There is a patchy corner of the front yard, surrounded by purple coneflower and periwinkle. It is sun-soaked in the afternoons, under shade in the mornings. Here, in the middle of May, I dig two small holes, place an orange milkweed sapling in each, and pack potting soil and compost around them. For two weeks I water and watch and will the two young plants to take root, to grow.
Early last year, I joined Garden for Birds, a community science project run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. On the sign-up form, there is a chance to upload a ‘before’ picture of your yard, and an outline of the project. Once a month, I receive a checklist with steps to prepare my yard and plant more native species. Species that will draw butterflies and moths to feed and forage, and songbirds that in turn feed on them.
I picked the milkweed from a catalogue of native plants. The catalogue itself ran four pages in length, rows upon rows of common and Latin names, some of which I recognised, a majority that I did not. The milkweed arrived in the mail: three saplings in small plastic containers, the soil and their survival held in place with layers of cardboard. After I plant them, every spring storm and subsequent downpour has me worried, glancing in their direction. But they hold on.
Next to the patch, hanging off a hook from the porch, is a bird feeder. I hung it up in February, on one of those bleak and bitterly cold Kansas mornings when the light seems like it has been filtered through a sieve and the end of winter is nowhere in sight. For a week, the feeder sat untouched, swaying in the wind. But soon, a boisterous nuthatch paid it a visit. Titmice followed. As did chickadees and cardinals, finches, juncos, and sparrows.
Many of the birds that visit my feeder will be in Kansas year-round. But some others in the yard are only temporary visitors. As spring storms roll in, it is these species I keep an eye out for. In the tangle of tree limbs by the neighbour’s home, I spot a golden-crowned kinglet. There are vireos and warblers, an odd flycatcher. The stand of trees at the end of the street is again home to Mississippi kites. Their high whistling calls will be a constant all summer. It is another reason I picked the milkweed – it would also attract monarch butterflies on their many thousand-mile journeys each Spring and Fall. Yet another temporary visitor, yet another wayfaring stranger in a strange land.
By June, the milkweed is holding steady. In the backyard, starlings scatter from the trees as I hang laundry to dry. I wonder about natives and aliens and the jumble of green by the clothesline. How many of these plants and trees are on that list of natives? And what of the people who may plant them? People who may have ended up here for opportunity or a fresh start. People like me, with the words ‘non-immigrant alien’ stamped on much of my paperwork, and whose stay depends on a visa?
I left for the same reason so many others have: hope and a measure of hubris, and because I’d imagined a different sort of life for myself. I was no stranger to this business of leaving. At eight, it was to boarding school. At eighteen, it was a crowded railway platform to college on the other side of the country. Then it was through airport departure doors and immigration counters; first Sweden, and finally, America. Leaving India for the US was like a long jumper’s leap, the many departures before it a flurry of steps, the run-up. Threaded in the act of leaving is transformation, as Rebecca Solnit has written. I left because, in the haze of distance, I saw the chance of becoming someone else.
I know this now, a decade after having left. But back then, all I knew was that leaving seemed like a straight road to the transformations I longed for. And so, like many others, you stand in line at the American Embassy, hope undimmed in your eyes. You put up with the indignities of immigration, with the uncertainties and visas and the feeling of being a temporary visitor. You put up with the grief of leaving one place but never really having arrived in another.
In July, the milkweed is scythed down by a well-meaning but unaware neighbour and her lawnmower. For a few days afterwards, I peer at the patch each morning, checking to see if maybe the roots had taken hold, and the stems still poked through. But all I see are rows of clippings the mower has left behind. Shortly after, I have to move. The new house is a squat building with large windows that bathe the living room in light and leave me smitten when I first view it. The front yard has mulch beds recently planted with red yucca and catmint and many frowzy clumps of grasses that I do not recognise, but suspect are from my list. I spend my first morning sitting on the porch with a mug of coffee, buoyed by the hope one often feels in new surroundings, and spot a ruby-throated hummingbird hovering by the yucca. There is room and time, I tell myself, for milkweed and other saplings that I can plant with my own hands.
By November, the evenings are slowly losing light, and the frost sets in. Early on a weekend morning, I drive an hour west to Quivira National Wildlife Refuge to see yet another temporary visitor. The inland salt marshes are frequent stopover sites for migrating birds. I hear the low, rattling calls of sandhill cranes before I see them. There are hundreds of them gathered in the marsh. In the dull blue light of dawn, I see a streak of white among the sea of grey bodies: whooping cranes, four adults and a juvenile, stepping calmly through the frigid waters.
I spent the night before reading. These endangered whooping cranes spend the warm months in Canada, in Wood Buffalo National Park. They fly south to Texas for the winter, a long route that takes them through the Dakotas and Nebraska, before they arrive in the salt marshes of Quivira. These migrants are no strangers to leaving either. Do they feel as I do? Neither here nor there, always in two places at once? Perhaps they are smarter and realise that every immigrant is also an emigrant. That you can leave home and still reach home.
As sunlight soaks the marsh, they take-off. Noisy squadrons of sandhill cranes, followed by the five whooping cranes, gracefully climb and head towards Texas. I linger a while longer, listening to the wind whipping through the tall grass and the dopplered rattling calls in the distance, before getting back in my car.
The year has turned, and all that is left of the yucca in my yard are brittle seed pods on willowy stalks. The hummingbirds, like many others, have long flown south, leaving behind my patch of plants rooted in the Kansas soil.
And what of me?
On the radio, deportations and revoked visas. Funding cuts to universities. Masked government goons gunning people down on city streets. Some being silenced while others choose to be silent. This is not the same country I applied to come to a decade ago.
And yet, I have been considering filling out more forms, applying for a green card. Every form reminds me I am an alien. My immigration documents and this government want to tell me a story, unwritten but implied: You are not native here; you do not belong here. You are here but for a short while.
Maybe. But stories are in the telling. My plants have been in my yard for a few months, whereas I have been here for a decade. Perhaps there are roots below my feet: the friends I’ve made, the work I’ve done, the life I’ve shaped. I could tear them out, flee in the face of the hate. I could go back to India. But perhaps the most radical act is to stay, like the plants in my yard, rooted in belief and in hope and in action. And so, I’ll say to the birds flying south: good luck and godspeed, my friends. I’ve come a long way, and I’m staying.
