Usually I leave flowers in my garden but this year I am cutting them and bringing them inside. I mean, not all the time, but more often.
As of Thursday I was fully immunized so I did errands.
This year I like to gather huge bundles of one sort of flower and cram them into one very large vase and see where they fall. As you know, I have a lot of white in the garden. Viburnum cut well, and persist in their glass cylinder.
They even drop their blossoms prettily.
Glamis Castle, on the other hand, absolutely terrible vegetation. Late bloomer, covered in thorns, smells bad, prone to disease, and its flowers often don’t even open all the way. Cut a few, I thought, perhaps redemption?
Nope. The flowers still peter out and when any given bloom has had enough of existence it drops its petals all at once like a teenager slamming her door, “There! See if I care.”
I’ve been almost completely at home for a year, like many of us lucky enough to have had that option. Going out this week made me giddy. The sky was beyond blue, and the giant empty parking lot in front of Cost Plus World Market felt as foreign and full of potential as I imagine the surface of the moon to be. I could barely absorb the usual sounds of cars and planes and crying toddlers. A mall fountain bubbled and to hear I had to close my eyes. Glory.
But also loss waits out there.
At home, where I can, if I try hard enough, make a project and almost an adventure of the tiny difference between one kind of white flowers and another, time is fluid. Which minute is this, which cup of tea, which hour in which week?
But I wasn’t in the Cost Plus World Market parking lot yesterday and today my best friend is dead. My mom is gone. The fireworks of the shift between one second and the next brings the passing of time, and time takes.
I don’t think there is–or should be–anything to do about this. It’s just the world. We all may conceptually understand that there’s no such thing as beauty without a dark edge, but I did feel it particularly sharply in the exact same instant as I zoomed past the San Francisco Bay and its egrets on the shore at low tide, free. Right when I realized that Google Maps was sending me to the next town up the road because the local Cost Plus World Market had closed, and I understood I could go there at the drop of a hat, I remembered how my best friend and I used to gallivant.
Still I’m glad I got out.
I mean, the hard stuff just comes with the good. Gotta make room. I suppose it would have been too much to expect the first true jaunt to end any other way than with ramblings on the meaning of life and no baskets.
Have a good weekend.
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