Ephemeral
Bend down with me to the earth, Sarah. Let us smell dying winter. Run our hands over trout lily’s hearty fronds. Gaze up into delicate umbrellas, raining yellow. These lilies—and Dutchman’s breeches and spring beauties—are drawn to spring’s rays in the ways you and I ache into each other during the night. These flowers shatter up until Woodbury Mountain is cleaved into two divergent things: a north face of early spring muck and earthen stench contrasting the south face’s audacious genesis colors. Sarah, let us follow the buzz and hum of first insects to spring beauties with cup-shaped leaves. Let’s settle our eyes on a single blossom as an Andrena bee steals pollen, carries it to her chamber, where she uses only this fleeting pollen to feed her eggs. What feeds our love? What makes us lean into the sun of each other? These spring flowers are so short-lived that once the maple and beech overstory closes in, choking out an April sun, these ephemeral blossoms dull, soon enough, entirely to nothing but next year’s roots. When we return in weeks, all traces of trout lilies, Dutchman’s breeches, and spring beauties will be gone as if they never existed. With Woodbury Mountain dressed in leaves, I grasp for a metaphor for all of this, but maybe it is simply that their love is such a quick love, a burst. We walk our way off Woodbury Mountain today, but next week and the week after and the month after and the year after, we’ll hike here again.
Sean Prentiss is the author of Finding Abbey: the Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave, which won the National Outdoor Book Award. Read more.