Invasives & Salvation
[second place winner of creative nonfiction in the 2024 Porter Fleming Literary Competition]
One year ago, on the one-acre plot I call home, I pulled off a thick, orange-brown vine that snaked itself around an inch-and-half diameter maple sapling. Satisfyingly, with my leather garden gloves gripped around the machete my partner and I bought when we lived in Mexico as reluctant missionaries, I whacked at the root of that muscadine vine until it popped. Then I pulled and pulled until the earth opened up and revealed the edge of the dead monster. Carefully, I unwrapped the monster’s tail that had coiled itself above my height.
I snapped a photo of the little maple, intending to write about it later. Remembering isn’t guaranteed unless I write. Of the twenty-something trees I saved that day through sweat and blade, she stuck out because she was so young and so at risk by the well-developed vine. I don’t like using the word “saved” because of all the religious trauma, the oppression, and worst of all, my complicity. But even as a lifelong writer, I can’t think of a better word.
Two months ago, I started taking Tamoxifen. No one told me that this nine-millimeter white preventative breast cancer pill would feel as invasive as the thick muscadine that nearly murdered the maple. I wonder if my sister feels the same about her double mastectomy. Her surgery was almost two years ago, but the reconstruction brought other invasive species: saline and silicone.
There are three things used to identify and categorize invasive species. They must adapt to the new area, reproduce quickly or aggressively, and cause harm. Invasives steal the sun and reduce biodiversity.
There are four women genetically connected to me who have had breast cancer. My sister and my mother, the most prominent for the percentage calculation. I have a 37.4 percent chance of contracting invasive ductal carcinoma. I heard that number several times before I understood that it signifies a little over a one in three chance for me to get breast cancer in my lifetime. High risk starts at 20 percent. Cancer is all math: numbers, percentages, and probability – but I am all language: words, body movements, and tone.
Despite the two knobby arthritic knuckles on her trunk, the small maple currently stands tall. Her crown is growing and she’s slowly healing. On the days when my migraines or debilitating joint pain come, I remember her. She reminds me that persistence is its own glory. She gives me hope for my young daughter who is also a sapling, and whose math we haven’t figured out yet.
Fast forward five years and I can get off this medicine. I’m supposed to open up my bloodstream to this invasive for that long. My oncologist told me if her risk percentage was as high as mine, she’d take the 10 milligrams every other day like I do.
Suzanne Simard is teaching me about mycorrhizal fungi, through her book Finding the Mother Tree, how the wide willow oak that sits behind this maple sapling potentially sent her nutrients when she needed them through the underground networks that sustain life. The muscadine choked, but the willow oak fought for her friend. There’s math to Suzanne’s methods and research papers too, but her storytelling helps it make sense. The trees on this wooded lot may all be connected by invisible fungi – and they give what they receive. These Carolina trees are my life-sustaining network: hickories, cedars, pines, willow oaks and silver maples. A mulberry that sits in the corner near the neighbor’s fence, a tall tulip tree in the front rooted not far from a Shumard oak and a tiny dogwood that lives in their shadows. Some stretch 90 feet toward heaven. They are my mycorrhizal fungi, my cloud of witnesses, my spiritual community.
When my girl was 6, her grandfather told us that he was planning to cut down a silver maple that was obstructing his pool deck. Juniper cried. She wept so much I had to walk her away from the extended family, sit her on my lap, and stroke her dirty blonde hair until she calmed down. That was the moment I knew her name meant more. She’s tapped into that mycorrhizal network, intimately knows the trees as living beings. Her divinatory tears were a warning to the rest of us.
Seven months ago, my spiritual director asked me where I feel the safest, where I feel the least judged. I told him about the city greenway that has an entrance a mile from my wooded lot, where I often go to run and name the trees. I had already started writing a piece of fiction about a girl, Matti, who loves trees. Matti’s sister, Jackie, dies of breast cancer in the story. Writing fiction requires research, so my love for the trees has deepened. Now I stop and touch my favorites on my runs and walks. On the greenway, it’s a 90-foot poplar tree that always speaks to me. Her thick trunk is the first mama tree in that section, and I like to put my hand on her to say I see you, I’m grateful for you – one mother to another. On Union Street where all the hundred-year-old Southern houses were built, it’s the 80-foot gingko tree I gawk at whose branches arc toward the earth and then start reaching for the sky. Then it’s the large southern magnolia who spreads as wide as half the house it sits in front of with its snake-like branches, some that belly the dirt below. And it’s the weeping elm that isn’t as tall as the gingko but just as glorious. Not too long ago its crying branches brushed along my hair as I walked under it. But then it got a trim, and now I say hello with my palm like I do with the poplar.
The trees have shown me that I’ve had dealings with invasives before. But when you’re grafted with one, suffocation seems like breathing. Now I see differently, I breathe differently. Safety doesn’t come in the places it used to for me. Churches, missionary life, bible club, Christian organizations. These are the spaces where certainty was heralded as a type of security. Like how Kudzu appears to give you privacy while it steals the sunlight that gives strength and kills biodiversity. These are the spaces where exclusivity was seen as holy. Like how English ivy shows off but inhibits new growth and causes tree rot.
For the last eight years, I’d been feeling this subtle sense that belonging in these spaces was costing my wholeness. And then a series of events, starting with the 2016 election and ending with me leaving an organization I loved working at, proved that inkling to be prophetic.
Now, I feel more lost at church than found. Confused than at peace. Drained than energized. The worst of it is that I feel like I have to hide that reality to fit in with USDA Hardiness Zone 7b. North Carolina may have a range of these zones, showcasing its climate diversity, but the whole state sits in one theological zone – the Bible Belt. Could the maple sapling go about pretending she never had a parasite debilitate her? The second you look at her, you know the truth. How much do we hide in plain sight for these southern, religious values?
Nine months ago, I started writing about Matti and her sisters. This Word document that holds their untold story sometimes feels like the deepest mirror I’ve ever looked into, where I see things inside that are truer than anything I’ve ever known as truth. Puzzling together a sentence makes me unsure, anxious, excited, contemplative, and any number of other emotions. Sometimes I type the words and my anger boils. Sometimes my eyelids well with water. Sometimes I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience: like I’m looking at myself typing and wondering is this really inside of me? Here on the page, I’m an explorer, discovering so much, including my family members that don’t contribute to my breast cancer risk – distant cousins of the Cornaceae, Sapindaceae, Fagaceae, and Ulmaceae families:
Robbie kept all of our leaf drawings in one sketch book, and after she was done drawing the leaf to my liking, I would add the name, bark texture, fruits or flowers, and any other important identifying features in a paragraph. I knew our neighbor Tim’s tree was a dogwood, but I also knew it wasn’t a North Carolina native dogwood because the flower tips weren’t rounded. Tim, an avid gardener would always talk plants with me, so I was grateful the day he explained the difference. I need to remember to tell Robbie to add it to the book.
Our sketchbook became a reference book for me, and it usually lived on my bedstand with my lamp and my bible.
Nope, it’s been a decade since I’ve had my bible on my nightstand. This doesn’t feel right to me—or to the story. So I backspace “and my bible” and replace it with “as if it were a bible.” Yes, that feels better.
Our sketchbook became a reference book for me, and it usually lived on my bedstand with my lamp, as if it were a bible. Robbie had to learn what apex, petiole, rachis, margins, sinuses, and lobes were so that when I didn’t bring back a leaf, but had one in my mind, she could still draw it. We used those words and then added several of our own to describe the leaf’s characteristics, like big butt for wide, peach-shaped leaves like mulberries, elf hat for abrupt apexes like cottonwoods, almondy for longer skinnier leaves like the winged elm, and we’d use arms for lobular leaves like the scarlet, turkey, and pin oaks, imagining the head of the leaf was connected at the petiole and the sinuses were like its armpits.
It's not just the land that connects me to the trees, but the thoughts that create scores of stories in my brain. I imagine my cerebrum as scaly and furrowy as the bark of a willow oak, where trails of potential story ideas could trickle like water down a million different paths. Shall I have Matti explore asexuality so I can understand myself better? In what ways will she part from the faith she grew up with? What beliefs will remain with her like tattoos or jewelry she never takes off?
Months from now, I hope a dozen publishers are knocking at my door with contracts for Matti’s full story. But it’s scary too, because the moment those who think they know the real me read its description, they’ll question my identity. Did she do this just to publish a book? Was she ever really a Christian? It’s one thing to peel away the invasives inside, do the hard work to see and cultivate your authentic self. It’s another to announce it publicly. Because your identity now stands as an undeniable testament that injustice occurred. Your quest for authenticity may show up as retaliation to those who are still grafted.
I wonder how many months the little maple lived with the muscadine creeping up and up? Was it a full year? Longer? The oncologist and all the research say that my body’s salvation lies in grafting with this little white pill, allowing it to temporarily invade in order to stop a worse invasion. But I know it actually lies among the trees. As I save them from invasives, they save me.
When I can barely keep my eyes open from the fatigue of this pill, I look out my bedroom window where a large hickory leans and sways in the wind. It’s the last image I see before I doze off. When I have to stop on my run because of the knee pain, the weeping cherry stands as a witness to my suffering. When the migraines won’t let me focus on my work, the cardinals, robins, and blue birds that make their homes in the magnolias and maples outside the sunroom-office window translate hope into chirps and tweets. And on a good weekend when I forget that I’m on the pill at all, I don my vine-colored overalls, lace up my Danner boots, grab the shears and machete and find my purpose – my wholeness, eliminating the invasives from my great cloud of witnesses.
One year ago, on the one-acre plot I call home, I pulled off a thick, orange-brown vine that snaked itself around an inch-and-half diameter maple sapling. Satisfyingly, with my leather garden gloves gripped around the machete my partner and I bought when we lived in Mexico as reluctant missionaries, I whacked at the root of that muscadine vine until it popped. Then I pulled and pulled until the earth opened up and revealed the edge of the dead monster. Carefully, I unwrapped the monster’s tail that had coiled itself above my height.
I snapped a photo of the little maple, intending to write about it later. Remembering isn’t guaranteed unless I write. Of the twenty-something trees I saved that day through sweat and blade, she stuck out because she was so young and so at risk by the well-developed vine. I don’t like using the word “saved” because of all the religious trauma, the oppression, and worst of all, my complicity. But even as a lifelong writer, I can’t think of a better word.
Two months ago, I started taking Tamoxifen. No one told me that this nine-millimeter white preventative breast cancer pill would feel as invasive as the thick muscadine that nearly murdered the maple. I wonder if my sister feels the same about her double mastectomy. Her surgery was almost two years ago, but the reconstruction brought other invasive species: saline and silicone.
There are three things used to identify and categorize invasive species. They must adapt to the new area, reproduce quickly or aggressively, and cause harm. Invasives steal the sun and reduce biodiversity.
There are four women genetically connected to me who have had breast cancer. My sister and my mother, the most prominent for the percentage calculation. I have a 37.4 percent chance of contracting invasive ductal carcinoma. I heard that number several times before I understood that it signifies a little over a one in three chance for me to get breast cancer in my lifetime. High risk starts at 20 percent. Cancer is all math: numbers, percentages, and probability – but I am all language: words, body movements, and tone.
Despite the two knobby arthritic knuckles on her trunk, the small maple currently stands tall. Her crown is growing and she’s slowly healing. On the days when my migraines or debilitating joint pain come, I remember her. She reminds me that persistence is its own glory. She gives me hope for my young daughter who is also a sapling, and whose math we haven’t figured out yet.
Fast forward five years and I can get off this medicine. I’m supposed to open up my bloodstream to this invasive for that long. My oncologist told me if her risk percentage was as high as mine, she’d take the 10 milligrams every other day like I do.
Suzanne Simard is teaching me about mycorrhizal fungi, through her book Finding the Mother Tree, how the wide willow oak that sits behind this maple sapling potentially sent her nutrients when she needed them through the underground networks that sustain life. The muscadine choked, but the willow oak fought for her friend. There’s math to Suzanne’s methods and research papers too, but her storytelling helps it make sense. The trees on this wooded lot may all be connected by invisible fungi – and they give what they receive. These Carolina trees are my life-sustaining network: hickories, cedars, pines, willow oaks and silver maples. A mulberry that sits in the corner near the neighbor’s fence, a tall tulip tree in the front rooted not far from a Shumard oak and a tiny dogwood that lives in their shadows. Some stretch 90 feet toward heaven. They are my mycorrhizal fungi, my cloud of witnesses, my spiritual community.
When my girl was 6, her grandfather told us that he was planning to cut down a silver maple that was obstructing his pool deck. Juniper cried. She wept so much I had to walk her away from the extended family, sit her on my lap, and stroke her dirty blonde hair until she calmed down. That was the moment I knew her name meant more. She’s tapped into that mycorrhizal network, intimately knows the trees as living beings. Her divinatory tears were a warning to the rest of us.
Seven months ago, my spiritual director asked me where I feel the safest, where I feel the least judged. I told him about the city greenway that has an entrance a mile from my wooded lot, where I often go to run and name the trees. I had already started writing a piece of fiction about a girl, Matti, who loves trees. Matti’s sister, Jackie, dies of breast cancer in the story. Writing fiction requires research, so my love for the trees has deepened. Now I stop and touch my favorites on my runs and walks. On the greenway, it’s a 90-foot poplar tree that always speaks to me. Her thick trunk is the first mama tree in that section, and I like to put my hand on her to say I see you, I’m grateful for you – one mother to another. On Union Street where all the hundred-year-old Southern houses were built, it’s the 80-foot gingko tree I gawk at whose branches arc toward the earth and then start reaching for the sky. Then it’s the large southern magnolia who spreads as wide as half the house it sits in front of with its snake-like branches, some that belly the dirt below. And it’s the weeping elm that isn’t as tall as the gingko but just as glorious. Not too long ago its crying branches brushed along my hair as I walked under it. But then it got a trim, and now I say hello with my palm like I do with the poplar.
The trees have shown me that I’ve had dealings with invasives before. But when you’re grafted with one, suffocation seems like breathing. Now I see differently, I breathe differently. Safety doesn’t come in the places it used to for me. Churches, missionary life, bible club, Christian organizations. These are the spaces where certainty was heralded as a type of security. Like how Kudzu appears to give you privacy while it steals the sunlight that gives strength and kills biodiversity. These are the spaces where exclusivity was seen as holy. Like how English ivy shows off but inhibits new growth and causes tree rot.
For the last eight years, I’d been feeling this subtle sense that belonging in these spaces was costing my wholeness. And then a series of events, starting with the 2016 election and ending with me leaving an organization I loved working at, proved that inkling to be prophetic.
Now, I feel more lost at church than found. Confused than at peace. Drained than energized. The worst of it is that I feel like I have to hide that reality to fit in with USDA Hardiness Zone 7b. North Carolina may have a range of these zones, showcasing its climate diversity, but the whole state sits in one theological zone – the Bible Belt. Could the maple sapling go about pretending she never had a parasite debilitate her? The second you look at her, you know the truth. How much do we hide in plain sight for these southern, religious values?
Nine months ago, I started writing about Matti and her sisters. This Word document that holds their untold story sometimes feels like the deepest mirror I’ve ever looked into, where I see things inside that are truer than anything I’ve ever known as truth. Puzzling together a sentence makes me unsure, anxious, excited, contemplative, and any number of other emotions. Sometimes I type the words and my anger boils. Sometimes my eyelids well with water. Sometimes I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience: like I’m looking at myself typing and wondering is this really inside of me? Here on the page, I’m an explorer, discovering so much, including my family members that don’t contribute to my breast cancer risk – distant cousins of the Cornaceae, Sapindaceae, Fagaceae, and Ulmaceae families:
Robbie kept all of our leaf drawings in one sketch book, and after she was done drawing the leaf to my liking, I would add the name, bark texture, fruits or flowers, and any other important identifying features in a paragraph. I knew our neighbor Tim’s tree was a dogwood, but I also knew it wasn’t a North Carolina native dogwood because the flower tips weren’t rounded. Tim, an avid gardener would always talk plants with me, so I was grateful the day he explained the difference. I need to remember to tell Robbie to add it to the book.
Our sketchbook became a reference book for me, and it usually lived on my bedstand with my lamp and my bible.
Nope, it’s been a decade since I’ve had my bible on my nightstand. This doesn’t feel right to me—or to the story. So I backspace “and my bible” and replace it with “as if it were a bible.” Yes, that feels better.
Our sketchbook became a reference book for me, and it usually lived on my bedstand with my lamp, as if it were a bible. Robbie had to learn what apex, petiole, rachis, margins, sinuses, and lobes were so that when I didn’t bring back a leaf, but had one in my mind, she could still draw it. We used those words and then added several of our own to describe the leaf’s characteristics, like big butt for wide, peach-shaped leaves like mulberries, elf hat for abrupt apexes like cottonwoods, almondy for longer skinnier leaves like the winged elm, and we’d use arms for lobular leaves like the scarlet, turkey, and pin oaks, imagining the head of the leaf was connected at the petiole and the sinuses were like its armpits.
It's not just the land that connects me to the trees, but the thoughts that create scores of stories in my brain. I imagine my cerebrum as scaly and furrowy as the bark of a willow oak, where trails of potential story ideas could trickle like water down a million different paths. Shall I have Matti explore asexuality so I can understand myself better? In what ways will she part from the faith she grew up with? What beliefs will remain with her like tattoos or jewelry she never takes off?
Months from now, I hope a dozen publishers are knocking at my door with contracts for Matti’s full story. But it’s scary too, because the moment those who think they know the real me read its description, they’ll question my identity. Did she do this just to publish a book? Was she ever really a Christian? It’s one thing to peel away the invasives inside, do the hard work to see and cultivate your authentic self. It’s another to announce it publicly. Because your identity now stands as an undeniable testament that injustice occurred. Your quest for authenticity may show up as retaliation to those who are still grafted.
I wonder how many months the little maple lived with the muscadine creeping up and up? Was it a full year? Longer? The oncologist and all the research say that my body’s salvation lies in grafting with this little white pill, allowing it to temporarily invade in order to stop a worse invasion. But I know it actually lies among the trees. As I save them from invasives, they save me.
When I can barely keep my eyes open from the fatigue of this pill, I look out my bedroom window where a large hickory leans and sways in the wind. It’s the last image I see before I doze off. When I have to stop on my run because of the knee pain, the weeping cherry stands as a witness to my suffering. When the migraines won’t let me focus on my work, the cardinals, robins, and blue birds that make their homes in the magnolias and maples outside the sunroom-office window translate hope into chirps and tweets. And on a good weekend when I forget that I’m on the pill at all, I don my vine-colored overalls, lace up my Danner boots, grab the shears and machete and find my purpose – my wholeness, eliminating the invasives from my great cloud of witnesses.