Distinctive (2025)

My grandparents’ backyard was full of plants. A grassy, mossy, garden-filled oasis under the shade of an ancient maple and several fruit trees. In the shadiest, most thicketed part of the yard behind my grandmother’s snowball bush and under one of my grandfather’s lilacs, amongst some ferns and lily of the valley, there was a lone jack-in-the-pulpit—a brilliant green echo of the forest that used to be much closer to (all around) the house.

I, too, exist most fully in tree-dappled sunlight amongst the other plants of the damp woods.