Immemorial
August's impetuosity, as the season turning months usually are, was outspoken this year. I knew I would never see her again, ergo, a great feeling of loss refused on that early summer afternoon. She was a quiet horticulturist subsuming an outlandish sense of humour, which is what coalesced her into my family.
How funny it was that my father would actually say to her, "So, did you kill your five husbands?" Even more, that she would laugh and raise her glass.
She wore a beaded bracelet from Christchurch, New Zealand, kept her thin porcelain coloured hair neatly combed to her shoulders, and spoke more fondly of the Labrador retrievers she's had than of the men. A man young enough to be her son went to her home daily to keep her company. It was rumoured that they had an affair some time ago. Barring my family, he was the only person I ever saw spend time with her. No, that's untrue. There was an unversed woman that had flown a while to see her. I didn't meet her children, Mimi and Pierre, until she died. Mimi greeted me while I was picking up acorns on her land a few weeks ago. I linger around the property periodically, rosey and prepared to gather my collection of doodles in the idle home. My parents told me I'm not allowed to ask until the time is right. I don't know how long it normally takes to give away your mother's things, peacefully, but she was independent of her family and disinterested in giving them anything, for all they ever asked for were portions of her tremendous fortune. I feel they won't hold me covetous for wanting them, as they are very invaluable to anyone that enjoys salary over sentiment, and they certainly won't feel generous for giving away nothing, which keeps the calm of greedy persons.
Her tattered blue station wagon, that she only drove when leaving to buy a pack of Canadian Molson beer every other day for dinner, still sits on the dirt road that goes in a crescent through her trees. The landscapers trim the grass, branches, and leave the flowers wilt. She and I had planned to visit remote botanical gardens.
Unless you were aware of her company, her step and voice would go unnoticed; the only bearing of distinction was her laugh. I was waiting for Lake to join me for swimming and fell asleep on the grass with 'The Little Prince'. A ray of sunlight nudged me from a dream about closets and Pax Britannica villages. Spots showed everywhere outside of a silver figure. She startled me, trekked up the hill with a docile figurante step. I hastily attached the clasps of my bathing suit and commented on the weather.
- As the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leaves—the fern and the needled pine and the latticed frond and the seaweed ribbon—perceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. The flowers looking in from the walled garden through my window do not, it is true, see me. But their leaves see the light, as my eyes can never do. They take it, as it forever spills away radiant into space in a golden waste, to a primal purpose. They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements. They breathe upon the dust, and it is a rose. Say that this is done with neither thought nor passion, and by something other than will. True that a plant may not think; neither will the profoundest of men ever put forth a flower. Of the use and the beauty of flowering there can be no shade of doubt. It is a rare thought of which as much can be said.
At her funeral, I sat above a stone G in the ground, against a tree. My parents were both crying. I signed the guest book as "Grace Gardens".
"What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.
"It is the time you have wasted on your rose that makes your rose so important."
