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Wisteria
Coolness in my overheated palm, it
rests lightly, hardly any weight at all. The fragility is wisely
attached to stems of sturdy flexibility. Scent immediately rises up
with my inhale, slipping into my nose, passes into my brain and I'm
overcome with complete gratitude that blooming things of all kinds
were part of my childhood, still inhabit my adult hand, will comfort
my declining years. Never an artificial plant for me!
I wonder at the essentialness of scent.
Is it my imagination that spring blooms seem to have a
delicacy to their fragrance that goes with the pale colors?
Is the passionate emotion that delicious scent provokes any less
intense for its lack of bold scent? Does any of that matter when all
that matters is that all things blooming draw me closer in spirit to
my mother - the woman who could grow anything.
But she brooked no nonsense from her
plants, whether vegetable or flower. Her soil was never lacking. Her
farmer roots knew about compost, turning under, leaving fallow until
one spring day a new bed would be prepared, new varieties nestled in,
then watched as carefully as I was watched. Watered, weak leaves and
sprouts plucked off with her sharp thumbnail. And then one day - Glory!
Glory! Abundant bloom, mountainous bloom, bloom I picked over and
over again. Each summer morning my job was to fill pitchers and pots
with flowers, to pick the blooms to keep plants from producing seeds
to quickly.
It was she who taught me the pure value
of containers of flowers in every room, that a pitcher of sweet peas
in a room with shades drawn always felt cool enough to curl up with a
Nancy Drew mystery. It was she who filled large fruit jars with
peonies, heads so heavy, minuscule ants
running up and down their stems, leaving a bruise on an unopened bud,
peonies on a round polished wood table. No wonder, as I walk
the path in my rental garden, that my joy was complete when I first
saw the dark red peony spears poke up through cool, damp spring
earth.
-Marti Brooks
Wednesday workshop, Spring 07
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