The Natural World Bears "Delights" for Heather E. Goodman

[Editor’s Note: Area writers were invited to submit poetry and/or prose to Studio B Art Gallery’s summer project “The Three Bears.” Writers were challenged to respond to the meanings of the words “bear” and “bare,” the Bear Fever sculptures or an aspect or theme from the fairy tale “Goldilocks & the Three Bears.” While "The Three Bears" project is officially over, we will continue to publish their poetry and prose responses.We hope you will continue to enjoy the wide-ranging responses to the challenging theme.]

Delights
  by Heather Goodman

The columbine is back this year, and I’m ecstatic. Because a wild thing chose our spot. Because it says we have made a good home for something. Because it is a crazy, beautiful creature, and it is, in a small way, ours. Because maybe its seeds will spread, maybe there will be more next year, maybe other wild things will come too. Because maybe we’re doing something right in a world that feels so very wrong so much of the time.

I’m thrilled Aquilegia canadensis has emerged. Ten years ago, my husband Paul and I ripped out grass, tilled soil, picked rocks, spread some manure and a huge variety of native wildflowers, and what came up was purple coneflower, goldenrod, and poke milkweed. For years, not a single other flowering plant. We were just grateful something came up in our rocky, clay-y earth that passes for dirt. Then, last year, ten years into the garden, at the very edge, a gorgeous stunner of a columbine: vigorous, flourishing. I checked it every single day, and at last it bloomed— it’s crimson and golden dangling flowers a feast.

The columbine delights because just like the cardinals nesting in the holly, the blue birds nesting in the box, and the phoebes nesting somewhere (though I can’t figure out where), these natural wonders make me feel— I’m embarrassed to admit— chosen, special. The way we all want to feel and rarely get to.

But the natural world allows for this. And more than that, not just allows for, but tries, dare I say wants, to give us this if we can only unplug and unscreen, get up and get out, listen and watch.

A possibility: the columbine came from some of the many native seeds I have collected on romps with Paul and the dogs and then thrown into the wildflower garden over the years. That something had a positive effect, when so much of what I do seems to matter so little, is what I love about gardening, and especially about gardening with natives: action equals results. It’s a lovely equation, an easy train to board, tangible touchstones for so little sweat.

So that possibility is also good, just not as good.

I’d prefer it to be the birds delivering that initial, hope-filled seed to us. It’s a better story. The self-fulfilling mission of planting natives in the first place.

The columbine by the wildflower garden is a huge plant, robust and full, so much larger than the ones that grow in full shade on a cliff along the creek, plants that have been there all twenty-two years we have been here and surely many, many years before that. Those foot-tall columbines defy gravity and sense: clinging to a slate rock wall where there is no dirt, where nothing at all should grow, let alone a dainty ballerina of a wonder of a plant.

Because of those miraculous columbines that cleave to the cliff face, I wouldn’t have thought to try columbine seeds up at the wildflower garden—a flattish spot with brief full sun and lots of dappled light, and actual dirt, albeit many more rocks than dirt. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what I think. As Dickinson wrote “The heart wants what it wants-- or else it does not care.” There’s something magical I don’t know; add it to the long list.

This not knowing, so frustrating in so much else of life, is, instead, part of the wonder of gardening, part of what I embrace and adore. Surprises compound the joy, even if it means some of those revelations are losses and lessons along the way.

Though the cliff face columbines are in full bloom and have been for weeks, the Aquilegia canadensis at the wildflower garden is still burgeoning. It might be three feet high by the time it blossoms, the leaves brandished flags, the stems solid trunks. Aquila means eagle and refers to the way the bloom looks like an eagle’s talon. Once the flowers open, I will note this for myself and watch for, but probably miss, the hummingbirds’ visits, though I should catch some of the bees and butterflies. By that time I’ll be out of my mind with glee, will be compelled to put fingertips to the delicate, genuflecting flowers. I will tilt their faces to mine, smile wide into theirs, and thank them for choosing our little garden, our wee nest.

* Heather E. Goodman has taught writing at high schools, universities, and the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. She provides students with touchstones to enter their writing and encourages them to continue listening to their voice. Having attended Bread Loaf Writers Conference and winning the Loft Mentor Serioes Award for fiction, she has published in miniStories, Crab Orchard Review, Minnesota Monthly, and Whistling Shade. She recently won the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren award.

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