The Move West
On my way west, moving toward a new life in a strange, but long-loved town, I became a gatherer. The RV was crowded with my stuff and my traveling companions’ necessities: Hopi, my parrot, and her cage, Rosie, a baby albino red rat snake and her cage, and Lovey, a tame white dove. On the floor of the RV’s shower, were a few plants from home: a red mangrove seedling from the Everglades in a container of salty muck, the walking iris my best friend gave me, and a staghorn pup wired to a wooden plank.
All her life Lovey laid eggs, sitting on them for weeks before finally giving up. I’d throw them away, and she’d lay couple more. I suppose I admired her most for her stick-to-it-ness. She spent the entire journey on a new clutch of eggs in a basket hanging off the shower head, swaying like a tree branch in the wind around every curve in the road.
I started the move west in Miami, so was pretty far into it before I began adding to my collection. The first, a coal black kitten, came crying out of a clump of bushes on the banks of the Mississippi River in Nauvoo, Illinois.
“It’s a stray. Take it if you want it,” said a Mormon tour guide, walking by with her clutch of tourists as I cuddled the purring kitten.
I remember the date. September 29, 1991. Three years to the day since my mother died. Her final cat had been black.
“What does Nauvoo mean?” Someone in the group asked the tour guide.
“A beautiful place.”
I named the kitten Nauvoo and put him in the RV.
Though it was early fall and I was headed north northwest, here and there flowers still bloomed. I began collecting seeds of the ones I admired. I picked up acorns and pine cones. By the time I reached my new home in late October, I’d been on the road for seven weeks and driven nine thousand miles.
At the front of the house I’d bought, was a small triangular, weed-choked bit of ground bordered by a concrete walkway. I dug the hole in the center and put all the seeds in, wished them luck, and tamped down the soil.
A South Dakota black oak sprouted in the spring and, though still young now, 29 years later, has roots here as deep as my own. I hope whoever comes after me appreciates its determination to survive, surrounded by a redwood forest, hundreds of miles from its next of kin.