Trees too old to die, potatoes too pretty to eat
When does time begin to pass quickly for a long-living tree? Surely any youth a tree experiences is as agonizingly slow as our own. When The Senator, a cypress in Florida, burned down in 2012 at age 3,500, did it feel relief or was it afraid?
The Senator was the fifth-oldest tree at its time of death. Methuselah, a bristlecone pine growing in the mountains of Eastern California, is thought to be the oldest, at over 4,800 years. King’s holly, a Tasmanian shrub that propagates its own genetically identical clones, could be more than 50,000 years old. These so-called clonal plants replicate themselves into vast colonies, like aspen groves — whole forests made of one self. It’s strange to imagine standing in a grove full of your own likeness. I would never want to be in such a place.
•••
On the above-ground subway platform at dusk, if I squint, I can imagine the flocks of wheeling sparrows as constellations chasing across my field of vision. The city feels most devoid of color at this hour, when a sunset fails to materialize, light blue sky giving way to dwindling gray-blue. Stars will not come, so might as well count the birds.
When the train finally arrives, I sit across from an old woman in a child’s body, clearly asleep from exhaustion. She wears children’s rainbow watercolor sneakers. Instead of laces, she has fastened a hair tie through the top holes, broken and re-tied some times over. She is so small I want to cradle her in my arms. Her little masculine hands are painted with chipped pale-pink and I feel kinship here, although I could be twice her height and could curl her fist inside my palm. In Bushwick I work in an old, cool warehouse building, all peeling gray and brick walls filtered through the concrete dust that seeps in from every crack, and so her light brown hand with its pallid peach nail polish resting on a faded royal purple JanSport book bag is some of the first true color I’ve seen that day.
•••
In March I take the train to Holyoke, the Valley Flyer tracing the line of the Connecticut River. It has been an agonizingly long winter, just white and gray, and I feel as though I have snow blindness and everything has blurred together into one big nothing. As we slow to come into a station, a lone goose sits on the edge of the river, bent to peer in or dive down. The ice is cracking; I can almost hear it. I always wonder if the last bird to fly off is brave or scared.
I struggle to find hope. Authoritarianism is everywhere and it often feels like a rolling snowball grown too large to stop. I go to the gym, I go to the library, I go to pick up our farm share, wearing the stupid fingerless gloves I got because I thought Rachel Weisz looked hot in Disobedience. And she did look hot, but I always imagine people that hot must pay a price, and right now that price is the overfull bag’s handle biting into my hand on one side, the wind biting the other, hollowing out the tiny network of creases along my skin, digging trenches and settling into them like burrows.
And I haul this big-ass bag up three flights of stairs into our horrible gray apartment that has been infested with bed bugs since we moved in, since before we moved in. We have received the most gorgeous purple potato you have ever seen. It is an iridescent geode cracked open to reveal a deep royal purple vein of marble. It is as precious as a robin’s egg. I could not ever fully describe to you the beauty of this potato. I think about it for days. It is actually not a particularly pleasant potato to eat, and I realize with chagrin that I have eaten an ornamental potato.
Months later, on a perfect spring day that truly feels like the worst day of my life, with nothing in particular to point to that conclusion besides a deep and festering misery, I egg myself into a walk. And out there, at least, the birds, the heady beach roses, the water trickling down the gutter. I close my eyes and imagine it as spring snow melt, pure and freezingly clear water melting away away away to reveal my perfect purple potato in the ice.
