On My Hands and Knees

by Mimi Hedl

In autumn, more often than not, you’ll find me down on my hands and knees, crawling from one space to another, in search of seedlings, mostly cedar, but any tree seedling will do. I embrace seedlings I can wrest from the earth in this dry, dry autumn, part of my job description. On this particular morning, I’d gone up to our only native pine tree, the shortleaf pine, in the south 40, to plant snow drop bulbs. I saw a vision of them blooming on the slight slope in February’s to come, so that when I looked out the bathroom window, I would see a congregation of beauty and promise on a sunny winter’s day.

Down on my knees, marking where I’d plant the bulbs, I saw one cedar seedling after another, I couldn’t go a few inches without coming across another one. You can’t see these tiny sprigs of green from a standing position, they simply blend in with the grasses and forbs. As soon as you spy them a few feet from your eyes, like a child, squirrel or bird would, they come into stark view. Luckily all the pine needles made the soil under this lovely shortleaf pine loose so that the seedlings pull with ease as the root system has not developed a strategy, yet!, to make removing difficult without a trowel and moist soil.

I keep saying I’ll collect the seedlings of one variety so I can authoritatively declare how many seedlings I’d pulled. A kind of bragging I guess. But I get tantalized by the pulling and finding so that I can’t control myself and like a child at Christmas, I go after them with crazy determination. As I pull and toss, I think of the birds that have perched in this pine tree, making the contribution of a cedar seed that had passed through their digestive system onto the soil below. I celebrate their honoring this beautiful tree with their presence, their song and don’t begrudge the seedlings they leave in their wake. Now the mimosa and redbud seedlings are another story! No bird sows those, the wind does, blowing the seed pods every which way, driving the head gardener to a frenzy of expletives. I laugh at her temper over something beyond our control but I must confess I sometimes feel the same way.

The snow drop bulbs rest in the earth, cedar seedlings lay on top of the soil, a pleasant hour’s work. I go about other autumn chores, like splitting cook wood. Not too much time passes before the Three Musketeers, father and two adult sons, who I’ve watch grow from babies into manhood, come with a trailer load of heating wood. We banter like old friends, they tease me about the scars on my ax handle and I blame the missed strikes on a “friend”. We all laugh and they go about their work while their two young sons, 6 and 8, appear, running around with boundless energy.

Now I watch these boys grow up. Braxton, the younger, goes to the deciduous holly tree and asks me if those red things are apples. I look at the tiny berries and can see how through a child’s eye they may look like apples, so I say if you’re a tiny creature they might seem like something big, but then say, “Follow me” and I take them to the persimmon tree, loaded with fruit. They’d never tried one before. Drake bites into one from the ground as I’d instructed them and says, “Yum. That’s good!” I remind them again not to pick any off the tree until we’ve had many cold, cold nights. “Why?” Drake asks. I tell him if he bites into one he’ll never forget how it puckers up his mouth and how the awful taste stays with him.

The persimmon tree and the Shumard oak tree share the same space, touching each other, so it only took a moment for the boys to start finding the acorns under the tree. They loved the caps on the acorns and started picking them up. I went back to the house for a basket as they would find one cap after another that fascinated them. Then I told them how the native Americans made meal out of the meat inside an acorn. (To do this, “the acorns were dried for a year, shelled, winnowed to remove a thin inner shell, pounded into flour, sifted repeatedly through finely- woven baskets, leached by rinsing in water, then cooked into a mush like grits.”)

When they found a cap and acorn intact, they wanted to see what the meat looked like inside the acorn, so I went back for a board and hammer. Through the years we’ve hammered enough hazelnuts to demand a board with grooves chiseled into it so the nut would sit properly and not roll off. The boys watched me crack open one acorn, then of course they wanted to do it. They cracked open one after another, never once hitting their fingers, though they had warned me not to hit mine. They were fascinated by the grub inside each acorn. I pointed out the tiny hole in the shell. Of course they had to hold the acorn to see the hole up close. “That’s where an acorn weevil laid an egg inside the acorn in the summer and that egg turned into this grub.” Braxton asked me to move the grub off the board so he could crack open another acorn. He didn’t want to touch it whereas Drake would’ve squished the grub without a thought. How curious and wonderful the differences among us.

The three of us were down on our hands and knees, collecting caps and acorns and cracking them one after another. They accepted me as one of them. “Look at this one!” Drake would shout, and show me a cool, perfect cap, not damaged by a squirrel releasing the nut from the cap. Then I’d find a cute little acorn with beautiful cap and show them. I told them I’d string the acorn caps and they started to collect in earnest and we had a nice basketful by the time the Three Musketeers came over and saw us crouched together in a tight circle.

What a sight that must’ve made to their eyes, to see the three of us playing together. As they peered down on us, they looked like giants to my eyes now accustomed to being a child. Talk about walking through the looking glass, if only for a short while. I’d entered into the world of the boys. And I liked it.

When I stood up I became an adult again. The spell was broken. Drake had pulled a persimmon off the tree and started to eat it. His face puckered up something terrible and he exclaimed, “Oh Mimi, why did you let me do that! It’s awful.” The men started laughing and so did Drake. The boys left running with a whoop and a holler. Quietly, I did the same.