Invasive

What are these?" Judy asks. She bends way down, peers over the gold rims of her spectacles at something green beside the path. My eyes dash away from her, scan patch snow between silver trunks of beech and birch to find the dogs, team-digging for chipmunks by a stump. Clots of soil and rock are hitting leaf-duff in rhythmic spurts. They'll be busy for awhile.

I crouch next to Judy for a closer look. Tiny white flowers, about a dozen in a bunch, a fairy bridal bouquet ascending from a rosette of heart-shaped leaves. Some smaller leaves wind in a spiral staircase up the flower-bearing stem. I hook my glasses into my sweater collar, get down on hands and knees, bring my good right eye in close: four petals, six stamens.

"Some mustardy thing."

I need to bring the little flowers home to reference books and tea to extend my diagnosis beyond family resemblance, pin down a species name—but I won't pick them if there are just a few. Unfolding my achy back and dampish knees, I put my glasses on, then look around. There are four. No, five. I know I've never seen them here; but still, those tooth-edged leaves do resonate—familiar shapes I cannot place. Judy has been walking dogs along these trails since before blueberry bogs succumbed to soccer fields. If she thinks these rosettes of saw-toothed hearts are new arrivals to these woods, then they are new. For now, I'll have to leave them be.

The dogs dig deeper, taking turns at the same hole. Judy and I return to talk of flowers waking from their winter's nap—this morning, the clump of bloodroot we transplanted from her yard to mine sent up first leaves, furled like umbrellas as they push from softening ground; soon it will be time to look for blue Hepatica.

Since we've started talking botany on daily walks, what I am planting in my garden has become a subject of earnest inquiry, as have my curtains, my cutlery, my compost pile, the health of my family in Germany, and anything I've ever cooked. Swept up in shared bouts of farmer's market shopping, canning, and impromptu barbecues, I've stopped wondering how long teaching college biology can keep me happy on the northern edge of Appalachia, three thousand miles from home.

Today, the chipmunks' burrow proves too deep for digging dogs. Judy and I pick up our pace, take the shortcut across the parking lot between the college football and baseball fields; Judy mustn't be late for her doctor's appointment.

"Call me when you get back," I say.

Her symptoms, reported over many weeks, have puzzled me—evening chills and fevers that resolve by morning, a pain she describes as "a stitch in my side."

"Or, I can tell you tomorrow," Judy says.

________

The dogs have treed a squirrel. Two weeks have transformed fairy bridal bouquets into candelabras by our path. Like dollhouse-cucumbers, green fruits curve skyward from stems that have shot up knee-high. Two neat seams that split the oldest fruits signify siliques—another mustard hallmark.

Judy's scans are back. "Diverticulitis," the doctor said, a small pouch on the colon that swells and gets infected off and on, not too unusual in late middle-age. Some intravenous antibiotics should calm the ooze and swelling, clear things up. The squirrel jumps, catches another branch; dogs rage below to no avail. There's a squirrel highway in this canopy, and each nodding twig asserts escape.

________

My dog's high-pitched yelps, hot on a rabbit's brushy tracks, lead me away from our familiar round of trails. Summer-green privet covers the mad zigzag of his dash and Judy cannot help me look. After four weeks of fevers and recurring pains her doctors, out of drugs to try, went radical; a surgery has clipped that oozing pouch—she should come home in just another week. I follow fading yelps and rustles down an unfamiliar trail, then stop to...