The Something

There are so many plants living in the Palm Hammock that some of them have escaped my view. And then, one day, I happen upon a gem, a rare, unknown beauty. Many, like this one, are small flowering annuals that can live on into several seasons because of the region's mild climate. This plant does not appear in my identification manual. Nor am I enough of a botanist to track it down in a technical key. But it is a beautiful specimen. Its leaves are long and narrow, unusually sturdy for an annual species of plant. They curl up ever so slightly along their length. Five, as you see, accompany each florescence, the florescence each comprised of tiny bursts of nearly petal-less flowers with small straight pistil and stamen. The plant itself is rigid and almost awkward in form. Long stretches of stalk, insect-leg joints with a fan of almost lance-like leaves and these delightful bursts of symmetrical reproductive tissue. It needs a name. It has already evoked a meaning.

And so this anonymous plant, and so many like it, live on in that cherished plat of land saved there on the west side of campus. Its flowers will erupt for the next several weeks, rains feeding its patient roots. The same weeks in which the national charade unfolds again. Will world-changing tectonic events follow in the wake of a Democratic victory in November? Yes, and no. It will calm what have been very muddied waters and sooth what have been irritated wounds and it will return the reigns of power to the hands of people who use fact-based reasoning to make their cases. But the real changes will have to come from within, or below, or around. There are immanent reconsiderations and re-visionings waiting to be performed. You and I must do that. Here, where we live. Like this unnamed something that holds itself anonymously beautiful and decorates my restoration project on the sand heap at the eastern edge of the Gulf of Mexico, we might all find some renewed obligation to produce beauty just because.