Your Ham is a Pig by Caroline Sutton

In March 2020 my daughter Sophia, husband Alex, and eleven-month-old Ella fled their apartment in Brooklyn and moved in with me on Long Island.  Most mornings I put Ella in a Bjorn and walked to Peconic Sound along a road cutting through a forest of gangly oaks, austere pitch pines, sassafras, hemlock, and wispy white pines.  “Good morning, trees!” I chirped, and Ella, intent on picking up language asap, mimicked, “Morning trees.”  “Morning, rocks.”  And so it went.  Although the trees didn’t return the greeting, they heard us and welcomed us—to her, their capacity for interchange went unquestioned. One day I walked into the kitchen where Ella, finger painting her high chair with yogurt, brightened and cried, “Tree!”  I was touched by the conflation, attributing only positive qualities to trees. Her parents raised their eyebrows.  

Just a year later we visited a local farm and fed a gentle old horse.  Ella let him take an apple from her palm, feeling the velvet nose and whiskers, rubbing her hand on her shirt after, and marveling at the size of the bite—who eats what being of major interest to her.  As we left, I called, “Goodbye horses,” and Ella, just two, piped, “He can’t understand you.”

Her logic startled me. And yet she tells elaborate stories, “Once upon a time, there was a little girl…” to her stuffed horse. So the divisions between humans and the animal and plant worlds are messy and ill proscribed for toddlers. Certainly, they are far more generous than we in allotting consciousness to things we readily dismiss.  Ella finds two sticks or strips of bark or leaves and the party begins, one inviting the other over for cake and lemonade, or getting on an airplane for California.  At that point, the tree has lost some of its tree-ness and become more essentially human in appetite, but her ease in handling, her immediate sharing as equals in conversations with a dead oak leaf intimates a kind of kinship and absence of hierarchy long lost to us. The sticks are not symbols; there is not such remove.

Ella bolts out the door and across the grass to check out my haphazard garden.  I’m no expert on fertilizing or spraying for predators, but a pro at deadheading.  I carry scissors.  She wants that autonomy so I got her some blunt ones that fit her tiny hands. Once we found that my son’s dog Lorenzo had bombarded a cluster of phlox, leaving a stalk nearly uprooted, the flower head toppled to the side, petals strewn like big wet snowflakes on the dirt.  “That one looks sad,” I muttered, giving it a trim.  We continued on, snipping tiny daisies whose petals caved inward and salvia that had lost all purple, leaving knobby green stalks poking the air. Weeks later she ran out in the yard, eyed a snapdragon browning at the edges, affirmed it was sad, and dive- bombed with her scissors.  I did a doubletake, wondering why I’d anthropomorphized the phlox, why I’d sentimentalized it. I had not told her it was dead, partly because it wasn’t, but more fundamentally because I wanted to skirt the death conversation. Now I had conflated death and sorrow rather than just telling her this is the end—this sunflower, this columbine is dead—and it’s how it should be, or how it just is.  When my son was two, my Siberian Husky died, a sleek silver dog I picked up in a trailer park in Alaska when I was eighteen.  She was lean, dark-eyed, and elegant, part wolf I’m convinced, and Paul loved her.  “Where’s Shantih?  he asked.  “Well,” I said, scrambling, “You know how the leaves fall off the trees in winter, the flowers wilt”— this was lame—”and die?”  Without missing a beat, he looked up and asked, “And you?”  

I lied, of course.

More often the dichotomies that surface for Ella in reading about or being in the natural world are less abstract, less profound than life and death—safe versus not, for instance, pleasant to have around versus not.  She pokes her fingers down the tiny holes of fiddler crabs and I hold my breath.  She finds a striated salamander (which I’ve never seen before) and I tell her instinctually not to touch it, fearing something, I’m not sure, that it will bite her, that its skin will cause a rash? (Both absurd.)  Too late I know I should’ve said, the salamander is shy and doesn’t want to be touched.  

A fly pirouettes around a bowl of peaches, alights on Ella’s cheddar cheese.  I gently shoosh it away with a sweep of my arm and wait for her to run into another room before grabbing the fly swatter and smashing it. If a moth is huffing at the screen to get out or a June bug climbing the stairs, I find a tissue and usher it out.  But this summer Ella found me on a chair outside my bedroom with baking soda plasters on both hands and all down one leg.  I had compulsively grabbed some crabgrass growing in the garden and had struck a yellowjacket nest. Ping ping, one after another, the stings hit my wrists and the back of my hands. I raced inside and pushed up my sleeves, alarming a bee trapped inside that stung my forearm while another found my calf as I pulled up a pant leg.  Ella didn’t witness the drama, but she knew I’d been stung.  I told her I had interfered with the bees’ home. Wouldn’t she want to protect her house if a giant scooped it up?  I don’t know if she bought it as she stood there staring stony faced at the messy white goo on my arm and bags of ice drip dripping beside me.  She now knows that bees can sting; I don’t know whether she assigns mal intent. 

But she’s fascinated by the possibility.  In one of the Babar books, little Alexander falls into a pond, and we get an underwater view of a crocodile coming his way.  Frantic, Babar launches a boat to save his son and hurls an anchor at the crocodile, which lodges in its mouth like a dentist’s gag, keeping its jaws wide and useless.  The crocodile thrashes about violently. I skip a few lines to downplay its fury. “Does he want to grab him?”  asks Ella.  “Why?  What is Babar doing?”  These are tough questions. “Babar wants to keep Alexander safe.  He can’t swim.”  This won’t do—she knows there’s more to it.  As we finish the book, Ella demands, “Again.”  But she flips fast through the first third of the book and finds the crocodile page and just stares.  Is it time to say, yes, some animals will eat you?  You eat animals?  Your ham is a pig?  I can’t do this yet.

How long can I sustain the ideas that trees have language, that animals have territory with legitimate boundaries, that we haven’t the right to cuddle or malign any creature on sight because we are not it, that rose bushes and cacti, bees and leopards can hurt you without being inherently evil, that certain deaths are more finite than others?  Or is the question, how long will such ideas interest her?  Will they nest somewhere in her consciousness so that one day when she learns about the intricate network of fungi by which trees of different species do in fact communicate, she will listen without a skeptical shrug, will go a step further and learn how such messaging enables the trees to survive? That is my hope. Today when I tell her to close her eyes and listen to the wind exhaling and inhaling or a flurry of chickadees just above or the lap and furl of waves, she’s into it.  Today when I hear a white-throated sparrow chiming somewhere, she tries to locate it among the heavy oak limbs.  When I push her on a swing, she says, “The wind feels my face.”   And once, when we clipped off a bunch of dead lychnis, clematis, and salvia, she gathered them into a bouquet and quietly planted them in the garden, patting the dirt around the stems and saying, “It will grow.”

Ella’s attraction to anything in the natural world isn’t governed by functionality or a cultivated aesthetic, not yet.  On the beach lie piles of Long Island grit—yellow and white quartz ground smooth and round, light oranges and pearly creams.  Underwater, brightened by reflection, they shine.  Pale pink eggs, little full moons with shadows, stones you could roll around in your pocket or put on your mantlepiece.  “Here’s a good one,” I coo, offering Ella an ochre globe, subdued and natural and classy as the walls of a Venetian villa. But she turns away indifferently, reaches into the water, and pulls out an ungainly gray rock, heavy, jagged, and coated in slippery algae. “A big one,” she remarks, plopping it back with no interest in keeping or collecting.  She pries at a bit of brick buried in the sand and another hefty piece of conglomerate.  She grapples it with two hands and offers it to me. “Here, you can have it!”  “Thank you!” I exclaim, taking hold, shuddering at my banal taste in prettiness and its implications, the favoring of white and pink and yellow over darker shades, the gut preference for what appears polished and uniform, the arbitrariness of this implicit value system.  What the hell am I teaching her?

Cardboard books for babies and word books for toddlers show jungle animals and farm animals, all of similar size and often alone on a page.  Kids learn cow, pig, duck, zebra, and so on.  Often the animals frolic, tire, and fall asleep, as every mom wants her kid to do. But two issues occur to me: a rhino appears the same size as a mouse; a rhino might well live in the same place as a cow.  We don’t learn scale or context. Relative size is tricky, as I’ve learned when Ella wants me to climb into a niche in a tree with her, or try on one of her dresses.  But where something lives and what lives with it is crucial for all of us. Yes, boy finds puppy or persuades parents to buy puppy and all live happily ever after.  Then there is the plover that picks meat from between the teeth of a crocodile. Why, asks Ella, why? Because it finds food there. Why?  Because the crocodile has been eating and the plover needs to eat too.  Why are there jaws?

This scene appears in one of the most unusual books I’ve come across for kids, Little Elephant’s Walk. Author Adrienne Kennaway spent most of her life in Kenya where East African wildlife impacted her deeply. Her picture book offers vibrant paintings of agama lizards, hyraxes, a genet, potto, aardwolf—animals I don’t know, Ella doesn’t know, and neither of us will remember, but the reasons for connectedness and modes of connectedness might create a sort of patterning on which other relations among plants and animals rely. Why are the impala running from the lion, why is an egret on the back of a rhino, why does a bird called a honey guide lead a ratel to a beehive in a tree stump, why is the crowned crane dancing?  A leopard lies in a cool breeze high in a tree while a rattlesnake coils around rocks in a hot sun. These animals want something, need something; Ella wants to eat my sandwich, stampedes through the living room, needs her mom.  We see a baboon with a baby on its back, a fruit bat enfolding its baby in its wings.

The growth of Ella’s awareness of what these animals are up to depends somewhat on timing and necessity.  Right now, no leopard lopes through my yard so I don’t need to tell her they’re dangerous.  A snake might, but most are harmless, though not all, so the characterization becomes more complex, just as it already has with fleshy mushrooms in the shade, which she fingers and mauls while I inform her that you can eat some mushrooms but not others. Why, why—the persistence with which she asks leaves me at times facing my own ignorance, at times abruptly awake to the choppiness of my answers.  Ella has probably seen enough pictures of porcupines to know not to touch one, but I’m uncertain how well a book illustration transfers to actual encounter.  (She never conceived the size of a horse before meeting one.)   Facts to be doled out about the natural world feel like ingredients in a sauce recipe that will result, maybe, in a mélange of fear and respect and affection, optimally at different times and in ways not mutually exclusive.  

More critical than facts is how to prolong the idea of agency, how to reconfigure an entrenched hierarchy that drives a human perspective to override that of anything else.  This is not mawkish empathy but necessity, a recognition of essential symbiosis, a plover in the jaws of a crocodile.

And someday, however painful, we will need to remind her of the salamander—people may touch you in ways you don’t want—or what I should have said about the salamander.  

Caroline Sutton is the author Don’t Mind Me, I Just Died, an essay collection, and Mainlining, a memoir.  Her essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, The Literary Review, The Pinch, Cimarron Review, Southwest Review, and Ascent, among others. Her upcoming collection of essays focuses on the natural world.  

22 September 2022