The bottomland along the Minnesota and Mississippi is a place shaped by “too much” and “not enough.” There is too much water and not enough sun.
The trees desperately try to colonize the land after the spring floods have receded, while small plants struggle in their shade. Throughout this liminal place the forest is littered with the bones of shallowly rooted trees which have been blown down in storms or strangled by floods. It is a place of endless beginnings which go nowhere like Leonardo’s notebooks.
But perhaps this is just the way things are. When I try to retell my life as a story, I am frustrated by the many projects that faded into inconsequence (the study of Italian and bird song, tai chi, a balsa wood model of a Spitfire…). But maybe I have been wrong to think a life can be like a good novel with beginning, middle and end; and no extraneous material. Perhaps, instead there are many branches, tangles, and no way to express all that you know, feel or desire.
There have been a few points of constancy: my lover, my profession, my child. They have risen like the silver maples from the flux and decay, able to withstand floods and draught.