Welcome to the July issue of Wild Greens.

Senses jumbled, pages mixed-up, media mingled: our July theme is “Scrambled.” I love words that have obvious yet unstated associations. Like when I say scrambled, I unconsciously think of eggs: a golden yellow egg comes to mind, unbidden. Or when I hear the word fellowship, my brain continues: of the ring. I’m not sure if we have a word for this. Perhaps it’s some subset of metonymy?

I do know that when two words are paired in a phrase, but one is obsolete, it gets called a fossil word. Some examples: "kith and kin"— we don’t use kith on its own; wedlock only survives in “out of wedlock”; turpitude only really exists in the phrase “moral turpitude”; has anything ever been ulterior other than a motive? But I digress— the theme is Scrambled, not Rambled, so let’s dig in.

Maggie Topel’s digital logo sets the table at the Wild Greens Diner with a complete breakfast.

Lauren Kimball’s graphic story illustrates a childhood memory from her grandmother’s kitchen, the center “yolk” of the home in “Scrambled.” Megan Wildhood’s poem “This is How We’re Raising Our Kids?” poses a question about what values we pass down to the next generation.

Nasta Martyn’s “Collage, paper” depicts fantastic beings hatching from eggs. “Try, Try Again,” a personal essay by E.B. Greene, considers the variety of ecosystems, past and present, that comprise the author’s home in Michigan.

J. I. Kleinberg’s visual poem “again, the wind” collages excerpts from magazine text to represent a sensory jumble. Scott Tierney’s “A Yolk of a Portrait” adds two real eggs to a self-portrait in pen, ink, and pencil. It’s a recipe for success.

Hayley J. Boyle’s watercolor cover for the issue is inspired by a favorite meme in “What the hell is going on in here? Eggs?”

I would ask the same question about this issue of Wild Greens!

-Rebecca

Try, Try Again

by E.B. Greene

The ground beneath my feet is a canvas painted by millions of artists. Their unsigned names are glacier, earthworm, Bodéwadmi Nation, maple, City of Lansing, white-tailed deer. The composition now is a structured vista of split-level houses, asphalt, turfgrass. But beautiful little pentimenti, the ghosts of a different scene, emerge.

Silver maple seedlings are the shadow of the previous artist’s sketch, back when this landscape painting was a dense, dark forest; cloudy sunlight shimmering weakly against the wet, dripping leaves. I take up this palimpsest, smudge away some of the already-fading ink of the housing developer’s plan, and write something new.

With my hands—these same human hands that set beaver traps, flicked horse whips, turned the bulldozer’s key, and cranked a lawnmower pull cord—I plant trees. Like the Spanish grandmother touching up a holy fresco, I do my best to interpret Mother Nature’s, the master artist’s, work. Dripping with sweat, hands gritty with the dark river floodplain soil, I try my hand at creation.

Now my yard is a somewhat chaotic bricolage. The 1980s suburban sprawl is gracefully disintegrating to reveal some wildness beneath. Next door, the neighbors spray pesticides along the fence line and pay for a crew to zip around on zero-turn mowers every other Tuesday. The irrepressible swamp is mixed in with the gas station highway on-ramp, turtles climbing up as radiator fluid trickles down.

Flying over, you’d see a crazy quilt: a parking lot, cornfield, and oak tree canopies. The quilter, in a mad rush, grabbed a handful of scraps. Some were from an old, old blanket that the glacier pulled over a newborn landscape. Some are brand-new and shiny plastic, leaching some toxic neon into the stitches.

To bring out more of this old underpainting, I’m trying to learn my history. What was here before me in ecoregion 8.1.6, a.k.a. the southern deciduous (hardwood) floodplain forest, a.k.a. Michigan? How did these great-great-grand-acorns of the ancient precolonial forests find themselves mixed up with me, the great-great-grandchild of the immigrants who cut them down?

Turns out this land in the before-times was a cussed swamp, swarming with malarial mosquitoes and too boggy-wet to travel through. Dominated by maple and ash, the puddles that appeared and disappeared with the seasons grew newts and toads, beavers and muskrats. I can still see tiny fragments of this wilderness, glittering like shattered glass around me.

I’m trying to connect my little piece of land to that mosaic, by planting some areas and abandoning others. I visited a native plant nursery and bought a little black oak, although it’s lost a few leaves to the deer. I’m joining efforts with others through groups like Homegrown National Park and Wild Ones. I make loving this place into little games of photography and birdwatching, and I try to share that love whenever I can.

It’s a bit jumbled, this love I have for my country. Though I’ve lived here all my life, I have no claim to nativity. Though this habitat gives me life, in many ways, my culture is killing it. I try to nurture this landscape, but I worry I’m just smearing the paint around.

But the oak tree grows, and maybe it still will 100 years from now. Next on my list to plant is an American elm tree, now with genes mixed in from a Chinese elm to protect it from Dutch elm disease. My main ecological manifesto seems to be: “Bless this mess.”