How to be an Invasive Species: Reflections on taking up space and thriving where you don’t belong By Teresa Helms and Eleanor Duva
“Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves. Our kind multiplies: We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot’s in the door.” -Sylvia Plath, Mushrooms In the second grade, as far as I could tell, my one true calling in life was to find, hold, and examine as many earthworms as possible. To put them in jars and watch them devour decomposing leaves. To marvel at their conspicuous non-humanness. One afternoon my best friend and I dug up a six by six foot (it might have been smaller; I was smaller then) patch of grass in my backyard in our quest to uncover the newest inhabitants of the cardboard home we had constructed. We asked for forgiveness rather than permission, and it was granted, when instead of inflicting punishment, or even replacing the grass, my dad turned the bare ground into a garden bed for my
25 Headwaters Magazine
mother. It, and three more, are right outside our kitchen window, full of zinnias in the summer and birdseed in the winter. In the time of my life when I kept jars of earthworms on my windowsill, I was only abstractly aware of gender dynamics in the sense that I had figured out that the more I acted ‘boyish,’ the more I was taken seriously. I wanted to be a scientist, and more importantly, to be listened to. As it turns out, I am still working on both. I find myself increasingly reluctant to make myself heard while my peers seem to only become more experienced, more knowledgeable, more confident than I am. I often feel like I should already know the information that I am supposed to be in the process of learning. I sit in my forestry lecture. Third row, one of three women on the left side of the classroom. I realize how little I remember from 10th-grade geometry. Our professor cracks a joke and the hearty chuckle of men in the company of
