A cold and drowsy snake visited in January. The yard had experienced floods, in days before, so I expect the snake fled some drenched winter hideaway. Moving slowly in the chill, our visitor spent a half-hour or more searching for dry accommodations in leaves that had settled against our house’s concrete foundation.
Photo of a Dekay’s Brownsnake peeking from under a dry brown leaf. The scales on top of the snake’s head are mottled brown with pale tan coloration between scales. Its large brown eye has a round pupil.
Over the past decades, I’ve caught rare glimpses of these snakes in the yard. Each time, I filed them in the generic “garter snake” folder of my internal memory bank. My flawed and over-capacity garter snake folder, in my flawed and over-capacity memory, holds all of the small, striped (or not), yard-sized snakes I’ve ever encountered. As long as the small, striped (or not), yard-sized snakes weren’t green, I called them garter snakes. (Green snakes are, obviously, “green snakes” in my flawed internal memory bank.)
Many of my “garter snakes” were, most likely, garter snakes.
Photo of a strongly marked snake with tan stripes and checkerboard patterns of dark brown and pale tan–an Eastern garter snake. This dapper little snake didn’t want to give up its sunny spot beside the paved walking trail and assumed the defensive posture shown in this photo–head raised, neck in an s-curve, body tense. Everything about this posture says “if you don’t leave me alone, I’ll bite you”. The snake attempted a strike shortly after this photo. I didn’t get bitten, because I was wary enough to stay out of strike’s reach, but I’m ashamed that I didn’t heed the snake’s clear request to be left in warm contentment. Instead, in my zeal for photos, I intruded so thoughtlessly that I made the little creature anxious enough to strike. I apologized, before leaving, but couldn’t restore the snake’s sun-soaked relaxation.
Many of my “garter snakes” were, most definitely, not garter snakes.
Garter snake. Not garter snake. Other snake. Each time I get a chance to patch my flawed and over-capacity internal memory bank, I’m relieved. Especially here, in my middle years.
As it’s been too cold for snakes to emerge, except in emergencies, I haven’t tested my brownsnake memory patch against snakes found in the wild. Or in the yard. So I’ve been testing it against my photo archive. At the moment, I’m still mid-correction, my internal dialogue still chirping “garter snake” when I come across photos of small, not-green, striped (or not striped), yard-sized snakes, still needing the gestalt-shift between first impression and new information. Still needing the pause and closer look. Not always garter snake. Sometimes, Dekay’s Brownsnake.
Photo of a Dekay’s Brownsnake, no more than 10 inches long, retreating over a tree root as I mowed the back yard. At the time, my internal dialogue tagged the photo “garter snake” and rambled off toward a more interesting (at the time) topic. Now, captivated by the newness of “Dekay’s Brownsnake” in my vocabulary, I clearly see the identifying keeled scales and parallel lines of dark spots down its back.
As for snakes in vases, or other yard art, maybe they are neither garter snake nor Dekay’s Brownsnake?
Photo of a snake’s tail dangling out of the bottom opening of a hollow piece of ceramic yard art. The tiny snake, smaller in diameter than a pencil, was reddish-brown with a pale belly. I labeled these photos “garter snake”, though I now wonder if they show a reddish variant of Dekay’s Brownsnake. Or maybe some other species, still unnamed in my vocabulary?
Another photo of the reddish snake that overwintered in a hollow piece of ceramic yard art. I tried following the identification key-map provided by the Virginia Herpetological Society, to no avail. Keels are readily visible on the snake’s side scales, but no dorsal scales are visible in the photos, which is where my attempts at identification break down. (Please comment if you can help with the ID!)
I’ve seldom had the luxury of hovering here, at the pivot point of internal correction. But my time, this winter, has slowed with the chill. Long nights and short days trigger depression and anxiety, steering me toward torpor. And this winter’s torpor has been more meditative than some years. I’ve lingered over these photos of our little reptile visitor. I want to call this moment learning, except that overused word feels both too small and too large. As do other words, like knowledge and discovery.
Photo of a very small Dekay’s Brownsnake emerging between dry brown leaves. In this side view, the snake’s overlarge eye and round pupil are fully visible, along with a row of dark spots along its upper lip. Its pale lower lip curves up in an anthropomorphic smile.
Such words, and the ideas they attempt to convey, have been claimed and reclaimed, used and abused, lauded and cursed for centuries. Well before I began grappling with my own understandings and misunderstandings, philosophers and critics set their pens to the task of recording, preserving, and passing on observations that make reality a little bit safer, a little bit more predictable, for future generations of humanity. So many men (yes, mostly men) writing letters to a future with so much more to observe.
Macro photograph of the face and eye of a Dekay’s Brownsnake. The small snake’s large eye shows a round pupil and an iris of iridescent brown and bronze. Its facial scales are mottled brown.
What goes into a name? Constructing (or deconstructing) Dekay’s Brownsnake
Dekay’s Brownsnake has the dubious honor of being named after two 19th century (male) naturalists. Its taxonomic genus-species name is Storeria dekayi. This caught me by surprise. An entire genus of snakes named for David Humphreys Storer (1804-1891), an American physician and naturalist.
I couldn’t resist a stroll through the search engine. I never can. Literature search is my favorite phase of projects, and archives are my happy place.
According to his obituary, David Humphreys Storer (1804-1891) was the dean of Obstetrics and Medical Jurisprudence for Harvard Medical School. He also had a great fondness for collecting. His collections encompassed everything from coins to birds eggs, and he cultivated connections with toll takers and sailors to bolster his coin, shell, and fish collections. His work with the Boston Society for Natural History led to a position with the Natural History Survey of the Commonwealth, where Storer managed the fishes and reptiles portion of the survey, resulting in the eventual publication of A History of the Fishes of Massachusetts.
Storer’s internet presence also includes an 1831 pamphlet, noted on page two to be the “Report of a Trial: Miles Farmer, versus Dr. David Humphreys Storer; commenced in the Court of Common Pleas, April Term, 1830, from which it was appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court, and by consent of parties, referred to Referees, relative to the transactions between Miss Eliza Dolph and George Washington Adams, Esq., son of the late President of the United States. It is impossible but that offences will come; but woe unto him through whom they come! It were better for him that a mill stone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea. —Luke, xvii. 1, 2. Reported by the Plaintiff.” (!?)
I must admit that my interest in Storer dissipated before I read the entire pamphlet. Historical gossip aside (“…the transactions between Miss Eliza Dolph and George Washington Adams…”? Might this have been a scandal worthy of Lady Whistledown?), the pamphlet doesn’t contribute to my relationship with the little snakes in my yard.
Neither the obituary nor the pamphlet help me understand the man, David Humphreys Storer, who was so admired as to have a small genus of small snakes carrying his name to this day. And here lies part of the trouble with eponymous taxonomy. No matter how admired, in collecting circles, nor how despised, in other circles, Storer’s name cannot help me understand the habits and habitats of the little snakes I’m currently obsessed with.
James Ellsworth Dekays’ name doesn’t help, either. Another American physician and naturalist, Dekay (1792-1851) participated in a different state sponsored natural survey, for the state of New York. Dekay eventually published his findings in Zoology of New-York: Or the New-York Fauna: Comprising Detailed Descriptions of all the Animals Hitherto Observed within the State of New-York, with brief Notices of Those Occasionally Found Near Its Borders, and Accompanied by Appropriate Illustrations. In Part III (Reptiles and Amphibia), Dekay described a small brown snake collected by “…John Crumby, Esq., a zealous sportsman and acute observer, who captured [the snake] as it was swimming across a large bay on the northern coast of Long Island” (pp. 46-47).
Dekay’s three-paragraph note about the little brown snake is widely attributed as the first description. (A formality often conflated with discovery.) Dekay first used the genus name Tropidonotus but later corrected it to the genus name Coluber. Today the genus Storeria is classified within the family Colubridae.
A quick search engine query leads to a slightly more interesting article about Dekay–“Between the First Blind Cavefish and the Last of the Mohicans: The Scientific Romanticism of James E. Dekay” by Aldemaro Romero. But again, this article doesn’t help me understand or appreciate the yard’s snakes.
So my stroll through the binomial etymology of Storeria dekayi found my first example of an eponymous genus, two 19th century (male) physician-naturalists, a sex scandal with political connections, an article that tethers blind cavefish to James Fenimore Cooper, and one unfortunate little brown snake that fell prey to a sportsman while the snake was (likely) minding its own snake-business, swimming across a large bay on the coast of Long Island.
Reconstructing my memory, brown snakes included
But why do I crave a relationship, a learning or knowing, with the small, shy, nocturnal, snail-and-slug eating snakes in my yard?
Macro photo of a Dekay’s Brownsnake. The snake was approaching the lens, so its head and eye are in focus while the rest of its body is out of focus. Its facial scales are mottled brown, with darker spots under its eye. The scales of its lower lip are very pale tan.
Why, after so many years of being content to see these snakes as “garter snakes”, do I care so much now? I suppose part of my previous contentment is rooted in a youthful mis-hearing and mispronunciation. Garter snakes were garden snakes, most often encountered during gardening. Small, not-green, striped (or not), yard-sized snakes. As long as they weren’t venomous, they were simply garden snakes.
Venomous-or-not was my earliest snake knowledge, my first lessons in the garden. Some snakes were, and are, venomous. Avoid. Don’t get bitten. Be afraid, if you must. If that’s what keeps you safe, be afraid of snakes. (Of course, all of this gets mixed in with Genesis, with Adam and Eve and a serpent that spoke of temptation. The lesson, again, was fear.)
Our father was a snake killer. Every snake he saw, he slaughtered with whatever tool was closest at hand. His histrionics over snakes were the stuff of family lore, which added a dose of realism to the lesson. My older siblings, and sometimes our mother, ridiculed our father’s snake phobia. I absorbed an adjacent lesson, that the reflex killing of snakes was an action worthy of ridicule.
I developed a fascination with these animals that were so terrifying to our father. I wanted to be not-afraid of what our father feared. (And I wanted to avoid being another target of family ridicule.) Rat snakes, king snakes, corn snakes, green snakes, garden/garter snakes. All the hen-house thieves and barn guardians. All the camouflaged brush and grass dwellers. I watched for them with a cautious kind of hope, longing to catch a glimpse. To see them glide across a rafter or ripple into the next row of okra or bask, egg-sated, near the hen house.
And then, during my years in the boggy woods, the fear-laced lessons of my past peeled away like the hull of a seed.
Photo taken in “the woods”, sometime during winter (bare trees, no underbrush, a thick blanket of fallen leaves) in the early 1990s. Shown here is a portion of the spring-fed creek that was the center of all activity in the woods. It was a shallow creek with shallow banks, flat gravel in places and woody in places, the wooded banks supported by exposed tree roots and moss. I visited the creek and woods as often as, and for as long as, time would allow. I was always escorted by a pack of dogs (and sometimes a cat or two, if the cats chose to follow). In this photo are my Boston Terrier (Simon) and Mother’s corgi mix (Bonnie). This photo smells like petrichor, sounds like water and wind and dry leaves and excited dogs, and looks like nostalgia. It feels like silence and loss, and it tastes like I’ve swallowed a memory because I was hungry for time.
In my boggy woods, hidden from the lessons of my parents and their religion, I sprouted. I developed an observational habit of naming and knowing the cottonmouths and the water snakes around the creek, the copperheads and the corn snakes near the edges, the rattlesnakes and the rat snakes under and in the trees. I knew where the gravid females basked and where the hungry youngsters hunted. I knew the woods and the creek because they were my favorite place to be myself. Should a snake have spoken to me, there, I would have eaten without hesitation whatever it offered.
Photo of a non-venomous water snake. The photo is cropped to concentrate on the snake’s face, showing the round pupil and lack of a heat sensing pit between eye and nostril. The snake is banded in various shades of brown with vertical stripes on both upper and lower lip.
Photo of a cottonmouth (or water moccasin), zoomed in to show the snake’s face and head. The cat-eye shaped, vertical pupil is clearly visible, as is the opening of its heat-sensing pit between eye and nostril. These two traits are common to the venomous pit viper family of snakes.
But the garden snakes, as long as they weren’t venomous, were simply garden snakes. The garden wasn’t my habitat, so I didn’t need to know its snakes. I tended the garden, and ate its tame offerings, with impatient distraction, always longing for the woods.
Here in my middle years, the garden and yard have become my habitat. I no longer visit the woods, except as a tourist. Now I need to name and know the garden snakes.
Other than the practicality and predictability of recognizing our Dekay’s Brownsnake as not-venomous, I can’t put my finger on the reason for my need. It’s not learning, knowledge, or discovery. It’s simply there. As are the garter snakes. The not garter snakes. The Dekay’s Brownsnakes, who, I’m happy to note, are drawn to the yard and garden because they like to eat slugs and snails. Perhaps this is reason enough to name them and to know them?
Photo of the Dekay’s Brownsnake, focused on the snake’s body scales. Each reddish-brown scale has a raised central keel, like a line drawn the length of the scale. These body scales overlap more tightly than the facial scales. A row of pinpoint black dots is just visible along the snake’s back.
Perhaps it’s all simply my personal gestalt-shift. The vase is Tennessee and the silhouettes are Virginia. The vase is the woods, the silhouettes our yard. The vase is youth, the silhouettes are now. The vase is water snakes, the silhouettes are garden/garter snakes.
Photo of a juvenile snake exploring a mossy corner of the yard. The snake is gray-brown with a pale ring around its neck. Its overlarge eye has a round pupil. I initially leapt to the conclusion that this might be a ring-necked snake, but now suspect it’s a young Dekay’s Brownsnake.
Here are links to three reviews of my poetry collection, Watershed:
“The collection focuses on the natural world and the human relationship with nature. …” by Crafty Green Poet (read the full review here)
“The poems have both a logical and mystical aura that keep the reader in place while the poems flow forward. …” by Lynette G. Esposito at North of Oxford (read the full review here)
“Watershed from Kelsay Books is an antidote to compulsion, to insistence, to the headlong rush into the next thing and the next. …” by GriffinPoetry at Verse Image (read the full review here)
I’m grateful for the time that readers, editors, and reviewers have spent with my writing, and with my book. I’ve loved every minute of my writing journey.
Here are a few articles and essays that are more interesting, and more important, than my musings:
Ecological countermeasures to prevent pathogen spillover and subsequent pandemics by Raina K. Plowright, Aliyu N. Ahmed, Tim Coulson, Thomas W. Crowther, Imran Ejotre, Christina L. Faust, Winifred F. Frick, Peter J. Hudson, Tigga Kingston, P. O. Nameer, M. Teague O’Mara, Alison J. Peel, Hugh Possingham, Orly Razgour, DeeAnn M. Reeder, Manuel Ruiz-Aravena, Nancy B. Simmons, Prashanth N. Srinivas, Gary M. Tabor, Iroro Tanshi, Ian G. Thompson, Abi T. Vanak, Neil M. Vora, Charley E. Willison, & Annika T. H. Keeley at Nature Communications
Biology Is Not Binary by Kate Clancy, Agustin Fuentes, Caroline M Vansickle, & Catherine Clune-Taylor at American Scientist (another hat tip to Science for Everyone)
I’ve carried this snippet of rhyme my entire life. The rhyme was embossed on a sign in our pediatrician’s office in Huntsville [Alabama], illustrated with two cherubic children, plump and pink-cheeked and aggressively binary.
What are little boys made of?
Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails
That's what little boys are made of
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice and everything nice
That's what little girls are made of
I despised this rhyme. Little boys got all the fun stuff, and I knew, for certain, that sugar and spice and everything nice were NOT what I was made of.1
Photo of me at some early elementary school age, posing for one of my oldest sister’s “Rae with Pets” series. Here I’m showing off our first goat, Sandy, a reddish-brown nanny with a short beard and curved horns.
In this blurry middle-school addition to the “Rae with Pets” series, I’m holding one of our red hens. Mother had forced me into a short haircut, for school, because burrs, ticks, and tangles didn’t flatter our household. When I confessed my longing for a feathered Charlie’s Angels look, Mother countered that Farrah Fawcett did not keep “rat nests” in her hair.
Commuters in paradise
We moved from Huntsville to Fayetteville, Tennessee, when I was three years old. I have no reliable memories of being a city kid, of the house Chapman Street where my siblings had friends next door and walked to school. My memories are 20-odd patchwork acres of fields, woods, pens, and sheds. There was an old barn and an older house, and, by the time I was old enough for memories, there were animals everywhere.
Another “Rae with Pets” photo.2 This time I’m posing with my brother’s beagle, Fella. A small white hen and a large reddish-yellow rooster have wandered into the frame, along with one of our shepherds in the background.
My memories are also long, diesel-fumed bus rides to and from school, longer drives to the grocery, and longer-yet drives to Huntsville. Because, while our parents moved our household to Tennessee, they never really left Alabama.
The tradition of commuting to Huntsville permeated our life. My oldest brother, 13+ years older than me, finished high school as a commuter student in Huntsville.3 Our father commuted to his bookkeeping and financial analyst jobs for a succession of space industry corporations in Huntsville. We commuted to dog training classes, company picnics, shopping excursions, and dental appointments. And, every time someone got sick, we commuted to the pediatrician’s office.
With five kids spanning the entire realm of K-12, we got sick a lot.
Photo of Mother’s hatchback Toyota Corolla, which logged more than 200 thousand miles before its odometer broke. Before the Corolla there was a maroon Buick Skylark and a classic two-toned station wagon (and probably more I don’t remember). All the cars smelled like migraines, like hot plastic and Mother’s perfume with notes of mildew, ragweed, and gasoline.
I always arrived at the pediatrician in the grip of fever, nausea, and a miserable headache induced by mother’s perfume, a 1970s favorite called Charlie. (Mother “got dressed” for trips to the pediatrician. Thus, Charlie.) The drive took about forty-five minutes each way, long enough to make me car sick on top of whatever ailment prompted the commute.4
And there, in the pediatrician’s office, were those insipid caricatures of binary gender. The little boys, with permission to own everything fun in the world. And the little girls, who owned only dresses and aprons and recipes.
Have mercy.
Photo of three very young kittens–one black-and-white, one ginger-and-white, one solid black–huddled together in our front yard. Unless Mother explicitly declared it otherwise, every kitten and cat on our property was mine, mine, mine. Mine to love and spoil and carry in my pockets or down my shirt front or on my shoulder and in my hair. Mine to name and cry over when they were sent away to other homes or died in one of the many tragedies that claim kittens’ lives in rural Tennessee. (The green bicycle in the background was a hand-me-down affair that I was allowed to ride but not own. I can still hear, today, the rattle of its loose fenders and kickstand as I wheezed up and down our gravel driveway.)
Owning too much and too little
Our household was a manifestation of parental dissonance. Mother lived as if entrenched in poverty, while Daddy lived as if money came easy. Both had their reasons.
Daddy worked hard and liked investing in the things he enjoyed. He was a master marksman who bought and sold custom-sighted guns.5 We had aquariums in every room, a citizens’ band radio (CB) in every car, a Pong game, and an Atari. These photos exist because we had cameras, film, and an account with the processing lab. Daddy also collected purebred dogs and carried us to obedience trials, most weekends, so the dogs could earn titles. We had beagles, Shetland sheepdogs, German shepherds, and a collie. My oldest sister had a teacup toy poodle. My middle sister had a Siberian husky.6
Photo of elementary-school me hugging my father’s Shetland sheepdog, Chisterling’s Dixie Clipper (aka BlackJack or BJ), at a 1970s-era outdoor dog show. I’m sporting a bowl-like haircut and home-sewn clothes: a red hooded shirt and houndstooth-patterned pants. BJ’s red leash matches my red shirt and the red second-place ribbon he earned.7
Mother worked hard, too, scrimping and saving and stretching each penny thin. She fed us from the garden, chicken house, and pasture: eggs and tomatoes, okra and beans, chickens she killed and cleaned and plucked, beef Daddy carried to the butcher. She also fed us squirrels and rabbits, when Daddy and/or our brothers hunted, and free government cheese and butter. We had two freezers full of ice-crusted mysteries in tin foil and plastic. She sewed the vast majority of our clothes from clearance bolts of fabric and carefully preserved Simplicity patterns, tsking over mentions of name brands and tutting over complaints about uncomfortably tight cuts that saved precious inches of material.
In short, I grew up in a household of competing parental personalities that reinforced the pediatrician’s binary rhyme, surrounded by Daddy’s largesse and Mother’s frugal home-making.
There was a singular exception to the tension. Both of our parents loved books and vinyl albums, so much so that we had shelves and shelves and shelves, in every room. (We went to the library a lot, but also to used book stores and the sale racks at record shops.)
Photo of elementary-aged me sitting on the floor of the bedroom I shared with my middle sister until our second-oldest brother moved out. I’m petting Daddy’s favorite sheltie, Mac’s Best of Love (aka Bess). The background is cluttered with bunk beds and metal shelving piled high with board games, books, and vinyl story albums.
Thereby Hangs a Tale
My favorite album was and still is Eddy Arnold’s Thereby Hangs a Tale. And, when I was in fifth grade, my love for Eddy Arnold sparked a battle with the pediatrician’s rhyme.
My fifth grade teacher decided our classroom theme, for that year’s Harvest Festival, would be Urban Cowboy. A genuine faux honky-tonk. For a small fee, parents and other visitors to the Harvest Festival could admire our straw bale decorations, enter a raffle to win a real calf (which was penned into a corner of the classroom), and enjoy the spectacle of kids in country-and-western costumes lip syncing our favorite songs.
Photo of fifth-grade me coveting a half-grown Holstein calf that was penned in a corner of our classroom during Harvest Festival. I’m wearing costume vest and chaps (which Mother had made, some years earlier, for my middle sister) over jeans and a white shirt I had already outgrown. A small felt costume cowboy hat hangs on my back.
When the theme was introduced, I knew EXACTLY which song I would perform. Eddy Arnold’s version of Ghost Riders in the Sky. Who needs three Christmas ghosts when you can have a herd of the devil’s cows, chased by the Inferno’s cowboys? I knew every nuance of that song, every change of minor key. It was bound to be a crowd pleaser. (If you haven’t heard it, get thee hence to the internet and listen. I’ll wait…)
Back already? Okay, on with my tale…
The combined and somewhat horrified NO! from Mother and my teacher stopped me short. But okay, if they thought the ghost riders were too much horror for the room, how about the location-friendly Tennessee Stud, from the same album? Nope.
Eddy Arnold’s voice was a man’s voice. I was a girl.
But I wouldn’t actually be singing, so why did the voice matter? Even if I bowed to Mother’s choice and went with Teresa Brewer, surely no one in the audience would think I actually sang like Teresa Brewer? The conversation turned hostile at that point, on all sides. I declared it was Eddy Arnold or nothing. Mother declared it was Teresa Brewer or else. My teacher declared he had better things to do than explain to me what should already be obvious.
I wasn’t even allowed to resign with my dignity intact, to join my classmates who had opted out of performing. Mother knotted me into my sister’s too-small costume and yanked me up hard when I dared complain, again, about the injustice of it all.
Photo of fifth-grade me doing my best to avoid Mother’s ire as I lip sync Teresa Brewer’s Music! Music! Music!. My most prominent memories from the night are that my clothes were too tight, my sister was mad because I wore her costume, and Mother wanted me to stay within arm’s reach in case I needed another physical reminder that I was a kid and she was an adult. (I did, in fact, receive a number of these reminders as the night wore on. Whether I needed them or not remains up for discussion.)
Memories being what they are, this retelling isn’t accurate. But it’s accurate enough, because the memory isn’t the point. The ensuing years are the point, the escalating Mother-Daughter War. All of the mutual disdain and despair over my clothes and my hair and my aspirations and my hard-headed determination to shun the sugar and spice, the everything nice I was meant to embody, in favor of the snakes and snails and puppy dog tails that were reserved for boys.
Photo of a cottonmouth snake (aka water moccasin). This zoom photo of the cottonmouth’s head shows its vertical “cat’s eye” pupil and heat-sensing pit (between eye and nostril). As a snake-loving girl I learned to spot these distinctive signs of the pit viper family, venomous snakes that shared the habitats I enjoyed exploring. This photo was taken in 2021 at Back Bay Wildlife Refuge, because I still enjoy exploring habitats shared by snakes.
In the part of me that cherishes Mother’s memory, I sympathize with her quest to pave me a feminine path in the world. In the part of me that still chafes from the strain, I regret the energy she invested in shoving me toward her ideal of feminine, while I defiantly shoved back. It was exhausting for both of us.
All because I was assigned female at birth
When it comes to gender, doctors get to make the call. As Kate Bornstein explains:
In most cultures, we’re assigned a gender at birth–and once you’ve been assigned a gender, that’s what you are and always will be. For the most part, it’s doctors who dole out the gender assignments, which shows you how emphatically gender has been medicalized. These doctors look down at a newly born infant and say, ‘It has a penis, it’s a boy.’ Or they say, ‘It doesn’t have a penis, it’s a girl.’ It has little or nothing to do with vulvas or vaginas, let alone DNA, hormones, or dozens of other nuances of biological sex. It’s all penises or no penises: gender assignment is both phallocentric and genital. Other cultures are not or have not been so rigid.
Kate Bornstein in Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (Chapter 4, Section 2, paragraph 1)
I was assigned female at birth, and I was pretty much okay with that assignment, on the surface. At least, I didn’t question or resent what being female meant about my body.8 What I questioned and resented were the societal (and maternal) expectations around my gender, the insistence that sugar and spice and everything nice should be all I needed or wanted to be.
Have mercy, indeed.
Photo of me as an awkward teenager with a vague hairstyle featuring short, feathered bangs and sides and mullet-like length in the back. I had huge glasses and orthodontic braces. I’m wearing that summer’s favorite long pink T-shirt, a dainty necklace and bracelet, and I’m showing off a king snake I had caught.
I wanted to be made of the tracks wildlife left in the woods. Of horses and goats and cows. Of kitten whiskers and, yes, puppy dog tails. Of snakes and salamanders, weeds and creeks, storms and katydids, stories and books. I read Henry and Ribsy and wanted to be Henry. I read The Black Stallion and wanted to be Alex. I read Where the Red Fern Grows and wanted a pair of hounds so badly I could feel their sleek presence in my dreams.
Photo of my foxhound Sarah. Sarah was the first dog I could call my very own. A friend gifted her to me from a beautiful litter of puppies. I was in college at the time, and I loved Sarah fiercely. I imagined, years ahead, taking her everywhere with me. She died before she was a year old, lost to a careless early morning moment when she got on the road.
Photo of college-age me with my Yorkshire Terrier, Angel. Here, both of us are fresh from cleaning up after some muddy excursion outside. A family friend had show dogs, and, after Sarah died, he gave me Angel. Around one year old at the time, Angel had not done well in shows. For many happy years, Angel did go everywhere with me, usually in my oversized purse.
But I also read The Witch of Blackbird Pond (I wanted to be both Kit and Hannah). And Nancy Drew (I wanted to be George). And the Dragonriders of Pern series (I wanted to be both Menolly and Jaxom). An obscure favorite called Horse in the House by William Corbin (I desperately wanted to be Melly). Even Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (I wanted to be Izzy) hinted that female didn’t have to mean sugar and spice and everything nice.
Photo of young adult me, finally free of the Mother-Daughter Wars, with my pet rat Izzy riding on my shoulder. Izzy was a hooded rat, rescued from the feeder cage of a pet store for $1.50. She had an aquarium-cage in my room, but she liked to ride on my shoulder and play in my hair. It seems Mother was right all along. As soon as I achieved Farrah-length hair, I kept a rat nest in it.
And then I got a chance to define myself
As long as we lived in a stable household, the Mother-Daughter Wars slogged on. Even a few years longer, after the household deteriorated into instability and poverty (the exact poverty she had always anticipated, it seemed), battles would flare. Mother continued her siege of demand and reprimand. I continued my resistance of hide and defy. She told me that my sisters, at least, made the effort. She was correct. They did. I didn’t.
I don’t know how our war would have turned out, had the household remained stable. But our father left, remarried, refused to pay alimony, and changed the life insurance to his new wife’s name mere months before he died. I was fifteen when he died, when Mother caved to the grief that had plagued her since Daddy left and told me she was too tired to raise me anymore. If I needed anything, I should ask my older sisters, and if I didn’t need anything I should simply stay out of the way.
I had outlasted the siege. I was free to dash off into the woods in any spare moment, to read as much as I liked (and as late as I liked, tucked tight under as many cats and dogs as could fit on my bed), to cook and sew only well enough to suit myself, and to wear yesterday’s muddy torn clothes to school if I wanted. It was a lonely relief, but at least it was relief.
In fact, my affinity for snakes and snails and puppy dog tails proved useful.
After Mother shook off her grief and began building a new life, she resumed morning pet duty: putting the dogs into their pens each morning, feeding and watering while I dressed for school. Otherwise I took care of the outside pets. The dogs and I, and whatever cats felt like tagging along, went for long rambles each afternoon. I pulled burrs, brushed or cut out all of our matts, plucked ticks, and watched for signs of injuries or illness. I fed and watered each evening and escorted the dogs to their assigned crates at night. I chased the goats off of the cars and back into their pen, when they broke out or were released for an afternoon, and watched over deliveries of the twin and triplet baby goats that arrived each spring. I emptied and refilled the wading pools that our ducks and geese fouled each day.
Because I was outside anyway, I stacked wood and mowed the yard and helped my oldest sister in the garden. Wielding an old slingblade, I beat back tangles of honeysuckle and stands of ragweed that encroached on the yard. I carried snakes away from the porch, climbed the roof to clean the chimney, and braved the spidery attic to fetch and re-stash boxes. I liked best the dirty jobs, and Mother was content to let me do them. It turns out that, when there’s no man about, girls might need to be more than sugar and spice and everything nice.
Photo of college-age me with long untidy hair pulled back under a folded bandana. I’m at the kitchen counter, preparing a meal, and there’s a tortoiseshell kitten on my shoulder.
Between fifteen and twenty-three, I reveled in the freedom I had gained through loss. I graduated high school, and, when I gained control of my own bank account (where Mother had deposited every 4-H prize check I had ever earned) at age 18, I emptied the account to buy a $600 car from my oldest sister’s boyfriend. My middle sister gave me a few unenthusiastic driving lessons, and suddenly I could get myself back and forth to everywhere without begging a ride from sisters and friends. I talked the local veterinarian into hiring me, worked two additional part-time jobs, and did well enough in college to keep the full scholarship I had earned with high standardized test scores. (My test scores did not reflect any particular proficiency or aptitude. I simply had a knack for standardized tests, which played to my strengths of reading, creative puzzle solving in quiet rooms, and informed guesswork when encountering the unknown.)
Year by year, I grew up and moved on. When I finished my bachelor’s degree in biology, I faced a happy pair of choices: should I pursue my snakes and snails onto a biology research path, or should I follow the puppy dog tails into veterinary school? I chose the puppy dog tails. (I won’t claim to have never regretted that choice. Regret is one of my lifelong habits.)
The rhyme stayed with me
I lived in a dorm over the university veterinary clinics, in Knoxville, where I stayed too busy to stew over a childhood rhyme. But the rhyme still surfaced occasionally. Particularly when The Spice Girls were popular. Which was about the same time that I met my rescue tabby, Spice.
Photo of Spice in my dorm. She is standing, front feet braced on the long windowsill that doubled as a bookshelf, peering out of my window over the receiving area for the large animal clinic. She’s wearing a bandage over her shoulders, covering the scabs that prompted someone to drop her off at the small animal clinic as a wounded stray.
The older I got, the less I pondered that rhyme on the pediatrician’s wall. Until recent years. Now I find almost daily reminders of the Mother-Daughter War, of my escape through loss from Mother’s version of female tradition. Of my bittersweet dash away from the siege, toward a future filled with snakes and snails and puppy dog tails.
What if I was a kid again, today? That same kid? Would I be able to make the same escape? I worry that my escape was a fluke, a privileged path through a brief convergence of opportunities.9 I worry the future is closing, not opening. Especially for kids who experience a deeper unease, who yearn not just for the other side of the rhyme, but an altogether different definition of gender. I never questioned or resented the gender a delivery room obstetrician assigned me at birth. But what of the kids who did and do?
My memories should stand as old-fashioned artifacts of bygone times. Instead, new generations are experiencing new traumas, inflicted by the polarizing lenses of binary, cisgender ideologies.
What is the deal with gender, anyway?
I’ve yet to find a satisfactory definition of gender. I’m drawn to a quote by Ian Hacking, which wasn’t meant to address gender but seems to fit. Hacking’s words strike a particularly interesting chord, for me, when paired with a quote about capitalism:
High-level semantical words like ‘fact,’ ‘real,’ ‘true,’ and ‘knowledge’ are tricky. Their definitions, being prone to vicious circles, embarrass the makers of dictionaries. These words work at a different level from that of words for ideas or words for objects. For brevity I have called them elevator words. They are used to say something about what we say about the world. Facts, truths, knowledge, and reality are not in the world like protozoa, or being in love. Philosophers keep on fussing with them.
Ian Hacking in The Social Construction of What? (p. 80)
Social theory is often likened to lenses of various cuts that enable us to discern patterns in human action. When the lenses are cut solely to confirm one’s faith and denounce whatever opposes it, the resulting vision is strictly ideological. Such lenses, commonly worn in politics and public debating, function more like blinders.
Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, and Craig Calhoun in “Getting Real”, the collective conclusion to Does Capitalism Have a Future?
While my experiences and expectations regarding the word gender continue to grow and change, while I claw at my own blinders, I’ve settled into a tentative personal understanding along these lines:
If gender is a genuine trait (that’s a big if), then
it must follow that gender varies, because all traits vary, and
these variations should manifest between a set of extremes
with the vast majority of individuals situated between, rather than at, the extremes.
If gender is a “real” trait, or even a socially constructed one, my experience shouldn’t be unique. In fact, I should be one of the majority who experience our binary-constrained society somewhere between the extremes. And I believe this is the case. I’m clearly not the only girl who despised that dratted rhyme, who dreaded a lifetime of sugar and spice while yearning for snakes and snails. (Nor am I the only girl released from her Mother-Daughter War by household trauma.) None of these constraints were, or are, necessary. A world of binary gender expectations isn’t necessary.
Which is why I wrote this long blog post
It’s worth repeating: My memories should stand as old-fashioned artifacts of bygone times. Instead, new generations are experiencing new traumas, inflicted by the polarizing lenses of binary, cisgender ideologies.
Let me be clear, my years in the Mother-Daughter War are petty spats compared to the abuses endured by many cis women, trans women, and non-binary people. I do not wish to usurp the stories of feminist, trans, and non-binary activists, nor draw attention away from their long struggle. I’ve benefitted from the work of feminist activists, in particular, and I’m grateful. I’ve learned from trans and non-binary advocates and activists, and I’m grateful. I owe my education(s) and career(s) to those who have done the heavy work of changing the world. I’m grateful.
I’m not equipped, emotionally, for a life of activism. But I have a small platform, a great deal of unearned privilege, and a history that seems pertinent to the moment. So I wrote this long blog post. I wrote with the hope that my story might help some mother, somewhere, call a cease-fire in her own Mother-Daughter War and decide, instead, to explore the beautiful territories and rich opportunities between the binaries.
Photo from near the top of our terraced pasture after a brief snowfall. Tire tracks are visible, left by a neighbor’s tractor. A single round bale of hay awaits collection. The neighbor cut and baled the pasture in exchange for all but one or two bales of hay, which we kept for the goats.
Photo from inside “my” boggy acres of Tennessee woods, during winter. There is a thick layer of dead leaves, several nurse logs (downed by a past tornado), and a rich growth of saplings in the tornado-cut spaces. This place was my refuge and heart-home, during my youth and young adult years. I loved these pieces of land as well as I’ve ever loved anyone or anything. They sheltered me through a series of undiagnosed and untreated depressions, and their memory shelters me still.
Notes
1. Please don’t read this to mean that I harbor any resentment against children and adults who are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. I grew up with several wonderfully contented sugar and spice and everything nice people, and I’ve met more as an adult. I simply knew, from my earliest knowing, that I was more of a snakes and snails and puppy dog tails kind of person. (click here to return)
2. This photo dates from a mid-elementary-school age. As it was clearly summer, Mother had slackened some of her standards regarding my hair, which is tousled in odd lengths as it recovers from one of the short haircuts. As for the striped halter top and yellow shorts, I inherited some dozen of each as hand-me-downs from my older sisters. Mother sewed them in bulk. (click here to return)
3. Later, my sisters and I commuted to our undergraduate degrees from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. I even continued the tradition, for a few years, after moving to Knoxville for veterinary school. Whenever I had a non-working weekend, I commuted four hours “home” to mow the yard or stack wood or mend fences or simply wander the fields and woods until it was time to drive four hours back. The years after I ceased commuting, when I declared somewhere else home, were fraught. Mother resisted and resented my decision to make only infrequent visits. She complained about having to pay someone to mow, about the expense of central heating with no one to stack the wood, and about loneliness. Loneliness, I now understand, was the real issue. I was the youngest child and the last to leave, so I was the one who left her alone. Our mutual insistence on misunderstanding each other’s motivations eventually led to a decade-long breach that never quite healed. (Readers might sense, here, an unhealthy dose of mother-daughter strain. It’s a common enough family dynamic. Read on for more.) (click here to return)
4. Mother probably detested the drive as much as I did, though not enough to transfer our care to one of the family doctors in Fayetteville. And her hard-and-fast rule held that if I was sick enough to miss school (with an undeniable fever and/or vomiting, which were the only acceptable excuses) I was sick enough to see the doctor. (click here to return)
6. I was nearing old enough, deemed to be 11 years old for me, when our parents’ marriage fell apart. Daddy had even shopped a bit, with me, for dalmatian puppies. I had read the book at least 101 times. (click here to return)
7. Daddy purchased BJ from a “show quality” litter. I suppose the dream was to expand into the conformation side of AKC shows. To finish a championship and, perhaps, to establish a lineage of champions. (Our father often dreamed big.) But BJ stopped growing just short of breed standard height. He was undersized, a career-ending flaw. Daddy entered him a few times, anyway, bluffing toward standard height with floofy grooming techniques. They even earned a few ribbons and points. But finishing a championship was never a realistic goal. Besides being undersized, BJ was a snappy fellow (stop judging!). He failed many a temperament test, never thrived in the obedience ring, and lived out his life as a grumpy little ornament on our untidy acres. He was Daddy’s dog, but I loved him and he loved me back and we spent many afternoons exploring together. (Especially after Daddy left.) Then many uncomfortable evenings pulling tangles and burrs from our hair. (click here to return)
8. Except that I feared all the ways that my uterus could and did destabilize my life. I’m bookmarking this thought, here, in hopes of expanding it into a separate post, later. (click here to return)
9. I don’t mean to overlook the bizarre irony of seeing my father’s desertion and death, my mother’s exhaustion and grief, as opportunity. There’s a profound dysfunction in my perception of these memories that mirrors the various dysfunctions our family navigated, during those years. (click here to return)
References
Bornstein, K. (2016). Gender outlaw: On men, women, and the rest of us. (2nd edition, Kindle edition). Vintage Books.
Hacking, I. (1999). The social construction of what? (3rd printing). Harvard University Press.
Wallerstein, I., Collins, R., Mann, M., Derluguian, G., & Calhoun, C. (2013). Does capitalism have a future? (Kindle edition). Oxford University Press.
I have been saving links to essays and stories more interesting and more important than my musings, but this post is already too long. If you’ve stayed and read to the end, I very much appreciate your attention and time. I’ll add the links to a later (shorter) post.
I don’t mark the anniversary of Mother’s car accident every year. In years where the date (today) passes without my noticing how it is today, I congratulate myself. This is not one of those years. This year I’ve noticed. All week.
I’ve noticed, but I can’t say that I’ve wallowed. This feels like an improvement over the wallowing years, though perhaps a step back from the not-noticing years. Maybe each of these years are actually equal, on my journey. Wallowing, noticing, not-noticing, maybe these things say more about growth and time than I’m capable of understanding.
And perhaps these noticings and not-noticings say something about how my mind works, about how it was working (or not working) in those individual years. Perhaps it’s not a complete non sequitur to point out that bee’s toes are much more exciting and interesting than bee’s knees, though the knees tend to get all the memes.
Macro photograph of a bee’s furry leg as it grasps a bright yellow cosmos petal while it is perched to sip nectar. The bee’s foot seems to be made up of three delicate hooked toes, each curled around the edge of the petal, while the bee’s knees appear to be simple hinge joints.
All of these wonderings and maunderings feel somewhat unproductive, but they are sometimes where poems start. So I’m letting myself wonder and maunder.
Macro photograph of a bee collecting pollen and nectar from the tiny yellow flowers of fennel. The black-and-yellow bee has yellow pollen dusting the hairs on its legs, head, and thorax. There’s even a scatter of pollen across the front edge of its wings. Its eyes are large and vaguely reflect the sky and sun, its antennae are long and segmented, and its delicate hooked toes are visible. Its knees are, relatively speaking, unremarkable.
While I’m waiting to see if a poem arrives, it seemed reasonable to update an old entry from April 2012, Finding What I Wasn’t Looking For. (In the post, I talked about Mother’s affinity for four-leafed clovers.) Except somehow, in updating the post (to add photo captions, mostly), I managed to change the post’s date to today. Now I can’t change it back.
Perhaps this, too, says something about how my mind works.
Macro photograph of a small plant with pointed leaves and three light-purple flowers. Each flower has four petals and four prominent stamens.
In trying to capture this weed (which I believe might be field madder), I’ve committed every possible photography blunder. Over the past few weeks, I’ve discarded images that were blurry, poorly lit, overwhelmed by background clutter, too distant, too close, blocked by a sleeve or the camera strap… the list goes on. I almost gave up.
Since today began as a failure day, marred by oversleep, bookkeeping errors, and lost office supplies, I decided to try again. What harm could come from adding one more frustration?
Instead of frustration, I found a moment of complete peace. This four-leaf clover, growing beside a patch of madder, felt like a visit from my mother.
Macro photograph of a four-leafed clover surrounded by blades of grass and other indistinct greenery.
One of Mother’s many talents was an affinity for four-leaf clovers. From her chair on the porch, glass of iced tea in hand, she’d point to a spot across the driveway. My siblings and I would follow her directions and retrieve the prize. Walking into the pediatrician’s office, she’d pause near the sidewalk, then laugh as we groaned over her obsession. Getting out of her car at school, she’d drop a book, reach to pick it up, and find a four-leaf clover growing through a crack in the pavement
I did not inherit this particular skill. Four-leaf clovers are vanishingly rare for me, so today’s find felt as if Mother must have been looking over my shoulder. The sensation doubled when I found a second one.
Macro photograph of a second four-leafed clover surrounded by blades of grass and other indistinct greenery.
In August of last year, Mother was involved in a serious car accident. She died in October. As we emptied her house, day after day of sorting memories and treasures and curious little mysteries, we found four-leaf clovers everywhere. Saved in envelopes, filed with old bills, stuffed in drawers and cabinets, sprinkled across shelves. Even pressed in the pages of her Bible.
Photograph of a dried four-leaf clover, pressed between the pages of one of Mother’s Bibles.
The house cried four-leaf clovers, orphaned keepsakes sifting from every crevice. A lifetime’s worth and more. So many that I felt no urge to pick today’s pair, though I was very grateful to have found them. I hovered a while, happy as I’ve been in months. Then I took my pictures, said another goodbye, and left Mother’s four-leaf clovers in the yard.
I’m delighted to announce that my first poetry collection, Watershed (Kelsay Books), has been released in paperback and Kindle ebook formats. The paperback ($20/US) is available through the Kelsay Books website (here) or through Amazon (here), while the Kindle ebook ($9.99/US) is available through Amazon (here). (For more details, I’ve created a permanent page for Watershedhere.)
Watershed front cover: a pale sunset image of clouds and sky over a pool of water, which reflects the clouds and sky, surrounded by seagrasses and shrubs. Text on the cover reads: Watershed, poems, Rae Spencer.
The poems in Watershed are mostly autobiography, written within my nostalgia for the landscapes of Tennessee, my journey into Virginia’s coastal landscapes, and my tenuous understandings of how “growing up” changes my gaze.
Photograph of a chickadee fledgling perched on our deteriorating fence. The young chickadee is shedding downy nestling feathers, while the fence’s aged wood is cracked and weathered.
As I pondered this post, how to introduce my debut collection, I finally grasped the word connection between debut and debutante. How ridiculous to contrast myself–middle-age, married, and profoundly awkward–against the idealized debutantes of historical romances.
Photograph of my reflection in a window. My face is hidden by the camera I used to capture the image. My graying hair is shoulder-length in tangled layers. I’m wearing a sleeveless shirt, so the tattoos on my hands and arms are visible–an ink collection of flora and fauna.
And yet, here I am, a debut author sending my first poetry collection into the world. I’ve loved every minute of the process, from the writing to the planning to the organizing to the submission to the rounds of editing after acceptance, all the way through this final phase of setting up author pages and posting announcements. I suppose all of this means that I’m finding my way.
Photograph of a brown thrasher fledgling hiding in a nook between a planter and our fence. The little fledgling is brown-and-tan-striped with the exaggerated beak, forehead, and eyes that render baby birds endearingly cute.
Finding my way to where?
To here, for now. To exactly where I am.
Photograph of an osprey passing overhead with a large fish grasped in its talons. The osprey’s muscular wings are fully extended, long tan-striped primary feathers spread at the tips, and its sharp beak and eyes are turned toward some unseen destination.
Photograph of a blue jay in the process of taking flight from the top of our wooden fence. The blue jay’s wings are extended, tiny black feet stretched into its launch. The bird is carrying in its beak a peanut, selected from a small pile of peanuts we left on the fence.
To a small yard in a sprawling suburb, somewhere in the middle of life’s extremes, poised between the lush luxuries of nostalgia and hope. There’s always something precarious on the horizon, but, for today, I’m here.
Photograph of a hummingbird perched on a woody vine of honeysuckle. There are no honeysuckle blooms in frame, so everything is green and brown, including the hummingbird’s feathers.
The following links lead to articles, essays, and posts that are more important and more interesting than my debut poetry collection:
Rae Spencer 