LETTUCE IN THE STREAM / UPON THE APPALACHIAN ROCK
There was lettuce blooming in the stream crossing our paths in COVID-19. I sat on a mossy rock, listening to the gentle bow of water flowing around earth and the bark of fallen trees. The microcosm- microenvironment, was self-sufficient, a place with an edge, in its own encased existence. The river represented a passing, beginning, or ending- a length of time. There is a here and now, which we witness through our senses, unchanged, paradoxically immutable by our breath in the present, while past and future passes through us, never stopping. In my periphery, encircling me- was one place. At one particular moment in time.
A frog jumped past me- no more than three-quarter inches high - into the pool of stream at my feet. I pulled my skirt down, my yellow underwear the same color as the moss on my rock perch. The lettuce was not fully grown. In its diminutive nature, this spot appeared as a home for woodland creatures - like fairies or elves, even gnomes. This place is where they would seek refuge, hunt, and thrive in oblivion, the stream breathing, adding bubbles to the water, creating life. Before Spring is full, the plants are small and bright green, perfect and poised. What if we come back next week? It is so beautiful. (Our mind challenges us to think they will look the same next week, that things don’t grow or change, that things don’t disappear. That, a scene is forever a scene.)
A pure simulacrum of life. This has existed and will exist- in its stature- or in a new one. The current reality was overwhelmingly immersive and memorable. I could at once turn my imagination to an equally real storm on an ocean or lake, rocking and splitting a ship in two. Or to a person hooked to a ventilator, taking their last breath in quarantine.