Man, are the mosquitoes bad this year! It must have been our rainy spring and the high water table, but they are everywhere! Yesterday I watched one land on my forearm and deliberately set up her — you know the stingers are all female — tripod of legs and then delicately probe my skin with her stylet, and then bam! I smacked her into oblivion.
And the pollen was especially bothersome in May and June too. I blame the pine because it was the most obvious, coating our cars and anything outdoors. Even on the offshore ocean there were long yellow swaths of it. I saw a scanning electron photograph of a pollen grain: it is all spikes, like a little medieval club, the better to inflame my delicate nasal tissues.
And the ticks…But wait, before we go all-boo-on-Nature, let’s not forget all those beautiful warblers that visited us for a while, or the chance to come upon a Box Turtle or a Black Racer, or, what I really want to talk about, our Lady Slippers. With the mosquitoes, we got Lady Slippers, and they, too, were abundant this year.
Flowers in general are noteworthy, as they express the sexuality of plants, and their beauty catches up all of us, including our little co-inhabitants of the world, the insects. But Lady Slippers are in a class of their own, so strangely shaped, with their pink pouched petals. They are so obviously different from their neighbors, the Star Flowers, the Canada Mayflowers, the tiny Blue Toadflax, the little bells of the Bearberry. Lady Slippers are, in fact, orchids, and although orchids are found all over the world they bring an exotic tropical note to our sandy peninsula. (The word orchid, by the way, comes from the Greek word orkhis- literally “testicle.”)
Lady Slippers, then, are special. When I guided people on walks along our woodland trails, they just couldn’t get over them. And there is an unusual attitude of protectiveness about them. They are rarely picked. There is an understanding that they belong where they are, and only where they are. Oh, if only we had the same attitude about all our wilderness. It is also widely known that Lady Slippers cannot be dug up and transplanted in our gardens: some mysterious symbiotic relationship between the soil and the plant prevents it. In fact, this protectiveness is actually encoded in legislation: these little plants are protected by law.
Of the hundreds of Lady Slippers I have visited this year, one in particular stands out. Why? Unlike its neighbors in their pink sheaths, it is a delicate creamy white. This is at least the third year it has come up in exactly the same place. It is the only one I am aware of, although I hear the white flower may be more common further north. The fact that it stands out says more about me than it does about the plant. Not because, as Melville says in Moby Dick, “…in many natural objects whiteness refiningly enhances beauty…” but more because of its rarity. We pass by the common for the rare, every time. We have grown accustomed to living with the beauty of our Cardinals and Blue Jays, and get excited about a Black Vulture sighting.
So, swatting a cloud of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, I knelt in a bed of oak leaves and pine needles and moss, and spent time with — paid homage to — the white Lady Slipper, grateful for the world we share.
