Letter From Gregory Ellis

Dear Mom, Of what I remember of my childhood, most of it concerns you, warmly. You nurtured me, and I remember! I remember hiking along the Encampment River in Wyoming with you and Tawny-dog when I was a naught but a wee lad, almost too young to remember, but I do. I was a tyrant, I remember, rushing the trail and kicking the bloody hell out of the sagebrush. Sagebrush, which had nothing to offer, not even color, nothing but dry and course and bitter. It cracked easily under my feet and sent up dusty puffs of destruction, tried feebly to scratch back with its dead grey branches. What was the death of one in the infinite country of it in which we lived. Better than nothing to a tyrant who knew nothing better. But you were patient with your tyranical son, you didn't even stop me or yell, as I would later with friends who tore flowers out by their roots. Without even breaking the vast silence of the sagefields, you pinched off a leaf of the plant and crinkled it under my nose, and I stopped and smelled it and didn't say anything. My tyrany didn't end in that instant but over time declined as you showed me what sagebrush really was, its rich pungence inside the grey-green drabbery: its leaves of fine hair to keep water in; the bitterness that protected it from cattle, favored it for pronghorn; the little bugs that convince the bush to grow galls for their larvae, little cotton-lined worlds; the spittle-bugs that hung in its branches like a cowboy's booger; birds that ate the grubs and flew over the fields leaving fertilizer in their droppings; the paintbrush that laces its roots in with the sagebrush, taps in to the deep well of it root system, and therefore only grows--can only grow--alongside in its lipstick glory. Soon sagebrush was everywhere, everything. The birds sang 'sagebrush'. The flowers were somehow not their own but bloomed for the sagebrush. After rain, the country welled up with its original smell. Mom, this is a crazy world, and there are a lot of people who would walk right by a sagebrush and not even bother to give it a kick. What does global warming mean for the plant? I don't know, but if global warming has anything to do with any one thing, I've learned from the sagebrush that it has something to do with everything. You already know more about global warming than me, and the rest of humanity's youthful, innocent tyranny. What can we do? I'm simply asking you to keep on with what you've been doing, mothering the world out of ignorance, linking your children each to each. Lord knows our efforts aren't perfect or complete or final, but I ask you to keep on with them--find ways to make them full. Do it for me if you have to, do it out of your own mother-nature, do it for the sagebrush. Love, Greg