Friends,
When I was four years old, my family moved from Los Altos Mendocino–and, specifically, to Furytown, one of Mendocino’s two historically Portuguese neighborhoods. I don’t think we lasted more than a year in Furytown before we moved to the hills above Little River, where I did most of my growing up, but while in Furytown I learned to identify and to love my first flower.
Back then our neighbors, whose parents and grandparents were immigrants from the Azores, called the flower I loved a “Lady Slipper”, and that’s still what I like to call it, but nowadays most folks use its more formal moniker: the Calypso Orchid. I’d like to believe that the flower got its name as a way of honoring the late Harry Belafonte, but alas, I suspect the name is actually more classical, referring to a beautiful nymph who, in the Odyssey, attempts, unsuccessfully, to entice Odysseys to stay on her enchanted Island.
Calypso is actually a good name from the flower because it is seductive and it’s also elusive. After moving from Furytown to Little River, I stopped seeing Lady Sippers while walking in the woods. I didn’t think much of it—I just assumed they only grew near Furytown—until I learned that my youngest sister, who is about to turn 40, had never seen a Lady Slipper, even though my family moved back to Furytown when she was maybe eight years old, and she’s lived in Furytown (more or less) ever since.
But now, suddenly, the Lady Slippers are back, and my sister has seen lots of them. She even showed me where to go looking for them when I was in Mendocino the week after Easter.
I don’t know where the Lady Slippers went or what brought them back this year. I’d say it was the abundance of rain, but there have been lots of rainy years in the last three decades. Climate change? Perhaps, but I’m not sure that explains the Lady Slippers’ return either because things seemed to have changed back, and I don’t see that as part of what climate change is about.
Apparently, Calypso Orchids are a bit high maintenance—conditions need to be just right for them to bloom—and no one knows exactly what those conditions are or what it looks like when everything lines up such that Lady Slippers can bloom. All I know is that it was great to see Lady Slippers this spring, and I’m taking their arrival in the woods near Furytown as a promise that the earth is still alive, still beautiful, still reflecting God’s creative Spirit, and still beckoning me into a deeper connection to God through a more profound knowledge of wild things.
I took a few photos of the lady Slippers I saw near Furytown. My favorite photo is below.
God’s Peace,
Ben
