empty rat-tat-tat,
rat-tat-tat.  I am not of the place I live. my spot
on the darkened earth. as if I believed I could get
back there. loss, this strange land I live in.  no god
or whatever. to recognize or find me. 
Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them
Mayapple Press, 2025

These days, I am of the place I live, watching the world outside my windows showing me how to get through my days. I will be fierce as our Cooper’s hawk, spreading my hands wide as Mayapple umbrella-like leaves. I will be as busy as the Carolina wren, and resilient as the parade of ephemerals sweeping through the woods knowing their time and place, one after the next. May we all feel the same sometime this long and complicated spring.

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My new book, Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them can be ordered from my press, or you can request it from your local independent bookstore or library.