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Image from Russ's Picasa web album
Instead of tea leaves, I've been reading the trailings left behind by rising floodwaters. In one species' crisis, it seems, lies another's opportunity. While people are suffering from damage to their material world, plants are getting a chance to spread their progeny into new territory.
The thin sideburns of mostly vegetative debris that mark the highwater points in my neighborhood seem to be dominated by maple leaves. Some have traveled long distances downstream. Or maybe I'm just maple-focused and noticing them more. Baby trees from last year's crop are popping up in even the most carefully tended landscaping mulch--none of which is in my own yard, I hasten to add. I've let my yard go "free," so I don't see the seedlings until they've grown eight feet tall and come tapping at the windows.
If you take a standardized test that asks you how maples transport their seeds and you pick "water" instead of "air" from the answer choices, you'll be marked wrong. But those wings can act as sails and rudders, too. Life is never a simple as multiple choice answers, and the more you observe the harder it is to pick one answer on the tests. Usually, the answer is "usually a, but sometimes b or c, you just never know."
Teaching to those tests leaves a lot out. If you've ever read Michael Pollen's Botany of Desire, you can never see plants in quite the same way. Instead of pawns without will or intention, you see them as entrepreneurs who make use of any means possible to spread their kind throughout the world. You also know that Johnny Appleseed wasn't making farmers happy with the source of apple pie; he was giving them the means to make hard cider, something the settlers appreciated even more. Apples grown from seed are weird and unpredictable, lending themselves best to fermentation.
But back to maple seeds. I wonder if kids today have history with them as some of us do. Growing up in simpler times, we spent countless hours with those little helicopters, twirling them, pasting them on our noses, making tiny dolls with dancing skirts, or just looking through the intricate fiber network of their wings. Nature was a source of delight, occasionally fear, and always wonder.
