Foxglove, also known as digitalis purpurea, is used to regulate the metronome of the heart.
My great-grandfather Monroe took digitalis when his heart beat too fast. My heart beats too fast because I have been carrying the box of his diaries inside my head for the past six years, sifting the similarities between Monroe’s longing for his childhood home and my own, watching to see what settles. Monroe wrote about the pinberries and the chokecherries and the thornapples that grew his youth into a myth: in his diaries, I watched him roam alongside the Flambeau and Chippewa rivers in central Wisconsin as the final lumberjacked logs floated past the settler cabin his father built; I watched his tale end with the turn of the twentieth century that grasped Monroe’s shoulders and turned him toward town.
The logging companies had mostly cleared the river forests by the time Monroe was an eight-year-old living on the left-behind fields, but his father’s heart stopped while digging out the final stumps, a watch that could not be rewound. Monroe’s mother sold the farm and they moved away from the riverbank. Monroe yearned for that land the rest of his life, writing about the loss of his childhood and the loss of the wild river forests along the Chippewa. It is more poignant to remember the land that way, but the specific childhood landscape Monroe longed for would have turned, instead, into fields, clean and controlled. Monroe missed the trees and wanted to go back to a time before they were gone, but that virgin timber had been cut before his birth. The truth is that Monroe’s childhood was ordered and controlled until it was not.
My childhood was also ordered and controlled until it was not. When I left the wild woods of Oregon at age ten, I remembered them as the wild woods. But of course that is not true. My father had been a graduate student at a university in the Willamette Valley, where the conifers had been chopped down and the fields worked for over a hundred years before my family arrived. I lived in a house in the city and the streets were metronomed; we were on lucky #13, the irregular, extra stroke. The specific childhood I longed for ran wild in my memory: rambling on the hills outside of town, clambering over fallen trees, and wading through creeks. But the photographs of my house reveal my mother’s bordered garden, the clipped Kentucky bluegrass of our lawn.
Monroe’s childhood ambition—logging like his uncle—was thwarted by the denuding of the white pine forests of the Northland, so Monroe grew up to work in the paper mills pulping the leftovers, popple scrap and scrub remaining after Weyerhaeuser’s trains pulled out of town. On the weekends, Monroe drove a hundred miles due north to the hunting cabin he had built in the wild woods, the echoing sound of the punch clock humming along the road until Monroe turned onto the packed dirt, enveloped by the stillness. My great-grandfather wanted to return home, but his childhood home was gone so he had to create a new one.
I wanted to return home as well, so when I grew up I bought a suburban house and I stripped out the beige carpet, laying wood planks atop the particle-board subflooring. I painted all the white walls and tore down the plaid valances. I bought my house even though it was bordered by the boring: box hedges trimmed into rectangles just like all the neighbors’ with a goddamn windmill in a break between two shrubs that hadn’t conjoined. River stones smothered whatever soil the hedges didn’t loom over. But there were no weeds because the former owners of my house had Preened.
A blank canvas of a lawn, coated in sun, but growing nothing but fescue. Cement sidewalks flattened two sides of the yard, my neighbor’s temporary green plastic snow fence stationed along another. The first time I saw my neighbor put the fence up, I thought he was trying to make it clear to the neighborhood that whatever mess was going on in my lawn didn’t belong to him.
The first spring I owned my house, I called in Lawn Boys to saw down the hedges and chain-haul-out the stumps. I posted “free river rock” on Craigslist and for two days, strangers brought wheelbarrows in circuits across my dandelioning front yard. I didn’t put out the Preen because I had A Baby Who Might Want to Crawl on My Yard Someday. Instead, I sowed potassium—potash—to give the lawn the nutrients I believed it lacked.
With the hedges and rock gone, I planted boring purple salvia because the Lowe’s tag said it was a perennial. But foxglove came up instead, because I didn’t actually know what salvia looked like and someone had stuck the plastic tab on the wrong plastic container.
My heart was unwell when I grew foxglove. I had spent years with heart spasms, undergoing every test a doctor could throw at an insurance-card-carrying twenty-something. EKGs, ECGs, heart ultrasounds, exercise tests on a treadmill with a node taped to the skin above my heart. At 23 years old, I went to the doctor with a soreness in the bottom of my lung and because I was on the Pill and had just returned from a flight, he was concerned about a blood clot. The doctor put me through the paces with a chest x-ray before sending me home to take ibuprofen, instructing me to let him know if it didn’t improve.
It didn’t, and when I dutifully returned three weeks later, the doctor informed me that I was too young for chest pain before ordering another chest x-ray and a spiral CT scan. No blood clots. They assigned a more aggressive ibuprofen regimen to take care of what “might be costochondritis,” which is a loose definition for chest wall pain caused by inflammation. I had rarely taken ibuprofen before, so I didn’t know I needed to eat alongside the 800mg I ingested every four hours. I had incredible pain attacks in the center of my sternum and when I called the nurse-line, panicking, she said, “Oh. That sounds like acid reflux. Try Tums.”
I’d never had acid reflux before; I have never not had acid reflux since.
I stopped taking my birth control pills because I grew suddenly afraid of blood clots. The pain migrated from my right rib to my left and centered itself over my heart. I thought I was having a heart attack. At twenty-three years old. The doctor turned my file over to the heart clinic, who gave me an echocardiogram and told me to go home—I was fine.
Monroe did not receive an echocardiogram at age 73 when he went to the doctor, recording in his diaries that his heart had been skipping a beat now and then, irregular, quick thumps. In 1965, Monroe’s doctor scanned him for diabetes and high blood pressure but, finding evidence of neither, dismissed him home with digitalis pills, which Monroe took regularly for one full year.
For two full years, I refluxed and the heart spasms continued, but until my throat spasmed, I did not go back to the doctor. When my throat spasmed, I went to the emergency room and they gave me another chest x-ray and told me I was fine. Follow up with my doctor.
Instead, I followed up with WebMD. I called a doctor after scrolling and insisted I receive an upper GI endoscopy. When I came out of my Propofol haze, the doctor said, “Well, it looks like you had a little acid reflux in there.”
So I took Prevacid and I took ibuprofen and I chewed Tums and the heart spasms continued. I shoveled up chunks of turf around the perimeter of my house, upending black plastic pots and shaking loose rootballs before tamping the plants into the ground, St. John’s Wort and anise hyssop and prairie smoke. Not quite a recreation of the wild woods of the Willamette, but I was doing the best I could, trying to reclaim prairie soil that had been turned into fields before ending up suburban. A form of turning my home into a home which had never actually existed except in the heart-sick fantasies of the child who’d left it, wanting to believe if she stayed she would have grown up wild.
Nothing was wrong with my heart, but it still hurt. Any medical chart would note me as a pleasant, well-dressed, articulate 29-year-old woman with two young daughters when I finally went to my local homeopath, and she asked me to talk for two and a half hours about my experiences with heart pain. She did not take my pulse, she did not ask to see the scans. She did not say “but are you experiencing heart pain right now?” Instead, she asked me to talk about what the spasms felt like, how I managed the pain, what I did while they were happening, how long the spasms lasted, and if there were any patterns to the regularity with which they occurred. As I spoke, I realized that my actual heart spasms had not begun until after a series of stressful tests where doctors were constantly concerned because I was too young to be experiencing heart pain.
The homeopath sat back in her chair and watched me talk, occasionally writing notes. She asked me about my family dynamics, my daily habits, my relationships. When I finished talking, the homeopath gently said, “I think you’re experiencing anxiety, not a heart-related event.”
I was a master of presentation, a woman with a pleasant expression who spoke in a regulated, eager-to-please tone, masking the homesick girl desperate to calm her fears that she was doing it all wrong and planting her young daughters in unsustainable soil, a soil she wouldn’t be able to tend for them in the future, torn between giving her children either the comfort of order or the asymmetry of what is natural; the great-granddaughter of a man whose heart had quickened and juddered because his home was not his home. I was a woman who had never been asked if she’d felt anxiety.
The homeopath prescribed a remedy, which is what homeopaths call medication. A remedy is a small amber tube filled with tiny white balls which dissolve under the tongue. I was supposed to take two pellets in the morning, two pellets in the evening. My remedy was called Kali Arsenicosum, but my homeopath declined to mention what it specifically treated, urging me instead to simply let the remedy do its work.
Naturally, as soon as I got home, I googled “kali arsenicosum,” discovering that it is prescribed for people who have anxiety related to health and cannot trust they are healthy when they are healthy. It is for people who are certain that if we don’t take care of ourselves, things might go wrong. We are scrupulous in our observation of the smallest symptoms in case it is the first sign of something serious. It is our duty to warn the doctor, but if the doctor says there is nothing to worry about, we feel they haven’t taken us seriously and they haven’t done their duty.
To think about the irregularities of my heart is to induce the irregularities of my heart.
Foxglove grows in bells, a stalk with different chambers. When foxglove bells are plucked and dried, crumbled and served in a tea, they enter the ventricles of the heart. Foxglove works like a remedy. The primary principle of homeopathy is taking into one’s body a small amount of a substance which causes the exact thing you are trying to eradicate. You are teaching the body to handle the problem in doses, like a vaccine, so that when your body produces the problem, it already knows the solution.
Kali Arsenicosum is not foxglove. My remedy was white sugar balls supposedly dosed with miniscule amounts of arsenic and potassium. I took Kali Arsenicosum to teach my body that it could handle poison, and that it could also turn soil into something healthy. Like cures like, but placebo can also cure. I did not mind the idea of being cured by a placebo. I do not mind that I was not told I was given a remedy to treat my mistrust of my health.
If I am told to think of my health I will make myself sick.
But the Kali did not cure me, so at my final appointment with the homeopath she prescribed a different remedy, noted on the bottle as “Dig 200c.” Dig 200c is digitalis purpurea: foxglove. Monroe’s diaries flooded my head because epigenetics is a physical and emotional river, veins like tributaries with the ghosts of family trees on the banks. Monroe’s final trip to the cabin occurred two weeks before his heart jittered to a stop; the foxglove would have been in bloom on the roadsides leading to the wild woods. I did not finish my course of foxglove because a small hand was growing in my gut, reaching up toward my heart, bloodrushing and building another daughter for me to expel, to place on the yard I had stripped clean of chemicals before telling her: crawl.
I wanted my daughters to have the home I didn’t have—one as sturdy as the house my great-grandfather built when he worked at the paper mill because I could not have the home he built, as an old man, in the wild woods. My great-grandparents raised my grandmother in their orderly house with four bedrooms and a half-acre garden in the side plot, filled every year with corn stalks and beans and rhubarb tended by Monroe. Monroe sold the house to my grandmother and grandfather, who then raised my own mother in it. But my mother left that home, and my grandmother sold that home, and Monroe’s bones were never buried by the banks of the Chippewa River as he had requested in his diaries; instead they dissolved into the soil of the manicured cemetery on the crest of the hill—not even buried beneath the hundred-year-old pines on the edge, but under herbicided turf.
I could not control my irregular heart, beating backward to the home I left as a child.
The heart is four-chambered and I have given rooms to my three daughters, leaving myself one closet in which I can hide and surround myself with my fears. I know I am borderline boring in my suburban house surrounded by sidewalks and my neighbor’s snow fence, but my office overlooks a front yard wrecked by the weeds I still have not Preened, even though my daughters have not kneeled on the lawn for years. I planted the echinacea purpurea and the flowering almond bushes and the catmint crawling around the borders of my home because I wanted them to take over, to surge over the fescue like a pulse year after year, a metronomic wildness. My fears are common, the heart-panic that I have not listened to my body and that I will leave my daughters without warning in the final exit, that one for which I have not prepared them; that I have not given them a home they can carry with them the rest of their lives; that they will remember our home as ordered when I wanted it to be wild.
