"Light on Walnut" The most valuable lesson that my work with Margaret has taught me is the role of death in life.
In one of our recorded conversations Margaret picks up a dead branch from a Black Walnut tree and shows me the fungus growing in clusters across its surface, a special fungus that grows on the fallen branches of Walnut trees and an example of a symbiotic relationship: “...look what it’s doing, it’s eating it up, taking it back to nature. It’s a mold, look at it, see what it does, it’s a wood rotter, it rots the wood, and takes it back to nature.”
"Skin of Man with Perspiratory Glands" At Margaret's table we cut cake and examine her microscope slides from her days as a biology teacher. Each one holding, beauty, death, and an appreciation of life in it's pastel stain. Their labels like small poems, Skin of Unripe Fruit, Hairs of Man, Woman, and Child, and Butterfly's Tongue.
" Blood Stained Mouth" A portrait of my neighbor Margaret with a slight ring of blood around her mouth after a trip to the dentist. It is an image that echoes the story that she tells of taking the children to the persimmon tree and how my brother always had a ring of persimmon stained around his mouth.
"Buttercup Smut" I collect the names of flowers from the Virginia Landscape. Solanum dulcamara- (Bittersweet Nightshade), Eupatorium serotinum- (Late Flowering Boneset), Lonicera fragrantissima- (Fragrant Honeysuckle, Winter Honeysuckle), Myosotis macrosperma - ( forget me not). I also collect their diseases. Buttercup Smut, Rose Rust, Black Knot, Fairy Ring of Carnations, and Sleeping Disease of Tomato.
"Night Moth Wing" Night Moths are one of the pollinators of Night Blooming Flowers. As a child I remember them fluttering around the neighbor's porch lights at night. I also remember one night when all of the neighbors gathered in Margaret's yard with flashlights in hand, and formed a circle in her garden. They were there to see her Night Blooming Cereus, a flower that blooms only once a year for one single night.