river_kate

Here's a very short story that I wrote on another site that I abruptly quit visiting about six months ago. The story is true and has great meaning for me:

It was a mid-March evening in Colorado. I was exhausted, having just gotten off work from my retail job. I'd barely missed my bus and had an hours wait for the next one. I could either sit on the bench in the cold or loiter on my tired feet and legs in the supermarket next to my place of employment. I took turns between these two choices.

Feeling terrified about my credit card debt, I had been watching every penny since the beginning of the year. I noticed the supermarket had plastic containers of wilted winter pansies on sale in front of the store. They didn't look like much but I splurged and chose the purple ones.

They sat on my kitchen table for a few days. I planted them in a too-big pot with some used potting soil and placed them on a small table on the porch. When a blizzard came a few weeks later I worried but the pansies looked magical and glorious in all the white snow. When I would return home I could see them a block away; the color looked so vibrant. They also flourished in the summer's hot and dry weather.

One day I pressed one of the blooms in waxed paper and put them under a pile of books in my extremely cluttered apartment. In late July, my sister wrote that she wasn't feeling well and was losing a lot of weight. When I sent her a card, I thought of the pressed pansy, managed to locate it and included it. My sister's cancer diagnosis came too late for anything to be done effectively. A kind soul paid for my plane ticket to visit her for a weekend in November to say goodbye.

Walking around her small town while she napped, I kind of checked out the lay of the land. After Christmas, with all the crap involved in retail, I knew I had to take a leave from my job and stay with her. She was told she had three weeks to live at that time but she wanted to live to see another spring. She had a ceramic robin on her nightstand and a little bowl with a rock, a feather and the pressed pansy I had sent months before and she daydreamed about her connection with nature. She lived to see the robins and the peonies and the magnolias and I stayed with her for the last five months of her life.

Taking the train back to Colorado in late June, I shipped six boxes of my winter clothes, stuff I had needed while staying with her and some things she'd had that I wanted to keep. The boxes arrived before I did and were waiting on the porch. At the time I didn't know how serious my long-term environmental poisoning was; I just knew I felt exhausted. Three of the boxes stayed unpacked for quite some time. I couldn't reconnect with the community where I'd been living; I was a changed person.

A year later I moved further west. I happened to get the the moving company from hell and that's enough said about that. By the time my belongings arrived two weeks later than they'd said they would, I wasn't functioning well. It took a long time to unpack and get my new place in any kind of order.

I have a lot of things. I'm aware that according to Feng Shui, dried flowers have dead energy and it's not so great to have dried things around. I get that. The little pressed pansy survived all the moving and drama. Now, almost five years later after I impulsively purchased the wilted pansies, the pressed bloom is in a pretty dish in an antique curio cabinet that belonged to my ancestors. Sometimes when I'm feeling fragile, insignificant and non-contributing, I sometimes think of the pressed flower there. When I look at it, it's a touchstone, like reading a book. It's life was meaningful and it did great work.