Tree Story

My cottonwood tree has transitioned from male to female. For twenty years it was happy to be a male, as were we with it being a male, as female cottonwoods drop that eponymous stuff every June all over everything, like snow falling in January.

We were OK with the cottonwoods down by the river doing their thing, far enough away to be kind of pretty rather than annoying. But our transgendered cottonwood sits in our front yard, where we planted it 22 years ago as a cotton-less cottonwood, or male, to shade what would become our beautiful courtyard full of flowers, bushes, and grass. It quickly grew to enormous size, as tall as our two-story, 30-foot tall house. And never once did it shed cotton, because, after all it is/was a male. 

When it began raining down its cotton this year I of course went to the Internet to try to figure this out. I found out that nurseries sometimes make mistakes in their gender classification, but the fact that our tree never released cotton for 20 years seems to negate that possibility. Sometimes, female trees take a few years to produce cotton, leading you to believe you have a male instead. A “few years” does not translate to 20 years.

Like so many other places across the world, New Mexico has had an unusual spring and early summer: it’s been raining. Ordinarily, after a few April showers things dry up, warm weather descends, and by the beginning of June it often reaches 100 degrees in Albuquerque. This year, in typically 10 degrees cooler El Valle, I was dressed in wool socks, long pants, and a jacket until about two weeks ago, when temperatures finally reached near normal and the rains abated, at least a little (this is not a complaint, but a celebration). So one could surmise that maybe all the rain and cool temperatures caused the cotton release. Except that MALE COTTONWOODS DO NOT PRODUCE COTTON.

What has my transgendered tree wrought? Well, the largest, most beautiful columbines I’ve ever grown—definitely the product of rain and cool temperatures—are coated with cotton that makes them droop and moan. My green grass is blotted white. Cobwebs of cotton fill every nook and cranny of window casings and doorways. Every time I open a door, cotton blows in to cling to anything soft, particularly the rugs. My dogs make sure it gets distributed upstairs where they join me at night. 

Yesterday a quick rainstorm, with lots of wind, blew through El Valle dropping what I fervently hope is the last of the cotton. I raked up as much as I could from the yard but the columbines took a beating. It kind of reminds me of what’s happening in the transgender world of people. Seems to me that all that fury and disdain dumped on the feminists who created beauty out of hard work and growth, much like my columbines, just clogs the relational paths that we all share