I was an unknown age in an unknown month of summer. I was in the front seat of your work truck. I think I was too little to be sitting there. Not grown. I guess neither of us cared. I think sitting there made me feel tall and grand. Made me feel like a big girl. This was when you still worked for railroad bloodsuckers. You weren’t supposed to use your work truck for any matters not railroad related. We were breaking the rules that day. We were driving down a road I can’t remember, en route to a destination long forgotten. I’ve forgotten most things from that time of my life. I think my mind does it to protect me.
Even if I forget most things, some things stick to my mind the way the leeches at Mulligan’s Bay liked to stick to my ankles. I remember, driving down this blurry road, tall yellowed grass on each side. I remember how blue the sky was. I remember sweating in your truck, because it had no air conditioning to fight against Ontario heat. I remember spying with my little eye something in the grass. Something taller. Something greener.
Cattails swaying in the sparse wind, dancing in the way that only they know how.
At this point, my memory jumps like a cutscene in a movie. Suddenly we were stopped on the side of the road, the engine still running. My door on the passenger side was open as I watched you walk up to all those cattails. There were so many of them growing from the side of that pond. The cicadas were loud, blaring, screaming their whistles and songs, watching the cattails dance to their melodies. You stopped in front of the most perfect one - untouched by birds that would peck at the heads trying to eat their seeds. Perfectly shaped, perfectly brown, the stem perfectly green. You had a pair of clippers in your hand. I’m not too sure where you got it from. I assumed it was from the mess of your backseat. You brought the blades up to the stem of the cattail, and suddenly, all the noise in the world seemed to stop. No wind. No birds. No cars whipping past us on the road. No cicadas. Everything turned to silence as they watched your clippers close around the stem.
When you came back to the truck and gave the cattail to me, the noise returned suddenly. I still remember my little hand clasped around the stem of my new obsession. I stared at it with awe and glee… How temporary that obsession ended up being… I have no idea what I did with it afterwards. I have no idea where the cattail went. I don’t think I had it longer than the rest of that car ride. I might’ve even thrown it out after all that trouble you went through to get it for me. I was never a very grateful or likeable child. Being a father is a thankless job.
For many more years afterwards, as I continued to grow in a way that that cattail never would again, I was surrounded by them. Cattails on every marsh, every lake, every road, every waterfront trail. I continued to look at them with the same indifference that I lent to them that day long ago. They danced all around me through each season. In the winter, I would see them poking their heads out through piles of lake effect snow, straining to breathe what little they could from the grim December sun. By now, I’d forgotten all about the cattail you gave to me, and the ghostly silence that moment brought. The cattails never forgot about me. Sometimes I thought I could hear them whispering to me. Or maybe they were whispering about me to each other. Maybe they whispered about all of their cattail secrets.
“Do cattails have secrets?” I would ask them.
“Yes,” they whispered back one day, “all earthly things carry secrets.”
Eventually it was time for me to go. Time to leave Ontario and whisper to different plants. I went North - far far North. North of sixty. I discovered cattails do not grow on the banks of the Yukon river. Cicadas sing different songs for Gold Rush flowers. Fireweed and willow trees dance to different tunes. All the locals harvest them to make willow baskets or fireweed jelly. In the summer, some of them will pluck a flower head and eat it just like that. The bounty of the land is plenty. I’d never noticed that before I went there.
We never felt bad. The plants knew all of this. They knew that we liked to harvest them for ourselves. That we liked to harvest berries in baskets woven from their bodies. Make cordage from their skin. Soup from their leaves. Medicine from their roots. Yarrow leaves will stop a cut from bleeding. Foxtail roots, wrapped in a damp cloth and pressed onto an eye, will soothe a stye. Fireweed leaves left to ferment in the sun and then bruised by your hands will make good tea for whoever visits you in your cabin - your cabin made from spruce logs. They might also like a slice of pie you made from the berries you foraged. Raspberries and strawberries in the summer. Cranberries and rosehips in the fall. You could buy spruce tip honey from the lady in the yellow house, or maybe borrow some from your neighbour. The plants understand somehow. They understand that this is the way things are. When you take from the earth to feed your neighbours, show kindness to your body and your spirit, or heal a member of your community with medicine you foraged, the world is silent in a different way. It’s different from stealing cattails from its cattail and cicada friends. The silence feels good. It feels like yarrow leaves pressed on a cut. It feels like a warm spruce log cabin. It feels like fireweed tea and wildberry pie hugging your tongue.
You and I didn’t talk too much while I was up there, but we never had much to say to each other anyway. Not in Ontario, not in the Yukon, not in the cattail field. I think we understood each other’s silence. It didn’t mean we didn’t love each other, or that we weren’t close. We were always close in a quiet way. And still, we kept in touch. One day, mom told me that you were feeling weak. Your legs weren’t what they used to be. You were going to see a doctor.
I tried telling myself that you were alright. That it was nothing. But I knew better. I knew I knew better. But like cattails and fireweed, you carry words without saying them. You whisper things without a voice, sometimes.
All earthly things carry secrets.
Then you called me one day to tell me that you weren’t going to get better. You’d get worse. You’d get weaker and weaker until you could not move, could not speak, could not eat, could not breathe. When I started crying, you did too. It was the second time in my two decades of life that I had ever seen you choke through your words behind a lump in your throat. Trying, failing, not to let the dam break.
It had been over a year at that point since I had seen you in person. In my dreams I saw a clock with no hands ticking endlessly, keeping time - whatever was left of it for you - a secret. I had no hands either, for some reason. I knew that I had to go back.
By now I had remembered the cattail. The mind will wander down forgotten trails, sometimes. Mine tends to do it during morning coffee. And one day, staring out at the ice fog that hung over frozen roads, I remembered that you had once given a gift to me.
“A cattail,” my mind's voice whispered to me, “remember the cattail?”
I arrived home on the last sunset of August. When I met you outside the airport, where you were waiting for me, I fought back tears when we hugged. The first hug in a year. One of so few in a lifetime. We stopped somewhere to get food on the drive home, and I saw that the way you walked was different now. Crooked, almost limping, feet barely picking up from the floor. It frightened me. It scared me how much it reminded me about time. That time is limited. Time is fake. Time is the clicking sound of a handless clock in deep sleep. Time is fireweed flowers getting crushed by my molars, swallowed down my throat into my body. Time is cattails in the wind, dancing to the tempo of the sky’s breath and the melody of bugs. Time is feet dragging on the floor. Time is crooked. Time limps across space. Time confines. Time is confined. Time is memory forgotten, then remembered.
And then, standing there, watching you, I understood why everything went silent when you cut that cattail. Music can’t go on when dancers are exhausted, when the dancers are plucked from their stage by a stranger’s hand. Time stops in those moments, and needs to reset itself. The way the cicadas had to restart their song. The way the sky let out a breath it had been holding onto. The way the cattails had to adjust to having lost one of their own. The way I now have to adjust to how things are, and how things will be. The way you have to adjust to your body. How your body has to adjust to age, to time, to death.
I see you in the cattails. When you finish this life, I know you will become one of them. You will move to the wind, to the call of cicadas, just as you once could. You will breathe the sun just like you do now. You will keep whispering unknown words, but in a different language. Cattail language. Eventually, someone will come along and cut you from your stem, and time will reset again.
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Larque is an autistic queer visual artist and writer born in Penetanguishene, Ontario. Her work — taking form through many mediums including film, painting, poetry, and prose — focuses heavily on themes surrounding interconnectedness with nature, identity, place, and the dominance of nature over humanity. Her films have been screened at the Yukon Riverside Arts Festival, and recently online at the Flickfair Film Festival. Although she’s not had much of her writing published yet, she’s currently working on her debut book Cicada Songs, a collection of memories, poems, and prose exploring family loss and childhood trauma while highlighting the role of the natural world in one’s everyday life. You can find her online @monportrait_.