I didn’t mean to come upon them. That’s always when you find the best things. They were huddled together in a little clump, rising out of the brown expanse of a leaf-littered forest floor. My eyes picked them out of the forest because back then I could do such things. A single lobelia in a mile-wide meadow was the one thing I would see; a lone lupine on the side of the Thruway as we sped by at 60 miles per hour stuck out like a sore thumb. I’m digressing, moving further away from the memory I want to record here.
It was early June. The end of the school year was upon us, which meant that final exams were at hand too. In those days I didn’t stress much about final exams. If you paid attention and did your work during the year, what more could you do? I usually did well on them. Still, the older I got, the less I seemed to retain, so a look-back was a good idea, even as it pained me. Studying notebooks from the entire year is a big chore, and there’s a point when you can’t do it anymore, when your brain is going to hold all that it’s going to hold, a saturation point that simply won’t allow anything else inside. When I hit that point I stopped and looked out at what remained of the day.
The sun was still slanting through the trees behind our house. It was my favorite time to be out walking in the woods. I hurried down the bank, past the emerging patches of Japanese knotweed, then across a street to another wooded area, up that bank, then down into a slight ravine.
There, in the belly of the forest, in the midst of all the fallen oak leaves, was a nice-sized clump of jack-in-the-pulpit plants. They were part of my childhood lore, when Suzie’s family had them growing happily in front of their house. Each summer I’d study them, fascinated as much by their form as for their endangered status. There were even whispers that they had spread to the point that someone had dug a bunch out and threw them down the bank behind the house.
Now, in the wild, was a tiny collection of them, happily unnoticed by most eyes. I was grateful that I happened upon them. Given their endangered status at the time, I left them alone, content to keep the secret of their location while enjoying the visage they made against the otherwise brown forest floor. It was the perfect study break. Nothing clears the head as well as a brush with the sublime.
The jack-in-the-pulpit plant is a fascinating woodland native. It sends up spikes that unfurl into handsome three-segmented leaves, followed by the ‘flower’ which is a hooded spathe enclosing the ‘jack’ in a cloak of green. If left alone, it will develop a stalk of bright red berries. The specimen shown here was purchased on a whim, in one of those mass-produced plastic bags that contains a sad little dried-up root or rhizome that rarely if ever comes back to life, so I planted it in a shady nook and promptly forgot about it. Other plants took over; a carpet of sweet woodruff, a lacy dicentra, and a hellebore stole the focus, and so the unobtrusive leaves went unnoticed. A couple of years later the spikes emerged and I was pleasantly reminded that it was there. Now it’s a sight to which I eagerly look forward, coming as it does with such pleasant early-summer memories.
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