I keep a list of the ephemerals in the yard so I don’t forget they’re there. It’s so easy, otherwise, to mistake them for weeds. 

The wild columbine that grows along the garden wall. 

The furtive trillium among the Solomon seal. 

The dense communities of Mayapples on each side of the walk. 

—

Once I start to recognize them, fragile and fleeting, I start seeing them everywhere.

The asters that mingle with the ferns.

The liver leaf in the shade of the shed.

The days themselves, brief and forgettable.

—

This day, which is my birthday, which is the day I turn seventy-one, is an ephemeral. Anticipated, briefly acknowledged, over. 

The knees that once held me up are ephemerals. The ability to stand on one leg to put on my socks. 

The aging dog.

The dog’s left eye. 

—

The Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert in 1964 that I attended when I was twelve: an ephemeral. So important at twelve, but then I was on to different music, serious music by which I meant Dylan, people like that. 

The age of twelve. 

My father who bought me the Beatles ticket. Gone, and so, an ephemeral. He died when he was seventy-six. Five years older than I am today, my birthday.

—

All my aunts were ephemerals. Once there were seven of them on my mother’s side, four on my father’s, and every other weekend we drove to Brooklyn to gather together. First at my maternal grandparents’ house for lunch. Next at my paternal grandparents’ apartment for dinner. In my maternal grandmother’s kitchen: the four sisters, two sisters-in-law, and my mother who was the youngest. Ordered to sit, to rest for once in her life, my grandmother fidgets at the table and watches the others sew and cook, squabble and laugh. Sometimes they sing Yiddish songs, harmonizing. One day I wander in and my grandmother takes me on her lap and gestures at the room—the stove, the icebox, the dressmaker’s dummy pierced with straight pins, the sewing machine with its foot pedal, the pot roast, the cabbage, her chaos of girls—and she says to me, Always remember, Judeleh. It’s all for lend.

Being called Judeleh. Ephemeral.

—

All my life I’ve heard my mother, the youngest, say, There will come a time when everyone’s gone and I’m all alone.

—

Words are ephemerals. The way they come and go. For example, once I honestly and truly described things as groovy.

The meanings of words are ephemerals. For example: enucleation, from the Latin ex + nucleus, literally to remove a seed from its cover, originally meant to get at the core of things, the heart of the matter, the hidden truth. Then, centuries later, medical science got hold of the word and now enucleation means that in a few days our vet will remove my dog’s left eye with a pair of curved forceps and a notched spoon. 

She’ll be fine, the vet says. It’s not like dogs read or watch TV. But my dog watches TV. She likes shows with horses or bears.

—

But maybe I don’t understand—or don’t want to understand—what the word ephemeral means. I’ve kidnapped words before, made them do my bidding. When I was twelve I thought I’d invented the word charisma, made a list like this: things with charisma. Spring yes. Summer no. Paul yes. Ringo no. You yes. Me no.

I know an ephemeral refers to something notably short-lived. A fad. A trillium. A mayfly. The rushing gray water that fills a dry gully after a storm is called an ephemeral river.

A mayfly gets five minutes, a trillium a month, an ephemeral river until the rain subsides and the sun comes out.

My father lived longer than most American men. My dog has already outlived most terriers. My knees held up seventy years before they told me to go buy a cane. My father, my dog, my knees don’t fit the dictionary definition of an ephemeral unless you stop to remember how old the earth is. 

Compared to the earth, we pass faster than a mayfly. We pass faster than a single exhalation. I’ve known this all my life. And yet I find myself wanting to hold my breath.

—

I live in a forest called Wingra Woods. Wingra Woods is a Wisconsin remnant, that is, a forest that’s largely been undisturbed since the end of the Wisconsin Glaciation. For most of those years the trees and small plants here didn’t change. They took care of themselves. They took care, too, of the animals who lived among the oaks and shagbark hickories and paper birch. The trees didn’t need pruning shears. The bluebells and wild geranium and goldenrod that grew in the leaf litter didn’t need watering cans. Then, 14,800 years later, nineteenth-century homeowners cleared plats and introduced lawns and ornamentals like buckthorn, honeysuckle, dame rocket, other fast-growing invasives that provided privacy and fragrance and color while below the forest floor they took all the nutrients for themselves, these beautiful, perfumed colonizers.

Today, on my birthday, I pull buckthorn sprouts and deadhead the gone-by Mayapples. Because there’s a drought, I drag out the hose. While I water plants that should not need watering I wear a mask, not this time because I fear pandemic but because this time wildfires have left a gray and dangerous scrim of haze and ash. 

But in the botanical sense, an ephemeral, says a friend who is aware of my lists, is actually a perennial. Unlike your father or the dog’s eye, it will return next year. This is true. It also sounds a bit like hope, that incorrigible weed, springing eternal.

But I’ve heard that forests will likely be gone in fifty years. Then the forest remnant will be an ephemeral. Then the ephemerals will be truly ephemeral. Then only disposable masks will be perennials.

—

What will happen to the dog’s left eye after enucleation? It will be autopsied, the doctor says, to make sure the rupture was caused not by a tumor but by injury. I’m already certain it was an injury. I think another animal, a native of the remnant burrowing into her pen, swiped at her when she tried to kill it. When cornered, woodchucks and raccoons go for the eyes. 

The dog is a terrier, cocky, defiant. She was the runt of her litter, half the size of her brothers and sisters. She grew to only twelve pounds. But she is twelve pounds of defiance and ego. Her task on this ancient earth, she believes, is to protect our crops, and though we have no crops she takes her work seriously. She has broken the necks of rabbits. She once, we discovered too late to stop her, killed a small flock of recently hatched turkey chicks who, exploring their world, had wriggled through the pen’s chicken wire. Their frantic, squawking mother ran back and forth on the other side of the wire as our dog killed her babies one by one. The mother forgot she had wings and a beak and talons. We have taught the dog sit, down, stay, shake, and roll over. We haven’t been able to teach her we don’t live on a farm, that we don’t even grow tomatoes in pots on the deck, that there is nothing to protect.

Small birds are ephemerals.

Motherhood is an ephemeral.

Mothers are ephemerals. 

—

My mother is ninety-nine and lives alone in her house in Florida. I would like her to move to Wisconsin, live in my house. She dismisses me. She likes her home. She is, as she puts it, still very much with it. She shops, cooks, reads. She does the New York Times crossword. She gets her nails done. 

On this day, she calls to marvel at how old I’ve become, how old she’s become. She asks how I’m celebrating. Weeding, I say. She says, Remember when I gardened? Remember the weeping willow and crabapple in the backyard?

I tell her I remember those two trees vividly, their individual leaves, their blossoms. I tell her about the dog’s upcoming surgery. She says, Would it be so terrible if she never wakes up? She’s had a long, happy life. 

I’m immediately incensed—yes, it would be terrible if my dog doesn’t wake up—but I say nothing. I certainly don’t point out that my mother, too, has had a long, happy life, that if she were to die tonight, the same could be said—no doubt would be said—of her. Is it so terrible she never woke up?

Later I’ll consider that I may have misunderstood what her words meant as I so often do. Maybe she was fully aware of the applicability of her words to her own life and death. Maybe that was her point, her seed of truth, her oblique way of telling me how grateful she is—we should all be—if we have long, happy lives. Maybe she was reminding me that it’s all for lend, was wanting me to find equanimity and grace, though my mother would never use those words. Maybe she was telling me to breathe.

—

This essay is an ephemeral. It will live in a drawer or on a hard drive, unseen and unread. Or, if I’m lucky, it will live, mostly unseen and unread, on a website or in the pages of a literary journal. Talk about short-lived. Literary journals are the ephemerals of the writing world.

The list I keep of ephemerals is flawed. It’s incomplete. It often doesn’t help. I still make mistakes. I fail to recognize an ephemeral and yank it out by the roots or I conscientiously nurture what turns out to be an invasive weed. For years I let myself be seduced by the scent of honeysuckle. I willfully ignore the fact that I have wings. 

I should quit making lists. I should stop writing essays. I should not hit SAVE. I should not hit SEND. I should respect definitions. I should toss a ball to the dog who despite everything still wants to play. Instead I keep adding to the list.

The wild columbine.

The trillium.

The Mayapples.

The bloodroot.

The bellwort.

The liver leaf.

The sharp-arrow aster. 

The ash from the sky.

The rain that has, like a gift on a birthday, finally started to fall. ■

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