Even here near the broad middle bulge of this planet where heat stays longer and cold hardly shows its face, the colors of changing leaves appear. This scarlet explosion is the familiar Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) that grew in the Northeast, that grows in the mid-Atlantic, and that lives down here in Florida, too. Its presence on the land is a familiar comfort, like an old friend or a favorite passage in a book. Here it overtops a Florida privet (Dodonaea viscosa) beside a small vernal sinkhole at the edge of the recovering hammock on campus. It covers several cabbage palmettos on the northern edge of the hammock and elsewhere on campus. In all of those places, it has turned the same shocking scarlet. It carries the memories of colder falls in its leaf structure, deciduous. It protects itself against the possibility of frozen ice crystals, piles of snow, by drawing down the vital sugars into its roots, setting a bud, and closing down for the season. In this warm November air, it seems an unnecessary caution, but life changes slow like that, never releasing qualities that might again be useful simply because they are not presently used. It is not all competition; it is not all blood and claw, there is no fixed efficiency in the mechanical sense of the word out there in the wild (or in here in the wild, either), life persists and carries what it carries for its own sake. Who could deny with certainty, for example, that the Virginia creeper changes it's colors because that is what it likes to do? Who would insist that every quality make sense in a teleological narrative of that sort, that nothing is left to chance or accident or, shudder to think it, simple desire to live what is, in fact, life?Because greed has gotten the high ground in Washington, DC, we voted in a slate of Democrats who just as quickly backed away from fixing the problems they said that they despised. Do not let a day pass this next year when you do not remind them of this cause. Because, without a return to ethical policies written by honorable people representing our best intentions, we risk expulsion from the human community to which we should increasingly try to belong. It is not all about competition, it is about life. I know that it is. It is about Virginia creepers turning scarlet in the warm heat of the Florida sun, and grasses fading to next year's seeds, cycles of persistence, not fleeting at all.
