Lady slipper flashback

My friend Michele and I were hiking the other day when she said "oops, be careful, there's a lady slipper."

I looked down and saw it, and I was instantly taken back to Briar Road in Bedford, N.H. where I lived while in elementary school.  I could take you to the exact spot that lady slipper was.  Was being the operative word.

Because I killed it.

I don't know where one learns the things we just seem to know -- like red berries will kill you or that certain snakes are poisonous -- you know, random things like that.  But when I was little I somehow accumulated the knowledge that if I picked a lady slipper, it was illegal and I would go to jail.

But I wasn't happy with that explanation.  Like, HOW would you get caught?  Were there police in the woods watching out for the lady slippers?  And why were the lady slippers so special.  No one had answers for this, so it churned inside of me -- a non-answered question that brought forth many, many more questions that no one else had answers for either.   So I stumbled across a little pink lady slipper in the woods while playing hide and seek with the neighborhood gang and I stopped and stared at it.  And then I looked around.  Were there cops hiding behind trees?  Even as a child this made no sense to me, so then I checked the trees to see if there were cameras.  There were not.

So, I said to my young self, no one really will arrest you if you pick a lady slipper.  OR.  Maybe there was something in the stem ... some type of alarm that went off and signaled to the lady slipper watchers that some thieving was going down.  Well, I had to.  I had to pick it.  My curiosity had gone beyond a comfort zone.  I needed to know.  What about the ferns?  Why weren't the ferns protected?  The trees?  The sun?  NO ONE KNEW.

So I picked it, held my breath, closed my eyes and waited for a cage to drop over me.  Or a loud noise.  Or people to come rushing through the woods screaming at me.

But nothing happened.  NOTHING.  And I looked down at the flower in my hand and knew that I couldn't even take it home and enjoy it.  Because they were illegal.  I'd committed a crime, and while no one knew it.  I did.

As I told that story to Michele, I realized that I'd never told anyone about it before.  I still feel the same regret that I felt then as I very gently laid the flower down where I had picked it and pleaded for it to somehow dig deep into the soil and fix itself.  Fix what I had done.  Undo my very bad deed indeed.  ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::hanging head::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

I am happy to say that I walked by this particular lady slipper with no inclination whatsoever to test what would happen if I picked it.  And I even thought to myself that I did not singularly bring about the demise of the lady slipper by picking that one oh so long ago, because here we were, some close to 40 years later and there was another pink lady slipper in the woods.

I won't even tell you what I did to bald eagles.