TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

When my son was younger, he loved to collect what he called “nature treasures” — pinecones, acorns, stones, seashells. I’d find them when I emptied his pockets, doing the laundry. I’d find them in my purses and coat pockets, where he’d slipped them for me to discover myself.

He’s in middle school now, and he’s outgrown this for the most part. But not entirely. Sometimes he still brings me a wildflower, an unusual feather, or a stone he notices. And as a little wink and a nod to his younger self, he still calls them “nature treasures.”

My house is full of them now: on our many bookshelves, on the mantel in the living room, on the dressers in my bedroom. Feathers. Rocks. Dried flowers. Scrolls of sycamore bark, which rolls up when it falls off the tree. We even have a whole collection of abandoned birds’ nests; the smallest can fit in the palm of my hand.

My friend Kate lives in Arizona, and she stopped by to visit us a few years ago when she was driving cross country. She brought with her some nature treasures from the desert, so now our collection includes snakeskin, dried cactus ribs, and some sun-bleached bones.

What kind of bones? I have no idea. They’re so white, so clean, it’s easy to forget what they are. It’s easy to lump them in with stones and gloss over the fact that they were part of an animal. Snakeskin and feathers are shed by living things, but bones? If you find bones, you’re looking at part of a creature that is no longer living.

Still, they’re beautiful — at least to me. I don’t find them morbid.

Today’s poem explores both the beauty and the brutality in decay.

Native Grasses
by Lynnell Edwards

Happenstance and following the animal path

I find the antler - shed, in the parlance of the field -


its fine tip angling to the sky. I step to lift it

from its nest of rotted leaves and brittle weeds,


the beast that lost it long gone - rubbed it loose

against a low limb -- has moved on. Smooth, 


matte-white, hard as the root bone it is,

a single point: one year’s growth. I slip


it in my jacket, steal back to the trail. Later

I make accounting of the day: quail’s nest,


seed pod, spent cocoon, a complete, unfractured skull

I hang in the bare branches of a hackberry tree, totem


of dominion. The spine I let lie in damp, native grasses.

"Native Grasses" by Lynnell Edwards. Used by permission of the poet.