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.