Cottonwood pods carry me, like snowflakes onto the fertile ground. Around us, origami butterflies and swans decorate the vines of poison ivy plants and cotton mouths loop around, playing our wedding march sonorously slick with singing and sass, punctuated by a tenor note of mosquito buzz coasting along the tree line.
But these fertile fields are fallow, and I cannot propagate our species without a mate. I look into Ancestry for a GMO compatible pod, and there, lo, spins the whirligig samara of my favorite maple, favorite for sweetness and that bright yellow it turns in the fall, so stylish against my snowflake white. Who cares if we contaminate the line? We are happy. While other brides take paper airplanes, we’ll arrive like royalty on his helicopter.
Then the fallow fields, with first flood and then drought, spread us around, plant us in the lowlands all the way to the dust of the hills. We alight like dryer lint and detergent pods, our new hybrid, a cotton maple? A Maplewood? (But we still can’t immigrate to Europe with our mixed race and modifications!) Planted thus we procreate, reproduce our respective selves a thousand times over. Our infant pods stand like spent dandelions on freshly plowed fields and their seeds, like their thoughtsake, will float up instead of down like me, turning like you until their downy heads knot from sleeping in the wet mud, like knotholes in the pine planks of a rustic cabin, and our progeny, our CottonMapleMapleWood Gen One will carry on, forget us, fill up the cemeteries with no headstones, and hear their friends say it is hard to have no place to go to pay your respects.
Amen.
Georgiana Nelsen left the bucolic Midwest twenty years ago for the wild frontier that is Houston, Texas. She writes something most every day, but that can range from contracts to poems. She believes in observation, listening, and acceptance and realizes that might look like stalking. Sorry!