Mommy has started her collection again.
Last year she brought home a mini cactus
from the family fair.
A stubby succulent,
smooth and translucent green flesh
covered with useless spikes,
better suited for a filter feeder,
like a frightened benthic anthozoa,
than for protection.
She placed it in a tiny raku pot
of charred black with fat iridescent brush streaks
on the sink's window sill
so during the day her cactus can look out
into the neighbors' yard
(as we do)
and so she can look at her nub of a plant
at night as she washes dishes.
When I was little,
our walkway from the toolshed to the front door
was crowded with soft wooden troughs
filled with the darkest, richest soil
jacked up with miracle grow.
It felt so primally good to burrow my index finger
deep like an earthworm
into the cool clean dirt
and hide in these nursery nests
white and yellow daisies, button and bell flowers,
Chinese lanturns,
fushia, lavender, and white sweet peas,
cornflowers, sunflowers, and rainbows of cosmos;
two in each hole.
The pictures on those $2 packets seduced us
with promises of life and color
on our dry, wooden walkway.
Not many plants survived the relentless sun.
The brave sprouts that pushed their way to the surface
were zapped by the electromagnetic spectrum radiation,
perishing quickly in fireballs.
The family fair cactus in its wabi sabi pot
has grown past adolescence.
Lean and tall and no longer knobbish,
it resembled a stretched out blob of play-doh,
or a small dildo,
and grew copious bunches of pubes.
Past middle age,
it is now an old fart,
covered in fine white hair like an old man's beard.
The wispy hairs wrap around its dildo-chin,
encircling itself in protection against the world it has seen,
this past year.
Family fair cactus has friends now,
around eight of them.
With property at the window sill in high demand,
there has been talk of construction,
maybe an upper level.
The new residents are small and clean,
sporting miniature spicules
sticking out from shiny juicy skins.
Three of them sit in tiny glazed pots
that stand on three tiny lumpy, stumpy legs.
The others sit in supermarket brown plastic planters
and on wide white dishes
sprinkled with river pebbles.
There is also half an orchid plant.
Last week on Mother's Day,
we went to my grandma's house
for a quite lunch,
mayonnaise chicken and bad takeout Chinese food.
After the dessert dishes were cleared,
Mommy took out her present to Dama:
A tray of three cool ceramic planters.
Dama, Mommy, and I planted the seeds.
"She likes to take care of things,"
"and watch them grow"
which is true.
Before Baga died,
Dama's backyard was filled
with a tiny lemon tree, pikake,
a bush that grew tiny red flowers
with four heart-shaped petals in fat bunches,
three mango and plumeria trees,
mock orange hedges,
and puffy lavender-flowering plants
that crept between her green onions.
Now her yard is paved with gravel.
Dama has fallen a couple of times
on the protruding rock stepping stones.
Mean strawberries stained her elbows and knees.
Yesterday I visited Dama.
Her mini sunflowers and asters have sprouted,
their tender little buds arcing towards
the heavy glass doors which filters their sun.
I turned the pots 180'
and saw into my mind, a garden of color.
If the last blue cornflowers do not wake up
from their Target-induced hibernation,
that is fine because they have already flowered for me
in all of the tiny wells of hope I created and tended to
as a child.
At least he can live forever :"|
