The dark green fuzzy
hearts cover the forest floor and Anna amidst them on a fallen log. The hardwood trees of the forest are still
without leaves. The spring has been so
slow that it seems as if the trees are holding their breath, waiting, for
warmth. Today, there is no wind and the
sun appears from behind the grey clouds, a bursting warm smile that bathes them
all.
She sits quietly,
observing the huge patch of Wild Ginger before her, listening, listening. The picture of the roots of these plants
flashes in her mind over and over.
Earlier in the spring, the tiny patch of Wild Ginger that she tends by
the shore of the lake, had been flooded.
The rising water had washed away the topsoil and left the large,
snakelike root exposed. At first, she
hadn’t known what she was looking at.
Every few inches, a leaf bud erupted straight up towards the sky. She had to remember, to search her mind for
what grew in that part of the garden.
The root structure was fascinating as it twisted and turned. The long rhizome had many leaf buds. She had imagined that each leaf had its own
root, but not so. The whole patch was
connected. After studying it, she
covered it up with soil to protect it.
After the next flood,
she did the same. But on the third flood
in a few weeks, she decided to relocate the whole root mass to higher
ground. She had transplanted Wild Ginger
to a number of spots in other years, but it was happiest by the edge of the
lake. That is until this spring. She didn’t want to find out how many times it
would tolerate flooding before it gave up.
So, she planted it up in the yard of the house beside another patch she
had planted the previous year, under the Maples and Oaks. She knew that Wild Ginger grew in hardwood
forests and thought it might be happy in the corner of the yard beside the big
trees.
Walking in this forest in late spring, Anna had come across a folded leaf right in the middle of
the trail. She picked it up, unfolded it
and discovered that it was the heart-shaped leaf of Wild Ginger. It felt like opening a letter, a love letter
from the forest saying, “I am waiting for you.
Come and find me.”
She had explored much
of the forest already and had seen Wild Leeks, Trout Lilies, Hepatica, Blue
Cohosh and Trilliums but no Wild Ginger.
There was one path that had been getting her attention for the past few
days but it had been cold and she ignored the intuitive pull. Now, she thought that that must be the way to the
ginger. It had been calling for a few
days before leaving her a leaf letter.
And so, the next
morning, she took the beckoning trail. When she came to another smaller trail that
led down the embankment to the river, she followed it. Climbing over fallen logs and sliding on the
wet mud, she made her way to the bottom of the river valley safely. Lifting her eyes up from the ground, she saw
dark green plants stretching out as far as she could see. Carefully making her way over the twigs,
around the raspberry cane’s sharp thorns, and under low hanging branches, she
got close enough to see what was growing there.
She burst out laughing as her eyes took in the emerald green, fuzzy,
hearts of thousands of Wild Ginger leaves.
She had had no idea that they were here all this time, waiting for her.
Anna found a level
fallen log to sit on and tried to quiet herself so that she could listen. What did the Wild Ginger have to say to
her? The roots of the ginger by the
water’s edge flashed in her mind. She
tried to clear the image and just listen.
Once again, the roots flashed. On
the third flash, she got the message. It
was the roots that were communicating, not the leaves.
She had recently been
in touch with a second cousin in England who had shared his research on the
family tree. The website he used took
her back six generations to ancestors she had never known about. She had grown
up in a small nuclear family with one brother and parents who had emigrated
from England. A few visits with
relatives in her life and lots of letters was all she had in the way of a
family. Her parents hadn’t been
interested in talking about their ancestors, or perhaps it was too
painful. At any rate, she had grown up
without knowledge of roots. She was
given wings and she had taken advantage of those but she never felt she was truly
Canadian and certainly not English and in her later years she had taken to thinking
of the Earth as her home.
It was, she imagined,
like being adopted and finding your birth family. All these names and dates of family members,
long gone. She wondered if she looked
like them, if she had certain family traits, if she would have reminded someone
of someone else. “Doesn’t she look like,
so-and-so?” they may have said. It was a lot to take in, suddenly being a
part of something that went back, well, to the beginning.
She looked at all the Ginger leaves spread out before her. What
if each leaf was a person in her family?
What if she was one of the leaves?
What if she was connected to them all by one convoluted root system? She
had spent a great deal of time imagining herself as part of the web of all
life. Her imagined pictures started out
as a two-dimensional web, like the kind that a spider would spin. Recently, it had become three dimensional
with strands of light, or thin silk connecting everything. She imagined how it would feel, being in such
a web. Kind of snug and cozy, she
imagined. Kind of safe and calm. No where to go and no one else to be, just
herself. And then she just had to renew
her relationship with the life that she came in contact with. She could do that.
The ginger had given her a
new image. She could take her place in
the family, in the patch of Wild Ginger and rest there. Her mother had felt the loss of her family
for so long that she had made sure that she held all the threads for the
family. She didn’t have the peace of
mind to be able to extend those threads to her daughter. She had died with those threads clutched
tightly in both fists. Her father had
walked away from it all. It wasn’t until
his dementia set in, in his nineties that he spoke of his mother and father, in
the voice of a little boy. But to him, they were his mother and father, not her
grandparents. The few strings she
managed to create had been done on her own, which seemed to displease her
mother. And the one string that was left
now, with her cousin, was the one that brought in the whole family. Now in her seventieth decade, the family was
revealed just like the Wild Ginger roots.
The lake water was
already high when the west wind became wild and pushed the water by her garden
higher and higher, over and over again.
The lake had washed away the soil, revealing the roots. The quarantine due to a pandemic and the cold
spring weather had kept people in their houses, on their computers, reaching
out to friends and family. She had been
cleaning up papers and came across various pieces of the family tree. She remembered that her cousin had sent
information in the past and she decided to email him and ask him about it. He had happily connected her to the website
he used to work on his ancestry. He
showed her the roots of the family.
She had followed the
names of her grandparents and her greats back to the end of the 18th
century. The same names popped up over
and over; John, Thomas, Ann, Mary, Jane, Elizabeth, George, William. She had taken notes on page after page, trying
to sort them out, recording their dates, where they came from and where they
died.
Had these ancestors
wished for a better life for their children and grandchildren to come? Had they wished for a better life for
her? Would they have been able to
imagine someone in their family living across the ocean so far away? Would they have advice about life to share
with her?
She brought her eyes
and her mind back to the soft green forest floor and felt the calm peacefulness
of the scene. There was room for each
leaf and they chose different angles to have full light exposure even though
they like to grow in the shade. She felt
her body relax and become still and she breathed it all in. Perhaps this is how her mother felt when she
was still in England. She had once said
that if there was no one at her own home, she would go from relative to
relative’s homes until she found someone who was in. Perhaps, this feeling that she was getting,
looking at the ginger “ancestors” was normal for her mother. Perhaps, the loss of it was so great that
there was nothing left for her to pass on to her daughter.
Anna closed her eyes and
imagined being surrounded by her ancestors, there in the forest. She took a deep breath and allowed her body
to feel surrounded, cared for, belonging.
Yes, that was it, belonging and having the right to be here, on
Earth. It was okay that she was
here. She carried some of the genes, she
carried their wishes and their stories.
They had passed all of these things to her and it was her turn to make
something of it. Her turn to make
something of it for the world, for them, for those that had come and were
coming after her and for herself. She
touched one ginger leaf and stroked it’s fuzzy surface gently as if it were her
own heart.
Smiling, she walked up
the path, in the company of her family and the forest dwellers, light strands
flowing from her fingers and feet to them all, supported in the web that had
seemed absent although it had been there all the time.
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