Kelly Madigan

I live in a plant-rich environment, a patchwork landscape surrounded by Loess Hills ridge tops that host remnant prairie–a place where we mark time by what is sprouting, blooming, or fruiting. The early pasque flowers are referred to by the neighbors as “Easter lilies,” and as soon as the raccoon scat turns purple, we know to carry a sheet out and hold it under the mulberry tree while we gently shake the branches. Maybe it is the couple of years of drought that have made the yucca blooms so vigorous this spring, referred to as candlesticks on the hillsides with their gleaming white stalks. We harvest and eat rhubarb, horseradish, wild raspberries, ground plums, lambs quarter, bedstraw, elderberries. Because we are restoring several acres of prairie, we pay attention to when the seeds are ready to be hand-harvested on the hoary vervain, thimbleweed, locoweed, prairie violet, coneflower, and porcupine grass. My palm knows the texture of each. Some seeds I can identify by smell. Some seeds use me—my shoes, or cuff of my pants—as their transportation. Some plants ward me off with stings and spikes and blisters. I first learned to whistle by using a blade of grass as a reed. It’s a sound I still make, a raspy shriek. Below it, or entangled in it, is the listening. I want to know plants better, to deepen my relationship with them, to be startled by the spring-like mechanism in a jewelweed pod that launches a seed outward, to be there at the moment a nettle releases pollen in a puff of smoke. I want to crush a leaf to smell the brightness, snap open the fallen segmented cottonwood twig to see the star within it, nap in the summer grasses. The pond frogs are sitting on underwater plants, perfectly situated to thrust just their heads out, waiting for insects. My life rests on a scaffolding of plants, as well.