“ACHILLEA | the Addict,” an excerpt from I Have This Thing for Flowers by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn
In its most generic form, yarrow (Achillea millefolium, mille meaning thousand and folium referring to its numerous petals) appears as clusters of tiny blossoms atop thin, sturdy stalks. The word for the plant’s flowering structure is “umbel.” Picture dill or carrot tops, or radishes and cilantro when they’re left too long in the ground and bolt. At first glance, yarrow seems to be quite delicate; its leaves are a faded sage green and curl like tiny ferns. Ornamental varieties exist in a warm range of yellow, pink, fuchsia, and red, with names like Song Siren, Coronation Gold, Firefly Sunshine, and Amethyst, but in the United States, yarrow blooms white in the wild. The eye is drawn to the knee-height flowers, pale and stark against the green of a surrounding forest, a field, an embankment—it can grow almost anywhere.
It’s fitting then that yarrow was historically one of those all-purpose plants, used to treat everything from sore throats and arrow wounds to a fear of the unknown. In Western Europe, herbalists steeped it into teas that increased the drinker’s psychic abilities; in China, fortune tellers gathered and dried the plant’s stalks in bundles of fifty to throw hexagrams. Even better than saving a life is a life that does not need to be saved, but so often these forecasts are only decipherable with hindsight, warnings . . . like candles / after a night of pyres.
When A— calls to say she Baker-acted her 12-year-old and asks if I know any good doctors for this kind of thing, I start talking fast. What I’m thinking about is how I held that girl in my arms when she was two hours old. The calls I make that afternoon to inpatient centers and psychiatrists around Tampa Bay sound like lies: “I’m asking for a friend, a friend’s kid, really.” A poem about warnings arriving too late runs through my head like the banner at the bottom of a round-the-clock news station. Time has recently started folding back on itself of its own volition. When I talk to A—’s older daughter a few days later, I hear myself asking the same stupid questions I hated when I was younger: “How is school? What do you think you’ll do after graduation?” I do not want to imagine that what was meaningful to me at her age is what is now meaningful to her and, remembering my disdain for sincerity, cannot bring myself to ask such a question so directly.
The older girl is now 17, just a year shy of how old I was when I befriended her mother. I’d smoke cigarettes on A—’s front porch between doubles at Olive Garden and sometimes there would be this five-year-old poking her head out the front door every few minutes to ask—“Shut the door!”—could she change the channel, could she brush her hair, could she have a juice box—“You’re letting the air out!”— could she play with the neighbor, she forgot something in the car, did we like her shoes—“What did I say?”—what if she didn’t want to finish her homework?
It’s this deductive slide that makes spellwork so appealing—if I can learn these secrets, then I can shape the world.
A— has nearly a decade on me, and the difference in years made us complementary. When we enrolled in the nearby community college, I tutored her in algebra and geometry and would troubleshoot her janky computer. She taught me how to make French toast and clean my shower, which I found confusing, as it was the same space where I cleaned myself. I thought A— was invincible. She had walked right up to me and introduced herself, so self-assured I couldn’t believe it, because, she explained, she’d become friendly with my boyfriend and didn’t want me to think she was like that. I pretended to have no idea what she meant. We were both living in studio apartments filled with cigarette smoke. Mine had vodka ads taped to the walls and beer bottles full of neon paint in the pantry, and hers had only plastic spoons in a set of otherwise unremarkable silverware.
Yarrow’s genus takes its name from Achilles, a man who, regardless of whether he is depicted as the hero or the villain of a story, remains a certifiable asshole. Legends say his mother dunked him in the River Styx as a baby, which rendered him nearly immortal. The only place on his body that remained soft and vulnerable is where he’d been held as he was submerged: what we now call the Achilles tendon, a small spot, so far from the heart. Yarrow is not a plant that weakens. Achillea recalls the time before Paris’s arrow: Achilles the fearless warrior, Achilles who learned this flower’s secrets from his teacher and brought it onto the battlefield to treat the wounded around him.
Common names for yarrow have included bloodwort, staunchweed, knight’s milfoil, and soldier’s woundwort, and its uses extended beyond myth. American Civil War doctors carried yarrow to stop bleeds, to prevent infection, and to relieve pain. Those are men’s stories, but the flower holds sway over all blood—it was also used to regulate menstruation and to relieve associated symptoms like cramping. A book of Cherokee medicine repeats again and again, regardless of tincture or poultice, dried or fresh: “Yarrow should not be taken during pregnancy.”
A— was pregnant again. She cut back on cigarettes, cut back on coffee, and leaned heavy on the shopping cart as we walked through aisle after aisle of an impossibly air-conditioned Publix. The phrase “God’s will” gets bandied around in recovery communities as a stand-in for everything from irony to catastrophe, but when her younger daughter was born, it was a miracle. The doctors at the hospital prescribed her Roxys so she could walk despite them having sliced through the muscles of her belly. I held this small bundle in my arms that seemed more like an animal than a person. Child protective services came to the hospital and left empty-handed. When A— returned home, she moved from her studio apartment into the adjoining two-bedroom house. The real warnings are always too late: Her new daughter, her new daughter’s father, her older daughter—all of them now living together.
In another version of Achilles’s legend, his mother dipped him into a yarrow bath—not the River Styx—to induce invulnerability. Herbalism today often looks like podcasts featuring white people who have renamed themselves untranslatable Sanskrit words, and I struggle to take anything I hear seriously while simultaneously wishing that magic was real. In a discussion of etymology, a self-certified herbalist points out that if this version of the hero’s story is true, it implies that the herb had been part of a healer’s arsenal long before Achilles ever appeared on a battlefield. Her tone is one of critical insight, but river or bath, teacher or mother, there are larger issues to consider if either story is an accurate account of history.
I started to see the spaces of
A—’s life where her bluster could not reach. She did not want to be a single mom again.
Arthur C. Clarke, author of what became 2001: A Space Odyssey, famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Some plants with medicinal applications also appear in religious or magical texts, building on an intuitive logic: If yarrow can stop a wound from becoming infected, then surely it can ward off other evils. For a protective charm, combine yarrow blossoms and iris petals in a muslin bag, and hang the pouch over a doorway that opens to the outside. It’s this deductive slide that makes spellwork so appealing—if I can learn these secrets, then I can shape the world.
I sprawled across the sateen comforter on A—’s king-sized bed with a cigarette and tried to blow smoke rings despite the ceiling fan. Outside, the afternoon Florida sun pressed our bodies like a woman kneading bread, but A—’s room was dark and cool. From my upside-down vantage point, I could see into the bathroom across the hall, which had been without a door for the past month. A— had been waiting for her boyfriend, her younger daughter’s father, to hang a new one.
That same man was calling, again. When A—’s phone rang it played the chorus of a country song in which a woman keys the pickup truck of a guy who’d done her wrong. Was it the default setting or had she picked it especially for him? I never knew. Every 15 minutes, we’d listen to a new voicemail. She’d kicked him out of the house, again, because he’d started drinking, again, and he was sorry, distraught, enraged, understanding, sorry, distraught, enraged, etc. He had also broken down the bathroom door a month earlier. Voicemail number five beeped its end.
“Girl, he is crazy,” she said.
“I don’t get it.” It being why she stayed with him.
A— rolled across the bed and looked at me. “I’m not strong like you, Ice Queen.” The sentence ended in a dramatic whisper. A— called me Ice Queen like it was my superhero moniker.
Ice Queen: capable of leaving a man in a single conversation, impervious to empty promises of change, armed with an impenetrable heart.
She called me that to be funny, but not funny in the way you’d think. Lying on A—’s bed, chain-smoking into the ceiling, I was newly single and feeling bad about it. I’d been dating a guy, the same guy who was the reason A— had introduced herself to me, for over two years. We’d lived together, kind of, meaning we’d said that we lived together but in actuality, he lived with me. He’d told everyone I’d kicked him out of the apartment, which was mostly true. I’d given him the choice between paying rent or leaving, and I knew, when presenting him with those options, which he’d take.
It was around this time, after I’d finally split from that man, when I started to see the spaces of A—’s life where her bluster could not reach. She did not want to be a single mom again. Her boyfriend was so good when she would first let him back into the house. She was an optimist.
A— had kicked out her boyfriend because he’d been drinking, but the problem was more what came with the drinking than the drunkenness itself: women who were like that; a tattoo that curved over his left nipple in cursive script that read, “To thine own self be true”; taking A—’s phone; throwing A—’s phone at a wall; cursing at the children; trying to drive with the children; calling the cops and saying “spousal abuse” when A— tried to physically stop him. She was on felony probation, and when the cops came, they took her to jail.
He was so, so, so sorry the next morning. His apologies spilled out of my receiver and laid themselves over my couch and bookshelves like muddy wolfhounds. It was a mistake, he explained. He’d fucked up, absolutely. He didn’t realize the cops had to take someone in when they were called for domestic violence. He didn’t realize that violating felony probation meant mandatory prison time. (He didn’t realize he’d be left with two children to care for.) He was so, so, so sorry. Could I help? He asked me to type up a statement that he’d give to the judge overseeing A—’s arraignment. “Say it was a misunderstanding,” he instructed. “Say that I’d had a beer and was joking around, and she’s just a great mom, and she was overprotective—she wanted to protect her kids. But I wasn’t really going to do it.”
Either he did not read the statement before he signed it or he did not understand what I’d written. The judge gave him a hard time: “It says here you were inebriated, but now you’re telling me you’d only had a beer. Which is it? Is this affidavit a lie?” He waved the paper and the displaced air clapped into the microphone. The courtroom was full of people, but A— only appeared as an image on a television screen. When the judge smacked his gavel on the desk and pronounced her ROR, “released on her own recognizance,” A—’s boyfriend seemed the most relieved of us all.
Yarrow’s weakness is its predictability, and it was named for a method of predicting the future.
Herbalism organizes plants under celestial bodies, and yarrow is “governed” by the planet Venus. As per the eponymous Roman goddess of love, plants categorized as Venusian were considered to have feminine attributes and to be attuned to matters of the heart. Think seashells and swans and aphrodisiacs. Many of the spells and charms that harnessed yarrow’s prescient qualities focused on questions of romance. In parts of Ireland, on days when the veil between the worlds thins, women picked and placed yarrow stalks under their pillows or into soft parts of their bodies, recited a rhyme, and waited to dream of their future husbands. A few hundred miles south, during the symbol-laden years of Queen Victoria, a sprig of yarrow in a corsage or a bouquet of flowers signified the healing of heartbreak.
I flew back to Florida to be a bridesmaid in A—’s wedding. I stayed at a cottage rental down the road from a Holiday Inn perched above the Intracoastal and sweated despite the October date. I carried a bouquet of hydrangeas, so tender they were more green than white. Her daughters, then three and ten, were the only children at the event. The oldest went up to the altar during the ceremony, and the man who had been her mother’s boyfriend became her stepfather and fastened a delicate gold chain around her neck while everyone cried.
In the late 1990s, a pair of computer scientists designed an open-source cryptographic algorithm they named Yarrow, after the I-Ching divination system. Their intent was to make encoding computer data more accessible, and they were wildly successful in terms of its widespread adoption, though not necessarily in terms of the actual encoding. Though Yarrow’s design flaw became apparent as early as 2002, the algorithm was still being used in iPhones as late as 2020. Given the choice between certain discomfort and the unknown, it often takes calamity to choose the latter.
Yarrow lacks true randomness, and it is thus relatively simple—by computer science standards, anyway—to break its encryption. In other words, you can predict what it’ll spit out if you’ve paid close enough attention, for long enough, to what has come before. I have asked experts to explain the exact issue with the algorithm to me again and again, and as I’m listening I swear I understand the flaw (its Achilles’ heel), but as soon as they stop speaking, I am lost. When I attempt to write it here, I feel like I am trying to catch a ghost, but maybe this is only my discomfort with irony: Yarrow’s weakness is its predictability, and it was named for a method of predicting the future.
A— had two other bridesmaids at her wedding, and in the eight intervening years, one has died of a heroin overdose, and the other has gotten clean. Her daughters have turned out like mirror images of one another despite living in the same home, two sides of the same coin. I see time passing sometimes like a dice roll and sometimes like an inevitable column of dominoes, each fall predicated on a previous disaster. What I am trying to say is though I don’t understand so many things, I do understand why A— didn’t leave after her husband hit her, and despite all we’d been through, by the time I was engaged to John, I do understand why she started getting high and didn’t tell me, and I do finally understand why she thought I had no heart.
