Kate and Barbara and Me
When Barbara Walters asked Katharine Hepburn
what tree she'd be had she been born a tree,
everyone laughed—such a silly question!
I can't remember Ms. Hepburn's reply;
she may have simply snorted or shot her
famous interlocutor that famous
withering, suffer-no-fools-gladly look.
(Imagine the size of the stork!) Maybe
Ms. Walters didn't say "born." Maybe she
asked, "If you could be
some kind of tree . . . ?"
I wonder if, given her directness and
wit, Katharine of Arrogance might have said,
"Sequoiadendron gigantium."
But
that grand Pacific tree doesn't have her
New England spark or spare tenacity.
My guess? She'd be some Connecticut
hemlock alone on a windswept cliff, the North
Atlantic thrashing far below. Silly
question? Hmmm. As for me, I'd like to be
a graceful Douglas fir, my soft gray-green-
needled, lacy branches flared like pretty
peasant skirts—in wintertime cradling snow,
in spring my new needles celery green. No,
I'd likely be some midwestern tree and
not even know my fancy Latin name—
a Plains cottonwood, prairiewindswept,
asymmetric, with small saffron flowers
that only birds and bugs see, my white seed-
puffed fluff drifting like snow across
sunscorched
fields and meadows, my leaves a scratchy
rustling in the fall, my shallow roots in
some meandering creek. No one would think
to ask me what flower or season or
body of water I would choose to be.
Judy
Brackett's stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Other Voices, Alaska
Quarterly Review, Squaw Valley Review, The Fourth River, James Dickey Review,
Wisconsin Review, THEODATE, Sierra Songs & Descants (Hip Pocket
Press), and The Untidy Season: An
Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets (Backwaters Press), as well as other
publications. She is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and has
taught creative writing and English literature and composition at Sierra
College. A native of Nebraska, she has lived in California's northern Sierra
Nevada foothills for many years.
