May Day

Today I went and bought my annual exercise in green thumb failure: pots of basil, thyme, feverfew, foxglove, lavender, and shasta daisies. Each year I attempt container gardening, and each year I get a few months' of good cooking herbs but everything else perishes. This year, I tell myself, things will be different. First off, I got some advice from a but cute man at the nursery who boasted that he has 70 containers filled with lush flora in his yard. He indicated that I too could enjoy such bounty. Would that it were so, cute nursery man.
Tomorrow is May Day. It is also my recently departed and dearly missed Grandmother's birthday. She loved flowers. I think it is so appropriate that she was born on the first of May. I am missing her most acutely. Each month that passes is one more month gone by that I have not spoken with her, have not shared things with her, have not laughed with her over the things we used to laugh about. I have not told her about the plans I have for my now-flourishing business, my new red maryjanes, or this longing I have--a secret my heart keeps--and oh but I miss her. Sometimes I dream of her. The last time I did, though, she was frail and sick. I dreamed she told me she didn't want to live anymore. I know, Gramma, I said, and my heart twisted around on itelf, and my dream became the place where I experienced that exquisite and bittersweet bodily felt sense that accompanies the loss of someone you have loved all your life.
Tomorrow then, her ashes will be scattered somewhere she loved, and she will be springtime.
There are other sad things for my family to do tomorrow, more mourning to deliver, more grief to endure. But for someone else there is no more suffering, no more cancer, no more pain. Shalom.

Life is temporary, and messy, innit? I miss my mother. If I could I would go walking with her, and tell her about the sound of the hummingbirds in the barn I go to on Mondays, and maybe she would tell me a story about my Gramma, and my Uncle Bob Allen, and what they ate for breakfast summer mornings on the farm.