Heather Lanier
The golf-cart-wide asphalt pathways should tip me off to this fact: the Tall Pines Nature Reserve in Gloucester County, New Jersey was not always a nature reserve. It was indeed a golf course. But as my family and I walk among the tall grasses and marshes and pines, I’m not thinking about the land, or its history. I’m thinking about the people, and how to protect them.
The parking lot here was more crowded than I’d hoped. Each time I spot a cluster of folks along the path—often couples, often senior citizens, the ones with the worst odds—my shoulders tighten. I grip the hand of the eight-year-old, the one doctors call “immunocompromised,” the one who greets strangers at restaurant tables like a manager asking How was the chowder? the lobster? the wine?
Tonight at 9:00 P.M., the governor will issue a new mandate, but he hasn’t yet. Which means it’s not officially state law to stay six feet apart. Still, my husband and I will try to keep two gregarious kids six feet from anyone, on an asphalt path the width of a golf-cart.
This is how we are trying to love the world right now: by not getting near.
An older couple walks toward us. I grip a hand. We widen our distance, say hello, move passed.
Almost all the deciduous trees here are bare, except the Callery Pears. They’re in full bloom, white puffs reaching upward. Their five-petaled flowers are delicate whispers, but their black-tipped stamens are coarse and suspicious as chin hairs.
“Smell it,” says my six-year-old, standing beneath one. “This one smells good.”
“Can’t fool me,” my husband says.
Yesterday, nose tilted toward her first Callery Pear blossom, she’d sniffed and was insulted. How could a flower smell this bad? A day later, she’s joined the trees in their cosmic prank.
We see a family of five. We widen our distance, say hello, move passed, steer clear.
We spot two geese beside a marsh, hear frogs croaking in a pond, cross a footbridge over a creek. And every few minutes, we see people, say hello, move passed, steer clear.
But it’s when we arrive at an expanse of trees, without people, that I stop, arrested.
“Look,” I say to my family.
The Callery Pears. Over a dozen of them are scattered across the acres, each separated by five or more dormant trees. They’re together in bloom; they’re apart in land, divided by hundreds of stark, naked branches. Amidst the winterish trees, they look snowed upon. Like the sky decided to blizzard, but only in surprising, joyous intervals.
The Callery Pears are too far right now to stink. Right now, they’re simple echoes of white across a landscape of scarcity.
Eventually, this entire expanse will fill with lush green. Eventually, everything will be touching again. Eventually, the rest of this land will say it too is alive.
Heather Kirn Lanier is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Raising a Rare Girl (Penguin Press, 2020) along with two award-winning poetry chapbooks, Heart-Shaped Bed in Hiroshima and The Story You Tell Yourself. Her TED talk about raising a child with a rare syndrome has been viewed over two million times. She just moved from Vermont to New Jersey, where she works an assistant professor of creative writing at Rowan University, and searches for good places to hike and roam.