Entry 8: Movement

11 April 2017, early evening
High sixties, cloudy, slight breeze, occasional drop of rain

I return to the wide chestnut tree on Mellon Park's southeast side, back against the rough bark and legs crossed among wood chips. I know, for sure now, that this tree is a chestnut; familiar limp leaves unfurl from knobby buds at the tips of the branches. I remember when I first came here at the beginning of the semester, how impatiently I shivered against this tree's trunk, staring at the branches knotted like my own cold and dry knuckles. Now the soft green leaves spill out like the drape of damp hair.

At my feet, I notice weeds popping up—dandelion and what I've learned to call white man's foot, or broad-leafed plantain. It's a squat forb, a thick-leafed cousin of spinach that grows in any hard-packed, well-trodden ground. The story goes that as white settlers headed west, this weed popped on the cracked wagon trails behind them, a green spread marking their passage.

I recognize, I realize, the plants we label as weeds, the outsiders, those that stand out from the native flora and fauna. Biologically speaking there's no such thing as a weed; it's only a construct of gardeners and ecologists to label a plant that has a leg up in an otherwise fully-functioning system. Or it's simply an unwanted plant. I recognize the dandelion and white man's foot because they've spread their way west as well, content to unfurl webbed and rounded leaves between cracks in the sidewalk and in dirt lots used for spillover parking at high school football games or the county fair. And I recognize the chestnut tree above me because one grows in the yard of my grandparents' farm, planted by human hands, watered by sprinklers as well as summer cloudbursts.

Chestnut trees aren't native to Montana, nor dandelions or white man's foot. Neither, to an extent, am I. I stare at my own white feet scuffed in dirt beside the plantain, calluses still thick from a childhood existence spent mostly barefoot. I remember the rose thorns and glass and splinters lodged in the bottom of my feet, how I wailed on my stomach as my dad worked to dig them out. I never learned, opting shoeless every time I had the chance.

Transplants, transplanted. Despite my first year of graduate school coming to a close, I still feel out of place here in Pittsburgh, some days more so than others. When I first arrived, it was the landscape and culture that stood out as different: humidity and deciduous forests, building after building with blinds drawn down against the daylight, however gloomy. But somewhere that difference shifted, and I became the different factor. Internal versus external landscapes. I'm not unwanted here, a plague on native systems, but I think there's a reason I can so easily identify the weeds, that I identify with the weeds.

My scope in Pittsburgh, especially in my writing, usually boils down to a comparison to home—to the West, to Montana, to Western Montana. I'd like to think I've never hoisted Montana above other places (though nobody's perfect), but I think my main tendency is a challenge to re-situate my perspective. I'm always looking through that lens of home, and I've realized even that lens is something new. I've traveled a lot, skipping across Europe from top to bottom, investigating different places in the US, but even then, even in bouts of homesickness, I never felt the ache of belonging I do today. Maybe it took those half-years of hopping from country to country, state to state with only a backpack of my belongings to instill that unshakeable sense of home. Maybe it was moving here to Pittsburgh, studying in a MFA program that focuses so deeply on the concept of home, that made me fully understand the complexity of my roots.

Nuthatches click above in their own morse code; robins trill and sing in every direction. For a moment the sun warms through the clouds, washing the park in a soft evening glow. To the north, streaks of rain drift down from an overcast sky, and a lone dark cloud hunches in front of the cloudbursts like a sky-bound beaver.

My thoughts are scattered today, leaping from weeds to robins to observation of self and home. But I do feel wholly present in this moment, content enough to simply sit and watch and be. When I first came here I hunched my back against this tree trunk in impatience, wanting only to move. The destination, I realize, is secondary; the drive comes in the movement itself, of seeing the world every second from a different perspective. Motion brings my body and mind in contact with different landscapes, my unshod feet muddied and pricked by stones and thorns. Motion, however falsely justified, brought my ancestors west, a trail of soft-leafed rosettes in their wake. And motion has brought me here, to Pittsburgh, to an environment where I still feel like a transplant.

But how beautiful it is, too, to know the perspective of stillness, to watch the songbirds bustle about their days, the park visitors wind up the paths, the clouds lift from the horizon on their stilts of rain. How easily I forget this viewpoint, back against a tree grown familiar, to sit and watch the world move around me. I'm trying to shake of my own labeling as a transplant, an outsider. I'm trying, like the chestnut tree buds, to let my hair down, to walk these sidewalks without feeling out of place in my Chacos, chugging water from a Nalgene, speaking with a subtle drawl that's recently bloomed (or that I've only recently noticed) in my accent.

I'm not a chestnut tree, nor a whitebark pine, nor a daffodil. My roots aren't clutched into a riverbank or sprung from a grassy lawn. I can move, and while I'm here, I don't want to feel out of place, but in place—sitting crosslegged in the grass when the earth isn't too soggy, watching the city pulse, woodpeckers forage, robins lay claims to territories, kids play, couples picnic, daffodils creep among chives, wind rattle leaves, snow settle and melt, wood chippers bellow, squirrels doze, crows swoop and glide, and clouds darken and sweep the sky a hard, indescribable blue.

I'd like to sit here and watch, just a moment longer.

Entry 7: Opening

2 April 2017, early afternoon
Mid-fifties, partly sunny, slight breeze

With the ground still damp and grass glossed by dew, I return to Nannette's bench in Mellon Park, where I find the daffodils spanning up towards my feet. Since I was last here, they've quadrupled, if not more, their range on the west-facing slope. Some shoots droop wilted tips, while others look as if they'd just poked through the wet earth that morning. Pale yellow and bright yellow flowers glow against the blue sky half-smeared by clouds. Patches of hollow-stemmed chives fill the gaps between shoots of daffodils; I pinch of a blade and let the sharp smell take me back to childhood summers picking and chopping chives from the yard for dinner of baked potatoes.

A songbird behind me chips out his song, persistent and forceful like someone blowing too hard on a whistle. I crane my neck but can't ketch a glimpse of him; his voice hops along the still-bare branches of the trees. The trees downslope, however, have popped out white buds of flowers like blots and dabs on a painting, and I wish I had brought my tree guide to identify the budding trees.

The sun blares out from behind a cloud and I squint, alternating open eyes as I scribble words onto the page. Today the sky seems bigger, the horizon less crowded by low overcast, and I relish in it, that taste of an endless horizon. Why today? I wonder. The city's canopy remains bare, thousands of branches crisscrossing and layering to a tattered hem of horizon, and there have been blue, open skies before. Maybe, I think, it's an internal projection of landscape. Try as I might I find my internal and external topographies meddling and crossing each other, gray skies shadowing my mind, stress pulling wind hard against my face. It's hardly a one-way street; if anything, there are multiple lanes and wailing horns.

Everyone seems to be out today—runners, bikers, people walking dogs, children screeching across the park. This morning, running in Frick Park, I sprinted down a grassy slope, feeling with every pump of my legs that childish joy of playing outside, of racing among green carpets and letting loose any inhibitions. A fly dive bombs my forehead and circles my legs before buzzing off. I can hear the ground clicking again, the shift of air and water and earthworms settling and expanding into warmer weather. I shake my head to make sure it isn't just water seeped into my inner ear from this morning's shower. Clumps of minerals and bowls of water in your ear, it turns out, sound just the same as ones in the shifting earth. Inner landscapes and outer ones are sometimes indistinguishable.

A white butterfly lifts and dips among the daffodils and chives. Twice I brush off a caddisfly-like insect hell-bent on climbing up my calf. This afternoon feels like the world is exhaling, the canopied city sighing, breathing out that old intake of winter's air and false hopes and suggestions of spring. Everything is opening—earth and insect wings, blossoms and birds' beaks, my own mind and eyes, one at a time. I fear false springs, but today I cling to open sky and budding flowers, the burst of green on the park's lawn, the influx of insects keen on my body. Rain will fall again, and wind rustle warmth from my fingers, but at least the season is opening, the daffodils creeping their claims with confidence up the slope.

A breeze lifts up through the blooming trees and daffodils, filling my own open lungs with the scent of petalled promise. And I breathe out, a little, my own winter of doubts.