Catahoula Katydids

Three small wild persimmons still attached to the same fallen branch crown a rowdy pile of bigger fallen branches. I strike a match. The bed of brittle cypress leaves lying feathered at the bottom of the pile sparkles and sends up glowing sparks. The dried frond of a dwarf palmetto fans the sparks into genuine flames. Soon the whole heap is ablaze. I step back to consider the fire, a spiraling plume of smoke beginning to bend toward the bayou . . .

Dwarf palmetto frond

And I retrace the spiraling path that returned me to this island on the eve of my forty-eighth birthday, my life, even if I’m lucky, almost certainly half over, to be warmed by these burning branches. To be home again. They say that the universe is just fire and spirals. I add another frond to the fire.

Moving home has felt like the second sweep of a lifelong spiral, and little signs along the way only confirm my suspicion. Like that katydid this morning. I was walking through the woods when I came across a katydid—a big grasshopper. Then this afternoon I was digging around for a box in my mom’s Girl Scout closet, and when I turned the light on, I noticed a poster pinned to the wall—I don’t remember making it, but the poster said seventh grade, which meant it was the spring of ’86—and on the poster was a photograph I’d taken of, oddly enough, a katydid. The three small wild persimmons begin to blister and smoke.

Kaytdid

We’d gone to the farm to walk through the woods and shoot a roll of film for a 4-H photography project that day, and when Achievement Day was over, my mom held on to the poster. Thirty-five years later, I find it pinned to a wall in her Girl Scout closet. I’d stenciled the title in block capital letters horizontally across the top of the poster and colored them in with a broad black marker: SPRING HAS SPRUNG. The spacing between the letters—you could tell I’d just eyeballed it—was embarrassingly uneven, yet appropriately springlike, in the sense of a spring, a metal spring, springing.

Below the title, I’d free-styled a subtitle with a fine-tip black marker: A Walk Through Nature. I must have arranged the ten glossy four-by-six prints on the poster first, then gone back and connected them into the shape of a footpath snaking through the woods, using the same fine-tip black marker. First stop, a katydid, leggy on a log. A caption accompanies the image.

“As we begin, a katydid catches our attention. Hurry! Snap the picture.”

Yellowtops

The path then snakes up against another glossy four-by-six. A wild blackberry vine in flower. Which meant it must have been March or April. Then the next glossy print. A blurry finger pointing to a four-leaf clover. Two blue wildflowers. A shell. Yellow wildflowers. Then finally a stand of ash trees lushly carpeted with yellow wildflowers. I’d written a closing caption at the end of the snaking path.

“All to be found and discovered while walking through nature.”

So it seems I’ve spiraled back onto that same snaking footpath all these years later. I don’t print glossy four-by-sixes from film anymore, but I’m still walking through nature and still arranging and sharing photographs. It feels like the sweep of a spiral.

I wonder if the katydid I saw in 1986 and the katydid I saw this morning are related. Wouldn’t you think all Catahoula katydids were close cousins at least? Catahoula oaks spring from Catahoula oaks; Catahoula persimmons from Catahoula persimmons. Where else would that katydid spring from? The same stretch of bayou is the living link connecting the generations. And the same stretch of bayou is the living link connecting me to myself, the child who I was to the child who I’m still becoming. I poke the glowing fire with a crooked oak branch and throw the branch on the growing fire.