In my previous post, I wrote about the experience of hunting the elusive Pink Lady's Slipper. It was an unpleasant and fruitless search. I ended my prose with Robert Burns famous "best laid plans" quotation and put the matter to rest.
But when I recently shared the column with the friend who accompanied me on the "adventure," she responded, "Now finish it."
So, here's the rest of the story: A few days after submitting my column, I was relaying the experience to another friend. She laughed and commiserated, and then she paused. "I think my neighbors have Pink Lady's Slippers on their farm," she said, suddenly remembering a conversation about them.
And so, the next weekend, my "adventure" friend and I were on our way to my other friend's neighbor's farm--and there, just yards into the forest canopy behind the barn, we found Pink Lady's Slippers scattered across the pine-needled ground. There were no ticks, no mosquitos. We did not take a long hot hike. We simply followed my friend's neighbor into her woods. We oohed and ahhed and snapped our pictures. And that's the rest of the story.
The problem is, it messes up my conclusion, the moral to the story. I have been looking for the "point" of it all. I’m not sure there is one. It seems to expose the sheer randomness of things, events, conversations, even desires themselves.
Perhaps the most telling feature of this “story” is that it exposes the need for meaning. We like to have things neatly tied up with beginnings and endings and points and purposes. Maybe that’s the lesson of the “real” story--that reality is random and unordered and we, refusing to accept this fact, impose morals, stopping the story short if need be to achieve the desired ending. Like Cinderella’s stepsisters we cut off the toes of reality to make it fit the fairy tale shoe.
At any rate, I have amended my story, I have told the whole truth. I have offered a fair and balanced accounting of 2007’s spring hunt for the Pink Lady Slipper.
Certain details--that my friend’s three-year-old daughter went with us into the woods for instance--have been left out, but none that would “tip the balance,” only those that are redundant or irrelevant.
In the final analysis, we in fact succeeded in what we set out to do--we found our flower. Maybe that’s all that matters. Shakespeare said as much when he concluded, “All's well that ends well.”
