Oakling
by Nancy BellI name the oakling Sylvia, and I give her privacy. Her home faces south, on the windowsill that is hidden behind the back of the clean, white couch. To look at her, as I do once a day, I have to kneel on the couch like a child, my little paws on the back of it, my chin on top of my hands. I gaze down at her. Then, I lie on the couch and feel her power through it. I tell myself I have conjured her. I tell myself she is my familiar.
I found the acorn in January, under an oak tree, of course. There were hundreds of acorns there, and they all had fresh tap roots, even though it was too early for taproots. We were having one of those unseasonably warm snaps that the planet is giving us now. Here were at least a couple hundred, a huge acorn dump, and big acorns, too. And all with their red-black roots pushing out toward the earth, almost obscene with life, little penises pushing down toward Earth. About half of them had already reached home, dug into the ground, one with it. I nudged them in wonder. Obviously, this happens every year, and has been happening for centuries. How had I never noticed? I felt sorry, bereft, cheated. So many acorns. What had I been paying attention to before, if not this drama?
I brought home six and put the roots in water, in varying vessels. Only one took. In time, it filled the glass bottle beneath it with white spidery roots, and eventually, a tiny celadon finger pointed up, straight up, confident. Now she’s a couple of inches high, crowned with two miniature oak leaves lying limply to each side, gathering power. In between those are two new leaf buds, and along her stalk are places where more will branch off, if she survives.
I give her privacy back there, for the work she must do, which should be happening in the dark of the earth. But I have placed her under glass and put her in my window. The least I can do. One day, I hope, she will peek above the back of the couch and ask to be seen, require to be noticed, assert herself. She will tell me to put her in some earth, goddamn it. Earth, soil! Where is my soil? An acorn contains all the nutrients for the oakling to sprout and do its first growing. At some point, though, that is not enough.
▴ ▴ ▴
My daughter and I walk in the park, just as we’ve always done. On the transition days when she would come back to my house from her dad’s, or when she had to go to his from mine—this regularly scheduled rupture she hated—on those days, on all the hardest days, we walked it out in Tower Grove Park. Now, all that is over. She’s free to come and go in her car, the brand-new author of her own destiny. Today, we just walk for the hell of it, spinning out the nonsense talk we invented, indulging in the old ways for old time’s sake.
We walk past Sylvia’s mother. Maybe. There are several oaks on this hill, and I found the acorns at the bottom of it, so she might have rolled down from any of them. They are a clutch of Sylvia’s aunties, and they are all equally outraged by her kidnapping. I took her away from them, took her to the sad realm of the indoors. I am spoiling her, coddling her, and depriving her of her birthright in the sun. This is what they say to us as we walk by. We try to reason with them.
“But you are park trees!” I argue. “You don’t live in the wild. You live in the park. You basically live in a zoo for trees! The park rangers mowed all the other acorns under the day after I took her. She would not have survived without me. I’m giving her life!”
“Pshaw!” they say. They use a lot of old expressions like that. They speak the language of several centuries all jumbled up together. It’s a very odd effect. But I respect them. I try to flatter them a little, butter them up, because it is never wise to have an oak tree as an enemy.
“I understand why you’re upset. I would be too. She’s magnificent.”
“Of course she is magnificent,” they say. “She is one of us.”
“I know! That’s why I took her. Can you blame me?” I push my daughter to them. “Have you seen my own child, how shaggy and undignified she is?”
My child, who is no longer a child, drolly agrees. She joins the conversation.
“How can you blame my mother for snatching your child?” she asks them. “She has to wake up to me every day!” The aunties flutter their leaves at us, charmed by her self-reproach.
“Indeed!” they sniff, “You are nothing to pen home about.”
But that’s too much.
“Hey, bitches!” I yell at the oak grove, “That’s my baby you’re talking about!” We crack up, and my daughter shakes her fist at them.
We turn and make our way farther down the hill, but at the bottom I sneak a private look back up at the little grove. I raise my hand in a kind of salute.
I’ll take care of her, I think at them.
▴ ▴ ▴
Thirty-six hours later, we are in the middle of a fever, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a hospital in the Midwest. We are so deep in all the middles that you can’t see any edges.
“Why is this happening?” my daughter asks me.
My baby is not a baby anymore, but the infection has pulled her back a decade or so, and me with her. I am enacting the kind of parenting I thought I’d never perform again. Holding, rocking, singing, being the world, being the answer. It’s exhilarating to be needed once more in this way I had long ago learned, then unlearned. But it’s shameful that it’s exhilarating because my daughter is very sick.
The nurse frowns at the thermometer. “This thing is stubborn.” She goes out to call the doctor. My daughter bursts into tears.
“I had no idea that there were all these nurses in hospitals everywhere who stay awake all night trying to help people!” she cries. It’s exquisite, an expression of mature appreciation that makes me proud. But then I realize it’s not appreciation. It’s terror at the realization that she has suddenly become someone who needs that kind of help.
There’s a ring of damp brown hair circling her face, and pink stamps on her cheeks and lips. Holding her is like holding the engine of an idling car. She vibrates with fever. She radiates and shudders. I sing her the old songs. I think to myself: Yeah, what is happening here?
Later, when the worst has passed, and the Tylenol has kicked in, she’s sleepy but still scared.
“Talk to me,” she begs. “Talk to me. Just say anything.”
I can’t think of a damn thing except Does drug-resistant mean that there is no antibiotic on earth that will work? But I don’t say that. I look out the window. There is an oak sapling on the front lawn of the hospital. Since Sylvia, I have noticed how full the world is of her kind. This one is still lashed to a little metal stake to keep it up. The soil mounded up at its base is fresh. It shivers in the night breeze. I tell my daughter about the oaks. That an acorn will keep an oakling fed for a whole year. That they have been around for fifty-six million years. That they can live to be a thousand years old. That the leaves are coated in tannic acid that keeps them safe from fungi and insects. I keep talking after she falls asleep. Only then do I say that 31 percent of all oak species are threatened with extinction. That ranchers are clearing them for grazing land. That there are such things called oak wilt and sudden oak death. That only one in ten thousand acorns ever grows into a tree.
▴ ▴ ▴
Over the next nine months, Sylvia sprouts six more pairs of leaves behind the couch. The life pushing out of her is outrageous and unlikely. She is still attached to her acorn, but it is split open now and shows a glimpse of greenish flesh. She dwarfs it. Although she fits in a windowsill, a small and fragile system, each individual leaf is as big as an oak leaf ever gets, as big as the ones that grow on hundred-year-old trees. She is both mini and mighty.
During the first time my daughter is in the hospital, Sylvia runs out of water while I am not paying attention. I panic when I notice and rush her to the kitchen faucet, apologizing. Those leaves still bear the scar of that deprivation, brown edges that linger even as new growth rushes past them up the stalk.
Before Sylvia sprouts her seventh pair of leaves, my daughter is hospitalized twice more. The hospital is normal now. More than the malaise or the fear or the loneliness is the boredom. There are no more tears in the night. When they ask for her arm to put in the IV, she doesn’t even look up from her phone. She doesn’t acknowledge the nurses when they are finished with their work.
“You don’t have to spend the night,” she tells me. “It’s better if you don’t.”
Before I leave, I put my palm down on her warm head and try to water her with my mind, to soak the brown leaves I fear are curling inside her somewhere. I think, for a moment, that I will pray, but I don’t know how. I have no deities in my stable whom I can call up in a pinch and put into the game. So, I close my eyes and talk to the aunties in my mind. I do the best I can.
My daughter is still and quiet. It is maybe just the fever. It is maybe just because she is caught up in a TikTok. But maybe she feels it. I know that I am foolish, a bumbler, a non-believer. But I do it anyway. I think about Sylvia. I let her image fill me up and flow down into my hand. I send her outlandish stubborn greenness into my daughter. I command the green to heal her. I imagine my daughter’s cells flooded with chlorophyll. Thank you, Aunties.
“Mother. You’re being weird.”
▴ ▴ ▴
I google. I learn that all these things are true:
- Studies have found that extracts from oak bark and wood can be effective against certain drug-resistant pathogens.
- Oak wood contains compounds, particularly those tannins I told my daughter about, that have been shown to have antimicrobial properties. These compounds can inhibit the growth of certain bacteria, including some antibiotic-resistant strains.
- Some researchers are exploring how oak wood compounds might work in combination with existing antibiotics to enhance their effectiveness against resistant bacteria.
- Other compounds found in oak wood have shown potential in disrupting biofilms, which are communities of microorganisms that can be highly resistant to antibiotics.
- The unique chemical composition of oak wood is inspiring the development of new drugs that might be effective against resistant pathogens.
- Some studies suggest that oak wood extracts may have wound-healing properties, which could be beneficial in treating infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
- Other researchers are looking at how oak wood might be used in water treatment systems to help remove antibiotic-resistant bacteria from the environment.
▴ ▴ ▴
The doctors ask my daughter if it’s okay that I stay in the room while we talk. They have to do that because she is eighteen. But after she consents, she lets me ask the questions.
“So, it’s gone?”
“It appears to be gone.”
“But you thought it was gone the other times.”
“Yes.”
“So, was this last time the same infection as before or a new one?”
“We don’t know. It could be that it never really left. We still don’t know much about drug resistance.”
“But you think it’s gone now.”
“Yes.”
I open my mouth to ask what makes this time different than the other times, but I reconsider. We pack up her things. On the way home, I tell her I need to stop by Home Depot. To my surprise, she doesn’t object. She says, “Great.” She comes inside with me. She doesn’t want to wait in the car.
Inside, my daughter blinks in the blazing fluorescent lights. She squints up to the vaulted aluminum ceiling and says, “This place is so big all of a sudden.” We walk between the rows of plants, and she touches their glossy leaves and bends the flowers toward her face. I find the soil I need.
“I’m starving,” she says.
Back at home, she picnics on Home Depot hotdogs and seltzer water on the living room couch while I carefully draw Sylvia’s white web of roots out of the water. I nestle them inside the little pocket I’ve made in the soil, along with the spent acorn. I water her in.
An hour later, my daughter is gone, out for the night. I’m not to wait up.
I google. I want to find out if it’s possible to keep an oak tree inside indefinitely. I find a poem by Tennyson instead.
Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;
Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed
Soberer-hued
Gold again.
All his leaves
Fall’n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength.
▴ ▴ ▴
I will visit my second daughter in the park, where I secretly planted her, out of the spying eyes of the rangers. I will rub her leathery leaves between my finger and thumb. She no longer lives in my house, but there is a reddish water stain on the windowsill where she started her life. She has taken her knocks. There have been good times and bad times. So much heat these days, but she’s all right. She’s still too young to make her own acorns, but she has a strong central stalk that will be a fine trunk one day.
She is a one-in-ten-thousand miracle.
She will not live on the same hill as the aunties. But I am reading a book about how trees are all attending a secret party with fungi deep in the earth. If she needs anything, she knows what to do. She can dip her toes way down and find the matriarchs. She’ll do that when she’s ready.
