Biodiversity Nada Samih-Rotondo

Obliteration of the Mine Eman Odeh

Biodiversity

Nada Samih-Rotondo

Ladybug! Ladybug! Fly away home. Your house is on fire. And your children all gone… ~Mother Goose I remember the ladybugs. As a five year old in Kuwait, I learned they came in different colors. They flew in through the open window on the school bus once on our way home. I decided then and there to get off at my friend’s bus stop. I knew it wasn’t my stop yet but rules be damned, I needed to see the ladybugs. I thought nothing of simply getting off the bus to keep chatting with my friend about the different colored ladybugs, stand in the afternoon Kuwaiti heat and be nearly swallowed by the sun’s glare until the soft-spoken bus driver patiently convinced me to please step back on the bus by saying, “this isn’t your stop and your family will miss you if you don’t return home”. “It’s okay!” I shouted confidently, “My friend will take me home.” I waved the bus driver away. “You need to get back on the bus,” he pleaded. But the ladybugs. What about the ladybugs?

I couldn’t believe the colors. As an adult I have only seen the red ones and part of me wonders if I imagined the variety. I remember yellow, orange, light and dark red… one looked almost green. How could I possibly leave this spot now? I need to collect, categorize, and explore. I must search until I find every last possible color that might exist, here in this very spot by the tree near my friend’s house. How can I be expected to step away from them now? Childhood and life was like this, mine, my mother’s and my grandmother’s. Being tugged away from everything familiar, not being given space to explore, to meander, to lazily consider the varieties of ladybugs. Mission interrupted.

My grandmother was forced out of her home in Yaffa, Palestine at age 23 (and then again out of her home in Kuwait in her 60s), my mother at 27, me at 6. The cycles feel tangled into themselves, not sure where their experiences end and mine begin. Our passage through time and space was abrupt and graceless.

Years later in the United States, I remember coming across a recently hacked tree in the woods in the early spring. I don’t remember what type of tree it was but the trunk was sticky with sap still running. The sap brought to mind an image of severed nerve endings, when a patient complains they still feel pain in the phantom limb. That’s what it feels like to be made landless, to be forced out of your home, to be taken out of your comfort zone, not once, but twice in three generations. The upheaval to our sense of direction, to our rootedness, to our daily routines, like sap that suddenly finds itself out in the open air with nothing to support its weight. I didn’t want to leave…neither did my mother, who as a fully grown adult had thicker roots to upend out of life with other Palestinians in Kuwait. It was a violent hacking, the kind that results in less than ideal results in the transplanted. No matter what favorable conditions it finds in the new land, it simply will never bounce back, will never attain the vigor of what it once experienced. The shoots that spring up are alive, yes, but flimsy. The leaves, a faded yellow.

I found a ladybug on my kitchen counter recently after years of not encountering any outdoors. It was the more common red one but it was still beautiful. I slid a piece of paper gently under it and ushered it outside whispering, “fly away home.”

Nada Samih-Rotondo is a writer, teacher, and mother who is inspired by the relationship between personhood and place. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, she immigrated to the United States at the age of six to Rhode Island. She lives in the enchanted post industrial land of Providence with her husband and three kids. She is currently working on a memoir spanning three generations and several continents. Her writing has been featured in Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, The Masters Review, Squat Birth Journal, and the Providence Frequency Anthology. You can find her on: IG @nadasamihwrites & follow her blog: https://nowapproachingprovidence.wordpress.com