One of the consequences of the human population of planet Earth moving indoors (indeed, sequestering indoors in smaller and smaller pockets of personal isolation, as we huddle not in family groups around the virtual fireplace of the television set, but hover above the individual flame of the iPhone) is that we have less intimacy with flowers and other flora.
We used to have a much closer relationship with, you know, apple blossoms, black-eyed Susans, and the angelic white floss of milkweed. Do children today know the taste of honeysuckle, or the medicinal smell of Montauk daisy petals crushed between their fingers as they play loves me, loves me not? I tend to think, in the majority, not. Far fewer kids in the Western world, or should I say the wealthy global North, are wandering bored among the purple lupins.
Mind, you, I am from the network-television generation, and while reception on the small black-and-white set with rabbit ears was weak in the distant Napeague of my childhood — it took a great deal of tuning and wiggling of the ears to make out the dialogue of “Star Trek” — I much preferred to spend my free time “goggling at the box,” myself, rather than experiencing the joys of nature. I mean, my generation definitely had less intimacy with the plant world than children in agrarian cultures in previous generations of human history. But still the days were long and there were many hours between staticky episodes of “Laverne and Shirley” during which I was outdoors doing not much else beyond wandering around aimlessly and wondering how horse chestnuts escaped from their spiky helmets, or trying to convince myself, despite my own skepticism, that King Neptune might rise from Gardiner’s Bay with a beard of knotted wrack or that fairies were napping under a balmy canopy of lilies of the valley in my grandmother’s back garden.
Lady slippers were a familiar feature of my childhood. Old and mysterious — silent, tight-lipped — friends. Have your children even ever seen a lady slipper? My own have not. The pink ones, the violet-veined pink orchids that grow here and there in the sandy soil of Northwest Woods and Promised Land. We knew not to bother them, or breathe on them, or touch them at all but only to get down low, on our knees — this was when you could kneel or even sit in the woods without fear of catching a dreaded tick-borne disease — to get a close-up look at a wild lady slipper. It is a strange flower, with a disproportionately heavy pink head, two vertical lips closed up tight, on a single slender green stalk.
The last time I saw a lady slipper was maybe eight or 10 years ago. I was driving east in my car along Napeague Meadow Road when my eye was caught by a pair of hipster kids who had stopped their bicycles and were wading into the grass beside the asphalt, scouting for something, scouring the ground . . . one of them clutching two purply-pink orchids in his fist. My head snapped around so fast I’m surprised I didn’t pull a neck muscle.
I screeched to a halt, reversed the car, threw it into park, hopped out, and like the queen of all Karens and with a red face warned the pair of hipsters that they were illegally stealing critically endangered, rare native plants. I was fuming, as you can imagine, even though there was no living reason why these apparent strangers to these parts would, could, or should have known not to touch the lady slippers. (Who among us has not felt the rage rise at the sight of a stranger to these parts breaking some previously-common-knowledge code of conduct, which once we all understood and shared? A stranger blocking the northward flow of traffic by Hook Mill onto North Main; a jogger maintaining a steely stare into the middle distance and refusing to return our friendly sidewalk “good morning”; a stranger spreading their beach towel within the natural 15-foot exclusion zone?)
Star magnolia blossoms, when they fall to the ground in a great pool, reflecting back the white moonlight during the high wind of an early summer storm, as happened on Bay Street in Sag Harbor last week, have a sweet jasmine scent. Blue hydrangeas have almost no scent at all, unless you push aside the branches with your arms to hide yourself in the secret bedroom of the shrubbery, burying your head among their pillows; then, and only then, you can just detect hydrangeas’ faint perfume, which, I happen to know, is akin to the lemon-oil wood polish my grandmother — or rather, her housekeeper — used on the antique living room furniture. The fragrances of the world diminish as the analog gives way to the digital.