High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [109]
That is how I became goddess of a small universe of my own creation—more or less by accident. My subjects owe me their very lives. Blithely they ignore me. I stand on the banks, wide-eyed, receiving gifts in every season. In May the palo verde trees lean into their reflections, so heavy with blossoms the desert looks thick and deep with golden hoarfrost. In November the purple water lilies are struck numb with the first frost, continuing to try to open their final flowers in slow motion for the rest of the winter. Once, in August, I saw a tussle in the reeds that turned out to be two bull snakes making a meal of the same frog. Their dinner screeched piteously while the snakes’ heads inched slowly closer together, each of them engulfing a drumstick, until there they were at last, nose to scaly nose. I watched with my knuckles in my mouth, anxious to see whether they would rip the frog in two like a pair of pants. As it turned out, they were nowhere near this civilized. They lunged and thrashed, their long bodies scrawling whole cursive alphabets into the rushes, until one of the snakes suddenly let go and curved away.
Last May, I saw a dragonfly as long as my hand—longer than an average-sized songbird. She circled and circled, flexing her body, trying to decide if my little lake was worthy of her precious eggs. She was almost absurdly colorful, sporting a bright green thorax and blue abdomen. Eventually she lit on the tip of the horsetail plant that sends long slender spikes up out of the water. She was joined on the tips of five adjacent stalks by five other dragonflies, all different: an orange-bodied one with orange wings, a yellow one, a blue-green one, one with a red head and purple tail, and a miniature one in zippy metallic blue. A dragonfly bouquet. Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation. The choice is draw the blinds and shut it all out, or believe.
What to believe in, exactly, may never turn out to be half as important as the daring act of belief. A willingness to participate in sunlight, and the color red. An agreement to enter into a conspiracy with life, on behalf of both frog and snake, the predator and the prey, in order to come away changed.
The Cooper’s hawk has been replaced as my significant other. A few weeks ago I was married, in the sight of pine-browed mountains, a forget-me-not sky, and nearly all the people I love most. This is not the end of the story; I know that much. With senseless mad joy, I’m undertaking what Samuel Johnson called the triumph of hope over experience—the second marriage.
Hope is an unbearably precious thing, worth its weight in feathers. If that’s too much to think about, best to tuck it in a pocket anyway, and make it a habit. I was stomping through life in my seven-league boots, entirely unaware of how my life was about to snag on a doorframe, sending me staggering backward, on the day I met my future mate. But the gris-gris charm for luck in love, given me by a fetisher’s apprentice in West Africa, was in its customary forgotten place, the watch pocket of my jeans. Now I keep it in a small clay jar among the potted plants in my bedroom window. Let the vandals carry off all but this—my hope.
On the day we met, my mate and I, he invited me to take a walk in the wooded hills of his farm in southwestern Virginia. I told him I loved the woods, and he took my word for that, and headed