One year into the twentieth century, eight orchid hunters
landed on the shores of the Philippines intent on wresting orchids
from their marshy homes. As soon as I could talk, I wanted
to be a collector, but of what? Moving house makes me bitter,
like a squirrel who has secreted away his winter stores (in my case
scarves, and batteries for which the recycling procedure
confuses me) and has now been asked to unearth them,
move my seeds in plain view where everyone will see how
much I need to survive. I tried trading cards, bottle
caps—amassing a handful only to abandon them to a
shoebox, a drawer, cowed by the magnitude of what was still
left to acquire. In Virginia, I pulled newspaper out
of a box I’d saved from a previous move and found
a tiny ceramic blue dish for decorative tea lights, something
both beautiful and simple enough it was easy to forget
I owned it at all. I am also responsible for a corked jar of pink sand
my cousin, the deep sea diving instructor, collected
from the ocean floor off the coast of Bermuda for my
sixteenth birthday. She was indiscriminate; the grains look
like any other grains you might find there—stunning coral
and glassy beige. But these days we have a lot of complicated
thoughts about taking things from where they readily arise
on their own. My sand isn’t special but I’m not supposed
to dump it out lest it contains something foreign that could
multiply—out-compete or devour some other tiny
mechanism that keeps everything in balance. So I move it
from place to place, mantle to bookshelf. I have adapted
quickly to the readymade archive: tag clouds, hyperlinks,
that website I adore that tells you everything that happened
on your birthday. (Gas cost 99 cents the day I was born.
The #1 pop song: “A Groovy Kind of Love” by Phil Collins.
On other October 17ths in history: 539BC: Cyrus the Great
marches into Babylon and frees the Jews from 70 years of exile;
1662: Charles II of England sells Dunkirk to France for
40,000 pounds; 1888: Thomas Edison files a patent for the optical
phonograph, which would lead to the first film.) Of the eight
orchid hunters, one was consumed by a tiger, another
was doused in oil and burned alive, five disappeared
completely and the last returned to Europe with
700,000 orchid specimens. Enough. I’ve barely scratched the surface.
***
Katherine Willingham lives, writes, and practices qi gong in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her first collection of poems, Unlikely Designs, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. You can find her poems in such journals as Kenyon Review, Southern Indiana Review, Third Coast, Grist, Adroit Journal, and others. She enjoys winter more than most, though her plant collection does not.
“Self-Portrait With Moving Truck” appears in TLR Uncle.