mother's nature
by tori gallagher

My mother taught me the names of things: the plants that filled her gardens, the insects and reptiles that colonized them, the animals that roamed the woods behind our house, that swam in the bayous and the muddy river, the birds that stopped through on their great migrations along the big flyway in the sky and the ones that stayed all year. She taught me to look and look closely, to watch and wonder.
And she taught me, by example, to jump really high and shriek if I found a water moccasin in the back yard. And then to run, quick, and get something sharp from the garage and hack the thing up in an adrenaline-induced frenzy. (If I had grown up in the Pleistocene, Mom would have been the first to point out the majesty and wonder of the great saber-toothed cat, and the first to spit it and cook it for dinner if it insisted on hanging around near the cave and her children.)But when life and limb were not at stake, my mom taught me to notice things—the metallic gleam of a dragonfly’s body, the glint of a hummingbird’s throat in sunlight, the fall of fireflies in summer. These things were important.

I grew up in a small town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast that had a post office, an elementary school, a grocery store, and probably a few more churches than people. But mostly it was all loblolly pine, ancient live oaks draped in Spanish moss, and mysterious bayous. On a clear day, the surface of those marshy inlets were bronze mirrors that showed the sky and hid the fish and most other denizens of the brackish channels. But most days you could spot an egret or a great blue heron stalking the shallows, or an alligator haunting the edges of the marsh, just its eyes visible above the water, waiting with the long patience of archaic reptiles (for a tasty nutria rat to swim by, I suppose, or a really stupid dog).

Like the other kids in the neighborhood, I got home from school and spent long afternoons outside playing kickball in the street or inventing long imaginary games that took us into the woods or down by the bayou. But however I chose to spend those hours between school and dinner, when the streetlights whined and flickered on, I always noticed the bats swooping in the purple dusk, diving on fat mosquitoes, the sweets chittering and swooping among them like apostrophes loose in the twilight. Anything that ate mosquitoes was good. I gave more blood to those insidious insects than I ever could to Red Cross. But truly, dusk was a magical time and I often watched the sun sink into the bayou, blazing the horizon, blackening the grasses, steepling the tops of pines. I stood witness to the falling of each Mississippi night. And later when the dark fell still, after the moon had risen and the choir of crickets and tree frogs had hushed, I’d sit on the back patio sometimes before bed and the call of a whippoorwill could chill my skin right through the lingering heat. My mother taught me to get quiet and listen, and to notice that the natural world was so much more than a backdrop for childhood games.

My mother has an abiding love of nature. We all have hobbies, passions, interests—things we do to stave off the stress and boredom of life in the modern, artificial habitats we’ve created for ourselves. Mom gardens and she paints. She spends her time trying to appreciate, understand, and recreate the natural world—in her backyard, on canvas or on paper. Her gardens were designed not only for beauty but as havens for wildlife: honeysuckle and clematis, pear and fig among the maple, oak, willow and pine, flowering plants for every season, foliage for every space and exposure, and all of it inhabited with insects, chameleons, rabbit, squirrel, tortoise, birds, and yes, snakes (non-poisonous reptiles were allowed to stay).

Each morning Mom would tour the gardens, trailing a hose, plucking old blooms, admiring the new, naming it all for me to learn, a catechism of the living. I forgot most of it right away. Honestly, I was a dreamy kid, and while I liked the birds and the bugs, I wasn’t as apt a student when it came to plants. (Maybe, if I had paid better attention I would have grown up with a green thumb like Mom. Instead, I tend to kill things. Well, things I try to grow anyway.) But I remember Mother’s garden as a magical place.

When I wasn’t outside as a kid, I had my nose buried in a book. I liked science fiction the best: the alien worlds and adventures of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov. But even they couldn’t compare to what I could find in Mother’s garden. What fictional alien could match a close look at a praying mantis? What technology could match the frantic, erratic flight of a swallow-tailed butterfly that one moment has lit on a day lily and the next has flung itself recklessly into the sky and soared over the house? What alien could sound more exotic than the high, undulating cry of a pileated woodpecker on a misty spring morning?

Even now the only perfumes I can abide are not the ones worn by women but the ones from her garden: honeysuckle that buried the fence on the north side of the yard, gardenia from the mountainous shrub outside her bedroom window, an indescribable scent from the climbing rose with the huge crimson flowers that had no name that we could discover. And always underlaid by the smell of pine and salt.

When Mom wasn’t dragging me around the garden, she set me loose scooping tadpoles from ditches and watching them grow legs. We found cocoons and made terrariums for them and waited for weeks until its occupant emerged with soft wet wings and then we carefully set if free. We carried binoculars everywhere. We tramped the woods and fields, gathering wild flowers in the spring so she could make arrangements for the altar at Sunday mass or our kitchen table. In the fall we gathered goldenrod and grasses and pipewort and to save for winter arrangements. Sometimes our garage reminded me of a witch’s cabin with mysterious bundles of herbs and flowers, seed pods and thistles and other rustly things hanging from the rafters to dry.

The garage was filled with other mysterious artifacts too. Every spring we traveled 500 miles in our big Mercury station wagon, to visit my grandparents on the Atlantic coast of Florida. And there we spent hours and hours, day after day, exploring the sandy, semi-tropic margins of the world. (The Mississippi coast is more marsh than beach, so this was a treat.) We named the birds and fed the seagulls. I played in the surf belly-riding waves while my big brothers swam in the deep water past the breakers, swearing every fin we saw was a shark and not a dolphin.(I knew the difference but sharks always seemed more exciting to a kid who had not yet seen Jaws.) This is also where I discovered sting rays but Mom taught me to drag my feet in the surf so I didn’t actually step on that first one. But most of the time, I spent beach-combing with Mom.

These are the names of the shells we found, a litany of the littoral zone: conches and lightning whelks, parrot heads and scotch bonnets, olive shells, jingles, cockles, sailor’s ears, shark’s eyes and moon shells, alphabet cones and sundials, limpets, bubbles, corals and murexes. And the occasional shark’s tooth, driftwood, beach glass or mysterious bone. The car always smelled like low-tide on the way home because of the buckets of sea wrack we brought back. And these were stored in the garage too until Mother found a use for them. The shells and flotsam gradually populated the house, filled jars and glass bases to lamps, sat on bookshelves and window sills, reminders of our trips to the edge of the world, talismans against the encroaching artificiality of modern living.

Mom always brought back sketches as well—seagulls in their whirly-gig flight over my grandmother tossing breadcrumbs, black skimmers and sandpipers populating a deserted dawn shore, still lifes of shells, drifted sand and grassy dunes, huge stormy skies spread across a long horizon. These things often made their way into paintings that joined the bayous and herons and ancient oaks on the walls, all of it serving as constant reminders of what is important. As for me, I always brought back the remains of a horrendous sunburn (a painful reminder that Mom did not pass on her Mediterranean-skin-that-soaks-up-the-sun to me. I’m still a little irritated about that.)
But for everything else, I am grateful. My mother made the world I grew up in magical, and I’ve carried that reverence with me every place I’ve been. Ten years I spent in the Texas hill country letting the creak of cedar seep into my bones, hiking every weekend, digging in the limestone beds of that land for fossil shells left by an ancient sea. And when I came here, to North Carolina, to mountains older than fossils and shagged by trees I had never named before, it was the same. Life is mystic and ancient and we are all just a tiny part of it. And our job, as self-conscious creatures, is to stand witness.

Last year, Hurricane Katrina destroyed my parents’ home. Surging before the storm, the Gulf of Mexico rose up in a wall of water that reduced the house to timbers and washed it away. It ripped out Mom’s gardens, soaked her paintings in saltwater, shattered the glass and frames, and tossed the remains into the ravaged woods like so much flotsam. Most of the town was leveled. Most of their friends are scattered and displaced. Mom got to keep Dad and the dogs and the car that they left in just before the storm descended. And while she remains grateful, I know she is deeply conscious of all that she lost. I want to remind her that what she’s given me was not lost. And all the other things can be recreated because she is who she is: artist, gardener, nature-lover, saber-tooth slayer and my mother. I want to tell her how grateful I am for what she’s given me (and that I, hopefully, will pass on to my children) because no hurricane can wash that away.

Tori Gallagher lives in West Asheville with her 3 sons, their mother, 2 dogs, a cat and a backyard full of birds and bugs she can name and plants she can’t. She aspires one day to grow something pretty (and not kill it before it blooms).