Down Here in Time, I Grow Strange

A nature essay with Robert Frost and Annie Dillard

Quick note: I don’t often talk directly about faith in this space; I say why here. But I want to share my poetry + flash meditation project at Lent for the Ones, which follows the voices of women poets through the church season of Lent. It is for those who, like me, find scripture triggering due to religious trauma. If it would do you good, you are most welcome there.

Unsplash: Annie Spratt

“It’s invasive.” My daughter strokes the silver-green leaves sprouting from crenelated branches. I pause to catch my breath.

We have climbed the hill above the woods behind our house, a no-man's-land owned by the city. Two autumns ago, workers replaced the transmission towers that ensure this liminal patch of land’s continuation—and its undoing. The last telephone poles erected here were built in the 1960's; they were wood and weathered and needed to come down. In their place, tall, narrow, space-age wonders of silver steel. Needles pointing to the empty sky. At their base, a wasteland.

The spots clouding my vision dissipate; I look around and realize the invasive plant my daughter identifies has sprouted everywhere: “Autumn olive.” She tells us about the tree that replicates at warp speed, and I will spend the next two days wandering our woods, seeing these beautiful, craggy-limbed interlopers standing in places I’d swear were empty last week.

In the sixty years since the first phone towers went up, nature has known what to do at their feet. I envision a fast-motion video sequence: first the weeds, then small shrubs, then larger, slow-growing ones that, by the time we moved into this house in 2015, towered over my head like eight-foot trees. Birds nested, deer bedded down. Critters dug and scampered, and butterflies and bees hovered at the wildflowers leaning forward from the edges. It was a nature corridor, running the mile length of rolling hillside between one county road and another, overseen by humming wires that had everything and nothing to do with its existence.

In his poem “An Encounter,” Robert Frost meets a telephone pole, newfangled in 1909. “Where aren’t you these days?” he asks the “tree that had been down and raised again.” It holds its hands in an odd position and trails “yellow strands / Of wire.” He gives no commentary on the devastation of the ground on which the “barkless spectre has planted itself,” but devastation is all I can see.

I have a cardiovascular condition called POTS that keeps my blood from flowing properly anytime I am out in midsummer heat. This year, it is 89 degrees already in April. My POTS switch has flipped to the on position two months early, and instead of sun-drenched evening strolls, I emerge in the cool light after waking, sticking to the shade of trees, and the autumn olives are everywhere. Everywhere. And the Japanese stiltgrass, which also doesn’t belong, covering the forest floor in a glowing green carpet that belies its outsider status, and I want to scream at them both. I want to howl at the wrongness. All I want is for the nature corridor to return to the way it was, verdant and sheltering, and I want to shout to the sky, which I don’t believe is empty, that something must be done about this.

On the powerline walk with my daughter, I ask if everything will grow wrong after the trees that don’t belong take over. “Is this the end times?”

Without turning to acknowledge my catastrophizing, she shakes her head. “No. Over time, the environment will adapt.”

Nature knows what to do. I know what to do, but my body doesn’t. I walk my backyard woods, remaining under the trees in the unseasonal, rising warmth; all is well. I emerge into the unsheltered heat of the powerline breezeway; my blood pressure plummets; my head spins; I hold up my hand against the sky too wide, the sun too bright. This world wasn't made for the way I walk through it.

In her essay “Sojourner,” Annie Dillard says she “alternate[s] between thinking of the planet as home–dear and familiar stone hearth and garden–and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.” She acknowledges that “we are down here in time, where beauty grows,” but she admits it’s more complicated than that: “It is strange here, not quite warm enough, or too warm, too leafy, or inedible, or windy, or dead.”

Like the stiltgrass and the autumn olive, I am alien. Unlike them, I do not know how to thrive in this place where everyone, it seems, emerges in praise of the warm weather. “These warm days!” they exult at a late-afternoon gathering. I try to be like them, but my blood boils in the lowering sun and my mind grows fuzzy and I don’t know how much longer I can stay out here. The people whose blood flows properly don’t notice or understand. I am too tired or sad to explain: Not for me, this place. Not for me. I slide my feet into my sandals, attempt a smile, and leave them to go inside.

I wake early again for my foray into the trees, alone. The gentler light filters through the leaves. The birds sing. In the farther woods, the spread of autumn olives blocks my view of the river bottom. The tree that does not belong makes me acknowledge its presence. The sun rises overhead and I cannot ignore it; my head grows swimmy and strange. All the elements clamor for my attention, the ones inside my body not least. For me? The birds in the trees sing as I head back for air conditioning and home. For me? For me?

I place my footsteps with a careful downhill cadence against their song. This place, for me. I try the words on my tongue. It comes out a question. For me, this place. For me?

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Read here for what happened next.

This essay originally ran in Fall 2024 at Down here in time, I grow strange — Dappled Things.

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