Grape

Two years ago, I moved into a house on the edge of a forest. I grew up reading about enchanted storybook woods; now I would live beside one.
My first forest walks were full of wonder. I found fresh, grape-like fruit on the ground and searched in vain for its source. I encountered a fawn, tucked away in the duff. I used an app to identify a towering tree, and it suggested, incredibly, American Chestnut. For three months I believed it could be true, considered clipping a twig and sending it to a lab that would tell me for thirty dollars what a neighbor eventually told me for free—it was Eurasian. No American specimen had grown that tall since the 40s, and anyone who’d lived here more than three months would know that.
I move frequently, a new home every few years, so I often encounter landscapes for the first time and walk through them ignorant of their histories. I once described this wandering lifestyle to a friend, and she said rootlessness is a legacy visited on settlers and their descendants. I thought about this in my first year here, as I learned the trees and their maladies. I flipped back hemlock branches to check for the cottony eggs of the adelgid. I recognized signs of beech leaf disease and legacy drought impacts. I helped a neighbor plant 300 hybrid chestnut trees, and as I worked he told me that most of the trees would have their roots chewed out by voles before the year was up. The plastic tubing, which protected the trees from grazing deer, held them upright, so you couldn’t tell which had died until the spring, when they failed to leaf out. Rootless, I thought, about vole-chewed trees, standing on the earth but no longer connected to it. I realized the magic of a storybook forest is the magic of ignorance, of undifferentiated green, and I began to describe the forest not as enchanted but as struggling, unhealthy, disabled.
And yet, as the snow melted this year, my eyes, now more accustomed to this place, picked out threatened plants in the forest’s understory—abundant partridgeberry, bloodroot, ramps. A massive vine I thought was introduced bittersweet was in fact wild grape, creator of the fruits I had found two years before. Recently, a grape dropped from the canopy to land, unripe, at my feet, and I thought too early, out of season due to heat and lack of rainfall, but also, pure magic. And it may not have been a grape at all, I’ll never be sure, because the rent has gone up beyond what my family can pay. I am leaving.
And though I can now identify which trees the porcupine frequents and where the catbird nests and where the garter snake hunts and the different summer and winter deer beds, these are but a few things. I could fill a thousand pages with all the forest I will never know.