Bittersweet

American Bittersweet grows wild in the fields around here. It is a native shrubby vine with small white flowers that bloom in early summer, but it is in autumn when it displays its true beauty. When everything around it is bleak and brown- it’s red berries capped in gold spill out from the vines providing feasts for the songbirds and wreaths for old abandoned tractors left rusting along the hedgerow. I knew it as a word before I ever knew it as a plant. It came home to me in the lingering moments of final farewells and it is within me during times of great joy and celebration. The bitter and the sweet are intertwined, inseparable. I wouldn’t have it any other way.