Our dear friends who were here visiting with us last week after having driven all the way from Atlanta, Georgia, hiked with us in the forest, and Tom spotted and identified this little native wildflower, Indian Pipe (also known as Corpse Plant), which doesn't contain chlorophyll, as you can see, but is instead a parasite. I may not have noticed it on my own, even though it's one of the many wildflowers pictured on the poster hanging near me now, "Wildflowers of the Redwood Forest," because most of the ones we saw were beneath the redwood sorrel, hiding their little piped bodies in the cool darkness like tiny plant-vampires, pale and fragile-looking.Having moved here from my native South a year ago now, I realized how much more grounded I felt when our friends were here with us, and how often I've felt as if I'm floating here. But more and more, Jon and I are sending our own shoots out and down, stabilizing ourselves in the forests and on the Pacific beaches here, in our little gardens by our house, getting to know the names of our neighbors and plants, weaving our own webs of stability we call home.
