Slough in a Box

Normally our mail does not arrive until 4:00 p.m. but our mailman this morning noticed that we had an unusually large number of packages, and probably didn’t want to drive around with them bouncing in his truck all day, so he made a special morning delivery about 10:00 a.m. The largest box was from my Grandma Edna. It was COVERED with packing tape, and after wrestling with it for about twelve minutes, I finally was able to peek inside, and I just started giggling like crazy! Amidst a bunch of other treasures was a bundle of cattails from North Dakota!

I couldn’t have been more thrilled with the contents of any package this morning. When Grandma Edna lived on the farm she lived amid pockets of sloughs. Everywhere you looked there was a dip in the ground, filled with water and cattails. Whenever I visited her I would always look longingly at those cattails. I thought they were so interesting when I was a little girl, and I wanted so very much to know if they really felt like a cat’s tail.

One time I had spend the day with Grandma Edna and we were out picking up Uncle Tom from the field in the late summer, and I kept asking and asking and asking all sorts of preschool-natured questions about cattails. Finally my grandma stopped the car and said, “Well, let’s just go out and pick some!” I couldn’t have been more delighted. We gathered a whole bundle, and later on that day when she drove me home, I was just ecstatic to show my mother the cattails.

Except my mother wouldn’t let them in the front door, fearing they would burst. (They do burst, and make a terrific mess). I was slightly devastated, banished to the playhouse with my cattails. But I played and played with them outside. I stuck them in the ground. I pretended they were medevial torches. I carried them here and there and probably bopped my brother on the head with them a few times and bribed him not to tell. Eventually they did burst open, with oodles of fluffy seeds inside. This did not slow me down; I simply made mud stew with the seeds.

In the little note attached to the cattails, my grandmother mentioned that now I have my own house, and I could take the cattails inside if I wanted. And of course I did, happily! All day long Ms. Crazy Preschooler has been asking questions about cattails and seeds and when they burst open. I am filled with joy to look at the cattails on my kitchen table, and realize that probably my poor country-deprived children would never even know what a cattail was if it hadn’t been for their thoughtful great-grandma, because I don’t know that I would have ever thought to take time out to point out a cattail to them.