“For all the trumpets and slippers and stars popping out of the ground right now, you’d think the Earth was stocked with flowers, that underneath the surface was a flower warehouse,”
– Amy Leach, The Green Man
A bag of seeds. An odd inheritance, but alive, he always did do things differently. He grew tomato vines in a glass house, disappearing before breakfast to water them, after lunch to smell, examine, prune, and taste them.
He grew flowers too. By June of every year, the patch behind the cottage was ablaze with marigolds. A carpet of suns in spectra of yellows, oranges, burgundies, and coppers. Their petals would open every morning with the sun, to the sun. He wouldn’t miss it. At night, they closed. This lasted all summer.
In early October, the children returned to school. At the month’s end, the marigolds wilted. Flowers do, and people.
The genus, in Latin, of Marigold is Calendula. It means “little calendar,” “little clock.” “Little weather-glass,” possibly. It means time, simple and continuous, passes. With or without, beyond us. The flowers do not mind this truth, their lives not measured by clocks.
They live by sun and water, and the freedom, to bloom or not, to dig their own roots deep and wide as they wish, to leave seeds when they go.
On the first of November, most marigolds will have disappeared, except in Mexico, where they cover graves and alters in churches and houses, line the streets and tresses of young girls with bursts of vibrant orange and red and yellow. Sunshine yellow. The Day of the Dead, Día de los Muertos, is one of celebration: it honours the lives of the departed. It does not mourn their absence.
The marigolds are used to guide the dead to their beloved, for a day, fragile and rich and fleeting, that passes, until next year.
The boy did not plant the seeds in the bag. Summer came and went, and another. A few. Then one random spring, as soon as the soil was warm, he scattered a few in a pot on the kitchen sill of his apartment. Within a few days, minuscule sprouts, brave little ones. A few weeks, stems, and by June, spectra of yellows, oranges, burgundies, coppers.
Time travel. The old man was there again, un-weathered, smelling of freshly upturned earth, ripe tomatoes, watching the sun open the flowers.