Wild Greens

Welcome to the February issue of Wild Greens.

In this collection, we come face-to-face with the persistence of “Plastic.”

First patented in 1862, “Plastic” is, as far as the planet goes, a recent invention, but its impact cannot be overstated. It’s fair to say it gave rise to entire industries and accelerated advances in science, engineering, medicine, communications, fashion, commerce, and the arts. (As I write this, I’m thinking fondly of the evolution of cinema, as well as the creation of plastic piano keys).

As a new inhabitant of planet earth, plastic’s ability to play nice with others is a point of contention: now emblematic of our unsustainable relationship to consumption and waste, plastic was originally introduced as a sustainable replacement for materials like ivory and tortoiseshell. Now it’s fusing with rocks to create something called plastiglomerate. It’s complicated.

Maggie Topel’s digital logo turns Wild Greens into everyone’s favorite piece of plastic– the credit card.

A plastic toy horse, lost and longed for, reappears in Veronica Tucker’s short story “The Forest That Remembers You,” and helps the narrator connect with their lost childhood. Melissa Mussak’s digital drawing “Plastic! Yum!!” depicts a plastic-eating mushroom. It sounds like science fiction, but mycologists are hopeful that mushrooms’ unique properties (and in this case, appetites) could help break down plastic waste!

Ann Howells examines her relationship to utilitarian objects in her “Ode to a Pink Plastic Comb.” We get older but our beauty products don’t seem to notice. In Melissa Lomax’s digital and paper collage “All Wrapped Up,” plastic wraps up sweet treats for your sweetheart. In Hope Yancey’s short story “The Genie Purse,” long-lasting plastic creates a bridge between childhood and adulthood when the narrator’s plastic doll comes to life.

Dea Ducci’s photograph, “Empty Flowers,” captures the unexpected beauty of an artificial bouquet. In “Mannequin,” a poem by Alyssa M., your fake plastic self is who others want you to be

Hayley J. Boyle’s watercolor cover for the issue, “Delineation,” shows a scene from John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge: a tranquil landscape with a side of plastic.

Durable, affordable, synthetic, disposable, indestructible— plastic will be here long after we’re gone. If I sound to you like a plastic apologist, you can blame the microplastics in my brain. 

-Rebecca

The Forest That Remembers You

by Veronica Tucker

I run the same trail every morning before the sun catches the tips of the pines. The ground knows my stride. The air knows my breath. I run because it is the only hour of the day that asks nothing from me. No patients. No decisions. Just the steadiness of my own heartbeat in the cold.

On the first true morning of December, the trail changes.

It happens so quietly that, at first, I think I am still half asleep. A thin fork splits off to the left where there has never been one. The main trail continues straight, familiar as my own kitchen. The new path tilts slightly toward the darker part of the woods.

I hesitate for only a second. Then I turn.

The trees seem to adjust around me. Not visibly. More like a shift in intention. A low tremor in the air brushes my arms. The path is narrow and pale, almost as if it has been used by something much lighter than a person. My footsteps fall softly, the forest absorbing each sound.

After several minutes, the trees open into a clearing I have never seen. It is perfectly round, like the bowl of a quiet breath. In the center sits a worn wooden bench. On its slats rests a small object.

My chest tightens.

I step closer. The object is a tiny plastic horse, white with a chipped blue mane. My lost toy. I dropped it during a camping trip when I was seven, and I cried because I was sure the woods had swallowed it forever.

I pick it up. It is cold against my palm. The cracked patch on the hind leg is exactly where I remember it. A pulse of air moves past me then, a warm gust followed by a sudden stillness. The trees around the clearing lean in with a slow, nearly imperceptible sway.

Someone once told me that the forest breathes differently in winter. That it holds its secrets more tightly. But the sensation moving across my skin now does not feel like winter. It feels like recognition.

I sit on the bench. The wood settles beneath me with a small creak. I hold the horse in both hands. Memories surface without warning. My mother calling me back to the campsite. My father teaching me how to tell direction by the sun. A whole world of things I thought were gone.

Childhood is a language the body never fully forgets. It waits, quiet and patient, until the right key turns.

Something shifts behind me. A soft rustle, a subtle change in temperature. Not wind. Not wildlife. More like a slow exhale released by something with awareness. I turn, but the clearing is empty.

I stay seated for a long moment, listening. The silence has weight to it, as if the forest is waiting for me to understand something I am not quite ready to hold.

When the sun finally rises high enough to find the clearing, the light falls over the bench, warming the wood. The trees straighten again. Whatever opened inside this space begins to close.

I stand. The path I arrived on looks steeper now. My breath turns into a thin white cloud. Some instinct I cannot name urges me to leave. Not out of fear, but because lingering feels like overstaying a welcome.

I take one last look at the clearing, then step into the trees. With each footfall, the forest shifts subtly back to its usual shape. Soon I recognize the familiar trail. The moment feels like waking from a dream that leaves a trace of warmth behind.

By the time I reach my car, frost is beginning to melt on the windshield. A crow calls from a distant branch. My watch vibrates with the reminder that the house will be stirring soon. Everything appears as it always has been.

Except for the plastic horse in my pocket.

At home, I set it on the windowsill above the kitchen sink where the early light finds it. It looks as if it belongs there, though I know it does not. I touch it every morning that week without fully understanding why.

Each day I return to the woods and search for the hidden path. I slow my pace. I watch the shadows between trees. I listen for that subtle shift in the air. But the fork does not appear again. The forest offers nothing but its usual quiet.

Even so, something feels altered. When I round a corner, I sometimes sense a faint warmth against my neck. A breath. A reminder. The trees hold still, yet I never feel entirely alone.

On the morning the first real snow arrives, I pause at the edge of the woods. The branches bow under their new weight. The world feels suspended, as if waiting for me to decide something important.

I slip the plastic horse into my pocket. The cold air carries the faint scent of pine and something warmer beneath it, a hint of the clearing that appeared and vanished. I sense the forest watching, patient, aware of me in a way I cannot explain.

For a moment, I imagine the hidden path opening again, the bench waiting, the air shifting with quiet intention. I do not know if it will return. I only know that something in these woods has not finished speaking.

I take a breath and step onto the trail. Snow softens the ground, and the morning holds still around me. The unknown does not frighten me now. It only reminds me that some places remember more than we expect.

I run, carrying the small horse and the feeling that something just beyond what I can name is keeping pace beside me.

Ode to a Pink Plastic Comb

The Genie Purse 

by Hope Yancey

I was searching for a warm sweater in an appropriate shade of pink, coral, purple, or red that I could use to assemble my outfit for Valentine’s Day. I’d searched my closet, where I came up empty, and now I went for the far reaches of the dresser. As I sifted through possibilities, I withdrew from a drawer my favorite purse from the past, the one I acquired as a little girl many years ago. This red vinyl purse was small and round. It featured a zipper closure and wrist strap. “Made in Hong Kong,” the label read. There were no pockets or complicated compartments. Girls growing up in the 1970s and ’80s didn’t need a special place to stash a smartphone. 

I was glad I still had the purse. It was gently used and had an unusual style that once captivated my youthful imagination. It captured my interest when I studied it now, I reluctantly admitted. Here I was in middle age, longing for childhood magic. On the purse was a whimsical design of a mysterious lamp with a cloud of smoke rising from it. Within that puff of “smoke” was a diminutive three-dimensional genie doll clad in a yellow dress, with a gold-sequined red headband in her dark pixie hair and matching red shoes on her feet. I suppose that’s what stylish genies wore back then. These children’s purses with dolls inside were Liddle Kiddles or a similar product. All 2 inches of my genie doll gazed passively back at me from behind the protective plastic case built into the purse’s construction, like admiring a mannequin in a shop window display. A very small mannequin. A thought occurred to me that sometimes, in thoughts and behaviors, we box ourselves in like a genie in a lamp.

The plastic case taunted my younger sister, Judy, with its implied challenge when we were children. It was so like Judy to want to tamper with something, experience it for herself, while I was more content to admire it from afar. She once tried to sneak a taste of aged World War II rationed sugar from an heirloom bowl. Judy was the owner of a similar childhood purse. Hers was not as neatly preserved: There was a split in the case, evidence of her attempt to extract the doll from its capsule for examination. To Judy’s eternal frustration, she never succeeded in releasing the doll.

Judy’s purse was navy, and the doll inside had blond hair like hers. Judy’s doll was no genie and made her home in a perfectly ordinary house with a garden and a white picket fence pictured on the purse. The doll wore a plain flower-print dress. I thought I got the better deal with my genie. Judy and I once reveled in our purses. When I was young, I thought nothing of proudly toting such a bold purse. “What happened to my sense of play, humor, make-believe, and adventure?” I wondered. The spacious utilitarian purses I carried as an adult woman were sensible. I wondered what my current purse, full of hand sanitizer and 40 writing instruments, said about me. 

What I can say is that none of these other purses came with their own resident genie. And that is unfortunate. In folklore, genies are magical, even mischievous. They’re able to grant wishes when summoned. I tried to conjure three wishes I might ask the genie for. I needed to free her. As I had done many times before when I was a little girl, I rooted for the genie doll to climb from the case. I realized there was no point to this exercise. Still, it cheered me to think of wishes I’d make if my endeavor turned successful. 

Next thing I knew, I heard the plastic compartment crack, and the tiny genie was blinking, yawning, and stretching her legs. The genie’s voice came out like a bird’s chirp. “About time,” she said, once her speech grew more confident. She gave me an impertinent look. “Hey, I remember you, Holly. Your sister tried to spring my cousin years ago, but YOU—I thought you were gonna leave me in here forever. Finally had to take matters into my own hands!”

Someone else might have been startled by this sudden spectacle and sound, but I wished for it so long that my thoughts turned quickly to the practical matter of where my genie was going to reside next. Tucking the vintage purse in the corner of a drawer would no longer do. I glanced outside to the deck, and a plan began to take shape. I contemplated what to call this genie. I loved Halloween and old films. Mina from “Dracula” was a contender, but I soon settled on Carlotta from “Phantom of the Opera.”

“Make yourself at home,” I told Carlotta. The normalcy of my words belied the strangeness of the situation. The local coffee shop would need to create a new drink size for her. A short time later, I left Carlotta sipping an impossibly tiny Valentine-themed latte topped with whipped cream and dusted with freeze-dried strawberries, her feet propped on an acorn from my Willow oak. 

Meanwhile, I set out for the garden center of a boutique hardware store. This business was as much a shopping destination as a hardware store and sold gifts and seasonal decorations. I carefully selected from the fairy garden display dollhouse-sized flowers, a heart garland, lanterns, pebbles, tiny furniture, and other implements to accessorize the fairy garden I planned. A bit of moss rounded out my purchase. Carlotta would have as comfortable a life as possible. She’d spent much of her existence stuck in a child’s purse in a dark dresser drawer. I discovered I enjoyed this creative project. I may have freed Carlotta, but I think she gave me back more in return. When I got home, I put away the utilitarian purses and vowed to replace them with something more eclectic.

Mannequin