I decided not to write about that one girl named Flora who I knew a while back, because I really didn’t know her very well. I have a picture of her with a cowboy hat on, her bust pushed up and her teeth all straight, sharp, and white. I knew that at one point, she lived in a trailer on her parent's property in Fort Bragg, that she was proud of going both ways, that she was a vegetarian, and got drunk quick.
There was that traveling perfume salesman who chatted me up on a train from Portugal to Genoa. He was too slick, and smelled like sweat and synthetic flowers. We left the train car and pushed ourselves against the main cabin window so he could shout out the names of the plants we were passing in Arabic. He told me enthusiastically that my name was a plant in Arabic. Not the spelling of my name exactly, but Sara with an e and maybe two r’s. I remember watching him and his friend etch my Arabic name onto construction paper, as the train bumped and curved along the old tracks. I could probably find that paper somewhere in some box in my parent’s attic. A box that says something like, Sara’s Sentimental Stuff, Don’t Let Go!
When I was in 6th grade we were studying Explorers, and we had to find a quiet spot up in the woods behind our school to sit alone with our clipboard and pen and write about what we saw. We would name the plants and the flowers. We would discover new creatures and shapes; we would draw them. We would be contemplative and observant. We were the first explorers to discover the depths behind the Greenfield Center School. I found my spot on a tree trunk, ready to take it all in, and I sat on a beehive by accident. From a distance, my teacher thought I was dancing and told me to stop. This was not the time for dancing, it was time for quietly exploring. I was trying to be quiet, a good student, and just shake the buzzing off of me. The teachers thought I was just being silly, until I ran down the hill screaming. Later, I counted my 108 bee stings, while my teacher slathered them with meat tenderizer.
I might’ve been able to hide the fact that we had a big party in high school, until my mom noticed the toothpaste spit hanging over a few blades of grass and the lilies. She couldn’t believe I let people brush their teeth and spit up on our lawn. I was happy that was all that she saw.
My step dad used to mow the lawn in his sweat pant cut-offs. He would always leave little patches of grass, if they had those yellow wildflowers mixed up in them. His sensitivity to living things is extraordinary. The backyard was small, so when he was done, it always looked a bit uneven, which both frustrated my mother and made her love him even more.
We were 18 when we found our way to the nudist colony in between the mountain with a vein of silver and the mountain with a vein of gold. That nudist colony run by the old Australian man, who looked like Doc from Back to the Future, who told us about the late night, only by donation, munchies jar in the reception area. That nudist colony that me and my three friends never would have found if we hadn’t started talking to that guy named Blaine in the mineral caves. The nudist colony that had a wooden swing right outside of the sauna, where I shyly and then joyfully swung naked, letting my feet brush through grass and then up over the edge of the cliff, as a deer knelt by and watched.
California’s got me with all its aromatics and textures. All of those succulents, palms, mosses; hedges of rosemary and jade. The douglas fir, eucalyptus, sequoias, and those gigantic stalks of bamboo. The night blooming jasmine seduced me first. I used to slather my wrists with the oil when I lived in Michigan, just to remind me of night time in this city. Most of the time it’s succulent, sweet and indulgent. But sometimes, when I come home late at night and I'm in a mood, it’s cloying, stuck up, and needy as hell.
New England’s got me with its sturdy hardiness and gradations of green. All of those pine, maple, oak, cherry and birch trees. Backyards full of bleeding hearts, hydrangeas, apple and magnolia trees. Then there’s the cow and horse shit smelling up the fields for whole stretches of road.
New Mexico could easily steal me away with the burning of pinon, desert sage, sweetgrass, and cedar. That perfect mix of smokey smells, barren land, and dry heat, that make every breath and step feel like an incantation.
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