"The squirrel misses the turkey," the Patient Spouse joked. He's not a sentimental man, largely, and I knew he only said it to break the usual mealtime silence. But I saw right away that he was right. The squirrel continued to lean to the right, where the turkey had been, but with no turkey there to support its little furry shoulder or meet its sidelong glance, the lean had turned to more of a list and the sidelong glance looked—yes, it most certainly was—no longer wistful, but sad.
The turkey and the squirrel arrived on our dining table independently: the turkey, from his place in the dark safety of the glass china closet where he awaits his annual Thanksgiving appearance; the squirrel, from a box of fall decorations kept under the window seat. The turkey dates back to my childhood. He is a wax candle, probably from the Ben Franklin store circa 1970. His wick is long gone and his possibly-even-applied-in-America paint plumage is somewhat eroded after years of state appearances on the family table, in the dollhouse and now, every November of my adulthood, on my own dining table. The squirrel arrived from IKEA a few years back, a charming little fellow with embroidered eyes and a winsome tilt of the head, clutching a tiny mushroom in his paws. When I set them together on the table this past November, the turkey proudly stood his ground as ever, but he looked less darkly arrogant and more as if he were pleased with his new role: propping up the simpleminded but adorable squirrel, whose little mushroom was held like a bouquet about to be offered. It was clear this December-May relationship was made to last. Then, one day while changing the tablecloth, I saw the turkey had lost a big chip out of his breast feathers. Not wanting to further endanger this, one of my favorite family inheritances, I returned him prematurely to the china closet. The squirrel stood alone. That is, it did until I became so sad at seeing it, lonesome and leaning, supper after supper, that I returned it to the box under the window seat.
Do I need therapy? Am I externalizing my own failings and lonlinesses? I'm sure the DSM would say so. The PS might concur. At best, its a childish thing to worry over two pieces of wax, polyester and paint as if they had feelings, as if I've never outgrown the ability to invest those things that represent life with sentience. But my elder daughter is more on the mark, I think, when she recognizes my reaction for what it is: the sensitive and slippery slope of animism.
Take these carrots. Clearly, they love each other. It was for that reason that they became the last of my most recent digging to be separated. I kept grabbing them out of the bag in the fridge, seeing their shapes entwined,, and thinking nah-they just can't be separated. Some may see theirs as a sex act, but I see it as the ultimate embrace. Once, I even tried untwining them, but it became clear I would have to dismember them to extricate one from its soulmate. The best I could do was wait until the PS and I were sharing a lunch, make these devoted Daucus into sticks, and share them with my own soulmate. In our mutual affection, theirs lives on.See? She called it a slippery slope, the Eldest did. A life lived in the animist religion is a complicated thing. It can be consuming, even. Yet, it rarely seems unhealthy. Rather, it is another way of preserving wonder at the world, where the lines between magic and reality are blurred.
Say two vegetables are entwined, and you are harvesting them to sell. This happens all the time. The ag agent will likely explain it away as bad thinning practice, or stony soil, or maybe a nematode that has made your beets entwine, your parsnips embrace, your carrots consort. These experts would never consider animist explanations. They disregard the soul that animates all things. They don't believe in Gaia, the older name for Mother Earth.
For a long time, good gardeners shared this secret: if you dug a lady slipper orchid in the wild and transplanted it to your yard, it would die no matter how you nurtured it. There was a relationship between the plant and its native soil—microorganisms that kept it alive and helped it thrive in a co-dependent system labelled "mutuality." A few such setups existed: the nitrogen-fixing bacteria living on pea-family plants, the algae and fungus living together as the visible "Plant" we call lichen; we learned about such things in biology class, and if the ladyslipper trick was a trade secret, it was backed by this scientific pigeonhole.
It is becoming increasingly evident that such mutual arrangements exist everywhere throughout the plant kingdom, on such an intricate and complex scale that it boggles the mind. Seemingly unrelated species enable each others' survival. Stranger still, trees foster their nearby offspring. Weak plants cry out to be helped and their chemical signals allow pests to close in on them in their undefended state. Outside your door, the air is filled with shouts and murmurs you can't hear, with messages sent across great stretches of time and between species. The old are teaching the young. The weak are sacrificing themselves for the strong. Plants, as it turns out, are not only more animate than the modern mind has allowed, they appear to be far better at getting along with one another than our single species can even manage to do with others of its own kind. How can you not respect that?
So it's impossible for me to thin the garden and leave the little transplants gasping in the row beside their living comrades. It's hard to separate the two seedlings and plant them a row apart (or worse, choose one to live and one to execute). "Pick me!" the one bean seems to cry out, while its neighbor scolds, "I was too young: you should have waited until tomorrow." "Don't drop me here!" says the seed lost along the side of the row where it will grow up and be trampled in the path. "I tried so hard" says the volunteer poppy growing in the crack right in the middle of the walkway.
Is it all in my head? I try to tell myself so. I don't want to turn into a white-haired old coot wrinkled as a raisin who talks to ants. The white hair and the wrinkles are starting to look inevitable. I know the ants don't speak my language, I really do. But as the quiet of gardening alone sets in, things do speak: seedlings and bugs and stones and fruit. The old coot in the garden is a stereotype because this does happen to people. Are we coots crazy? Or are we just listening? Every time science discovers fresh evidence of the animate "inanimate" life buzzing below our human radar, I feel equal parts wonder and vindication. Meanwhile, you'll have to pardon me if I break off here. The begonia is calling me from the window, and it's so, so thirsty. Bloom where you are planted.
