My Mutant
On vacation in Savannah, GA, I wrote a love letter to the city. Because I don't know the town that well, it's a budding love. In other words, it's all about me.
My mutant as an infant. It’s bigger now.
My beloved honeysuckle has no business in my backyard, but left to its own devices, it now owns the territory. It wraps around my table and grabs at my legs. It hovers over me and festers below me, fusing with the rotting wood of the deck while cocooning me and provoking me, out of control but free. I won’t tell it what to do.
It is an intentional mutant, after all. A scientific wonder. I don’t know what other powers it might have.
It feels like it doesn’t belong in the land of snow and famous Halloween blizzards. It feels like it should live with Spanish moss and trees that look like they’re just waiting for you to turn your back. It feels like it’s foreign to the land of birch and spruce and people dropping dead with a snow shovel in their hands.
Minnesota is kind of a mutant island, just of the Norwegian variety. The monsters are little men with beards eating porridge that better be made right or else they’ll kill your cow or get confused and kill your neighbor’s cow but mostly just watch the house until Ragnarök. Our World Tree is an ash, not a magnolia, a mutant version of which our mean neighbor used to have before chopping it down for something more appropriate.
The other night the bartender told me Spanish moss has chiggers. I assumed something like that was true, but it’s good to have confirmation. I wasn’t planning on touching it, but I like to know my instincts are accurate.
My honeysuckle only began to alarm me when Saint Paul registered 60 degrees Fahrenheit and I realized it was February, not May. I looked at my mutant protector differently when I thought I saw a green shoot emerging from the bark on March 1. Maybe it doesn’t need its superpower hybridity to live in my backyard anymore. Maybe its cousins can now come visit. Would they stay? Would I mind?
As I write these words, it is 58 degrees in Saint Paul, MN and 63 in Savannah, Georgia.
Here’s what I’ve chosen to believe is happening at home. My mean neighbor undoubtedly knows we are out of town. She will, as is her habit, verified by video technology, open the back gate and snoop around our yard. The little Norwegian gnomes who protect our house are getting squirrelly and chomping their teeth. They haven’t had their porridge. They’re up in the attic, but they know about the secret backstairs.
My mutant vines are quivering from the abnormal heat. Orange blooms are trying to push out, a few months too early. Seymour isn’t around to feed them, so Mean Neighbor is on her own.
Little Norwegian gnomes and mutant flora find themselves in alliance. Mean neighbor should close the gate, but she won’t.
Twisty vines and chompy teeth.
That’s all probably too dark for a Minnesotan. But I’m chatting with my mutant’s cousins. I am going south while they are going north, where it’s no longer too crisp for their comfort. The honeysuckle owns the yard now, so the cousins are welcome to visit. The little Norwegian men are sadists, so it will at least be a good time.
Anyway, that’s all too dark for a Minnesotan.
I’m not from there, either.