Everything Here Has a Plan

...except me

Ever seen an armadillo? Like a little tank. Blind as a thumb. It leaps straight up when startled, the single worst evolutionary decision an animal has ever made.

On a road full of cars, an armadillo jumps into your bumper.

At least the deer up north had the decency to run.

The armadillo says no. I’ll meet you head-on.

Then there’s the gator, which I won’t discuss at length, because down here you don’t discuss the gator; you assume the gator.

Every body of water contains one until proven otherwise, and it has never been proven otherwise.

Retention pond behind the Publix.

Gator.

Drainage ditch by the off-ramp.

Gator.

The decorative water feature at the office park, the one with the little fountain and the sign that says “Please Don’t Feed The Ducks.”

There are no ducks.

Gator.

And then there’s the tortoise. Picture an army helmet hauling itself across four lanes of traffic with an unbothered determination that suggests it’s made peace with whatever happens.

The lizards here outnumber everything. They’ll fight you, bite you, do push-ups on your porch rail, puffing out a throat-flag the color of a bruise, defending a tiny territory nobody wants.

Every single thing that crawls or swims or suns itself here has a shell, a plate, a scute, a hide. As if the whole peninsula got a memo.

“Arm yourselves.”

The plants got the same memo.

Nobody warns you about the plants.

You move here thinking palm trees, thinking hammocks, thinking the gentle green of a screensaver. Then you reach into a hedge for a frisbee, and find yourself thrust into the middle of a knife fight.

There’s a tree called the saw palmetto, named that out of basic decency, a warning right there in the name, and I still didn’t listen.

The stems are lined edge to edge with teeth. You brush it, and it opens you up in a long, clean incision. No pain at first, just the surprise of your own blood, the plant having filed you under “processed” before you knew a transaction had occurred.

There’s the Spanish bayonet, a yucca that decided to become a weapon, each leaf ending in a hard black needle that’ll pierce the heel of your size 14 cowboy boot.

Ask me how I know.

There’s the Sandspur, low and innocent, hiding burrs the size of a tooth. You find them with your bare foot, always your bare foot, then with the fingers you use to pull them from your foot, and then a week later you find them with your foot again.

Cactus grows wild here. Here, a state with ninety percent humidity. A desert plant thriving in a swamp. And that little contradiction will happily thrust a needle into your flesh if you get close enough to question it.

My strategy? I take a small pink pill at seven each morning and another twelve hours later. I set them on the coffee maker I’m forbidden to use the night before so I can watch them wait for me.

Some mornings I take the pill, but it doesn’t take me. My heart goes wandering off on its own, a wet bird loose in my chest, flapping at nothing. I steady myself, clutch the rim of the sink, breathe and count and wait for it to remember the shape it’s supposed to hold.

Even the pretty ones are in on it. The bougainvillea (Boo’Gun-Vill-E-ah).

The bougainvillea throws color all over the fence like a sunset that fell down. Gorgeous to behold.

Yet under every bright papery bloom is a thorn curved back toward you like a fishhook, so it doesn’t just stick you; it keeps you. Insistent you stay and pay attention to it.

My cardiologist has a sofa in his office that costs more than my pickup, an original Ensō Zen circle by Hakuin Ekaku hanging behind him and a screen he can turn so I can see the mountain range of my own pulse.

He points at a stretch where the peaks go ragged, a picket fence kicked over in a storm.

He is not gentle.

He tells me stress is a trigger. Caffeine is a trigger. He tells me heat and exertion are triggers. He tells me to stay out of the yard in summer. He tells me all this the way you’d tell a teenager to stay out of the ocean, which is to say he already knows I won’t.

I go home, and the palmettos are waiting where I left them. Green. Patient. Toothed.

I get down on my knees in the planter bed by the porch because a weed has burrowed up through the crushed seashell mulch, and it offends me.

I pull it, and the next one, and the sun takes note, stings the back of my neck, and the air leans on me close and loving, and the confused little bird in my chest wakes and starts to flap.

I stop. Sit back on my heels. I lay a dirty hand flat on my sternum, slide two fingers up, press against my carotid artery, and feel nothing, then quick, then skip, then nothing. A small wet muscle quivering, guessing, flipping a coin it refuses to show me.

It’s come up heads all summer.

One of these mornings it won’t.

I’ll tip, go down into the palmetto, and the fire ants will have me before the ambulance clears the light at the corner.

Yes. Fire ants. Angry at everything and true to their name.

I don’t know which morning. Nobody knows which morning. That’s the thing.

The heat presses down. My pulse trips, skips, holds, then stalls.

It catches, and I reach into the flowerbed again, take the next weed. Low, burrowing my fingertips into the broken shells, pinching it below the soil.

It comes up clean. A long white root, hair-fine, suckling tiny clumps of sand, alive in my hand.

I study it there. Think about what I’ve just done.

And I honestly don’t know if this man on his knees, hand over his own stopped clock, has come to understand something holy...

...or if he’s simply dropped his armor long enough to accept his fate.