Category: Ecology

Before there was the boy, there were the roots.

Before there were roots, there was the clay, packed and wet in the slow years when streams carried the silt down from far-off ridges in the old Appalachians and laid it here, flat and patient.

The boy kneels now, in the season where the heat already presses on the back of his neck. His fingers slip into the soil, seeking the thin stems that rise like stubborn thoughts along the ditch. He pulls, and the roots resist. They always resist.

On the porch, the old man watches from the chair his father once sat in, the cane legs sinking into the same warped boards. The boy is his grandson, though in the way of land and time, he is also his own shadow from fifty years ago, pulling at the same ditch bank under a sun that never moves far enough to matter.

“They’ll come back,” the old man calls.

It is not advice. It is history.

“They’re weeds,” the boy answers.

It is not certainty. It is inheritance.

The old man has pulled these plants before, each spring, each year, each turn of rain and drought. He has pulled them while young enough to curse them, while old enough to bless them, and now old enough to know the difference is only in the saying.

Beneath them, the roots speak in their human-silence, threading the years together. They remember hooves pressing down before the fences came, remember the shade of trees cut for corn, remember the long, narrow shadow of the railroad cutting across the horizon. They remember the boy before he was a boy (a bundle of blood and possibility) and the man before he was a man, his hands just as quick to bruise as to plant.

“You ever ask them why they’re here?” the old man says, though he’s not sure if he’s speaking to the boy, or the boy he once was, or the ditch itself.

The boy thinks it’s a joke and laughs, but the sound falls against the quiet. His fingers are still buried in the clay. He feels the rough threads of roots giving way one at a time, as though they are choosing to leave.

“These,” the old man says, taking one from the pile, “feed the rabbits in February. Keep the soil from running when the rains tear the ditch raw. Hold the heat for the bees when the frost breaks too soon.”

The boy pictures the field without them. Bare ground in February. Mudwater runs into the creek. The bees are circling an absence.

Somewhere far off, a train moves through the loblolly pines. Its sound folds into the wind, and just for a moment, the boy feels the years loosen, the past and the now running side by side like the ditch water after rain.

“What do we do with them?” he asks.

And the answer comes from all directions… from the old man, from the wind through the tall trees, from the roots beneath him:

You put them back. Sing to them.

And you learn their names.