While I'm quite good at names of people - the ones I know, not famous ones - I'm so bad at the names of other things: plants, flowers, birds, streets, clouds. Which is fine.
After an exhausting lead-up to our wedding, and a deeply wonderful but fatiguing couple of days hosting friends and family and dancing until midnight, we escaped to the driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, near Soldiers Grove/Viroqua. There's an Airbnb down there that we stayed at in the first year of our relationship. It's a farm where you have to climb half a mile up a hill, but are rewarded with an off-grid, one-room cabin that smells like fresh-cut wood. There's no one else in sight. You have a solar shower and composting toilet and the complete bliss of no internet and limited reception.
Best of all, you exist in a wide-open field of yellow flowers. Next best: they have a book on wildflowers. And it felt silly not to immediately know, once I found out, that these yellow flowers are goldenrods. What else?
It was an overcast weekend. The sky kept doing daunting, beautiful, and shifty things. And while I sped through a book - my first in many months - I kept taking breaks to go walk outside to look at the deeply saturated yellows, greens, and blues. I got up early to stare at the goldenrods and watch the clouds drift through the rolling hills. I followed the path along the ridge, only to find more yellow, dotted with heavy apple trees.
I was that perfect kind of happy. With fall coming and no real pressures or worries over me, I felt like my truest self. Like 5-year-old Kallie, alone on the farm, walking through our back pasture.
I get overwhelmed thinking about the long career road still ahead of me, although I have no doubts it will zoom by. So, I start to simplify by listing the things I know I want for sure. And really, those things don't extend far beyond just this: a little house in a field of goldenrods, with space for friends and family and space for silence and staring.
And after thinking about the names I’m able to remember, whether people or plants, it makes sense that it's not until I've internalized a thing and realize how it feeds me that I learn its name. Maple and cottonwood are the trees I climbed. Rural Route 2 was the gravel road I grew up on. Goldenrods are the color of J, the color of our wedding, the color I didn't really think about until it kept surrounding me and I finally learned its name.
