Aliens

A small forest of these weird fungi appeared in our back yard this week. And then Sarah and I were in New Hampshire and saw these wonderful moss sporophytes:

These eruptions don't look anything like the "normal" plants and flowers I am used to. That probably has something to do with my expectations, rather than the real population of the natural world. I think these extraordinary growths are probably coming up all over, but we don't tend to spend much time in the places they are growing.

Which then sent my thoughts off to the people we Americans often call "aliens" -- which is to say, people who have come from another country. (Uncharacteristically, I am not talking about Star Trek creatures from another planet.) When we talk about "aliens," we mean people whose families came to America more recently than our own families came to America. There are many legal categories of such visitors / new arrivals, but one commonly applied distinction is between people who are "legal" and "illegal" (although of course it remains legal to be a person, it's just her or his presence in this country that is either within the law, outside the law, or ambiguous).

Two things to think about:

• We Americans tend to forget what a young country we live in. By European or Asian or African standards, we are all "new arrivals."
• It is quite odd to use the word "alien" to refer to these new neighbors. There is almost no difference between us and these "others" -- especially if your field of vision is broad enough to encompass the difference between us and the aliens whose pictures I have posted here this week.

(If you were wondering: that's the reproductive organ of the skunk cabbage.)