🔘 Daily Notes .9 - Medicine I Know

Planting trees and harvesting willow near Anaconda, MT

🔘 Daily Notes chronicles my unedited thoughts at the moment, from day to day. This series will end at 1.0, or 10 total posts 🍵

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Medicine I Know

Written while sleeping in a warehouse between shifts planting trees on the largest superfund site in the USA, a place where trees may never grow again.

Rosehips glow red in the last light of day—  
Grow above a dry ditch, near a path, where many pass  
Unpicked, I gather ten handfuls  
to make rosehip soup.

In the dry hills far away I planted roses this fall  
on hillsides so toxic grass wouldn't grow.  
The work: three weeks on slopes so steep  
in heat, and rain, rocks, and the build-up  
of yellow, arsenic-laced dust   
on all my clothes.  
Barely time to cook at night, have to get going
at first light of morning.

Up the haul roads we drove, donned hard hats  
Hands cramped, swung the dag up, and down  
into bitter, broken, pitted, rocky soil.

What would grow, I asked:   
one plant in a fifty, someone guessed.  
Groves of aspens, like bones, filled the valley bottoms,  
ducks swam toxic water in the slough.

Then to see roses near a path, growing, fruiting, fine  
reminded me that not all is like this.  
Handfuls of small fruits: seedy, but not dry— 
add to a cup of simmering water
and simmer for forty-five minutes.  
Strain through mesh, or squish with a spoon. 
Add water if needed.

Then pour into a bowl. Add a little sugar. Top with a dollop of cream. The liquid red, warm, orange. In the old warehouse, 
in my camping pot, 
far from those hills where things may never grow.

Medicine I know.