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.