Full Circle

I realized recently that what felt like the next step in my adventure was actually my life coming full circle. Back to my roots, to my earliest warm and fuzzy memories of joy and bliss and a wonder-filled childhood spent outdoors, wrapped in the comfort and peace of rural Virginia.

You see, I’m no stranger to native plants. I may have come into propagating them through a long and winding journey — the details of which I’ll spare you, for now, or at least until we are better friends — but I’ve been a student of them since I can remember.

We were a camping and canoeing family. I jokingly called us “the Coleman family.” I think we had every piece of gear that Coleman made…Coleman lantern, Coleman stove, Coleman cooler, Coleman coffee percolator, Coleman sleeping bags, the latter laid out on a tarp under the stars with my father shining a flashlight up into the heavens and teaching me the constellations…I can still see the majestic bucks on the soft, flannel lining that soothed us to sleep. We would time our camping trips to nearby Shenandoah with meteor showers and other grand and spectacular celestial events…but I digress…

The point of this was that we spent our days hiking. My mother studied botany in college, and every national park we camped in, she would stop at the visitor center and buy whatever books they had on local wildflowers. We would wander the trails slowly and seemingly aimlessly, looking at flowers and fungi and trees and calling them by their name.

It makes things real, you know, when you call them by their name.

And memorable.

Back home, in the days when we lived outside from morning til dinner and lived to tell about it, when we had no screens to distract us, we had to make up our own fun. So I played with plants.

I remember sitting near the ditch out by the road and savoring the sweet sour leaves of sorrel. The cheerful yellow flowers called to me, and I didn’t hesitate to taste them. We nibbled the nectar out of clover (red tastes better than white), and drank little dewdrops pulled delicately through the honeysuckle — that was like nectar of the gods, to me. We braved the thickets for wild blackberries and prayed there’d be enough for my mom to bake a pie.

And the things we knew better than to eat, we still found ways to play with. I LOVED to gather seeds. Birch seeds, foxtail seeds, sumac seeds, switchgrass seeds…I was constantly tromping through the fields, running my hands over seed plumes and seed pods and petting — did you know Staghorn sumac seeds are soft like velvet and smell like raspberries? — and pulling and tugging and opening and peeking and collecting.

And making “cereal.”

Yes, cereal. Well, at least that’s what I called it. I would dump all the seeds into a bowl and stir them around and pretend they were cereal, and pretend to eat them.

Did I say we had to make up our own entertainment?

But I never tried to grow them. Not until recently.

Instead, I grew the seeds my mother bought for me. I remember my first seed starter kit — Garden Balsam — with which I had spectacular success. I was so proud! And the seed pods were SO much fun to pop, watching them explode and scatter into their hiding places, only to reveal themselves the following spring.

And tomato seeds, pumpkin seeds, avocado seeds, bean sprouts…I was always growing something.

In later years, after the divorce, we moved to California and my mother ran a flower cart in La Jolla. I would meet her after school and tend the cart for her, and on weekends I’d accompany her to the wholesale warehouses that were like vast, dark tombs of soon to be dead cut blooms. She opened a plant store and became a florist, and soon our house was overflowing with opulent displays of exotics, every square inch of the covered patio was a bucket of beauty or a potted plant…and just like the scene in Mystic Pizza, the fridge was full of — you guessed it — flowers.

Fast forward many, many years, and many cities and many miles…with stints in Charlottesville and Fincastle and Roanoke and Meadows of Dan, with countless gardens in between…and the mountains were calling me home.

For the last five years, the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in the shadow of Shenandoah National Park, has been tugging at my heartstrings. And so in February, I packed up once more and came to Greene County.

To say that I have fallen in love is an understatement unworthy of the depth of my emotions, now that I am here. With each morning meditation, I sit with my coffee and my heart is so full, it feels like it could burst. The best way to describe it is complete and utter bliss.

I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got here. I brought with me some winter-sown seedling trays of native plants…and as I potted them up and watched them grow I reconnected with something deep inside, profoundly resonant with who I am at my core, what I value, and what means the most to me.

And suddenly, my path became clear. Only it wasn’t a path ahead, it was a path bending full circle to that little girl whose fondest memories were of blissfully meandering through meadows and wandering the woodlands of Virginia, naming native plants and appreciating them. Whose dream was to work in conservation, and help protect and preserve the web of life for future generations of all of us, rooted and unrooted.

I always knew my purpose. Now I have found my place. This is my contribution to that end.