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Eveningland — Hem. I love this band. This album is guaranteed to be in my top ten for 2004.
Also listening to Sam Phillips, who's appearing in concert on Tuesday night (that's almost "tonight") in Atlanta at the Red Light Café. Yes, I'll be there.
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It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own....— Jessamyn West
That night, when the party was over, Howard went to our bedroom and lay in wait for me, wearing only his suit of tarnished flesh.. I walked toward the bed through the pewter light, dressed in all the awful beauty of my years. We looked at one another. — Hilma Wolitzer
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New poem up — a little something by good old ee cummings. |
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I can be reached at romanlily ~at~gmail.com. Or you can join the notify list here. |
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October 11, 2004
Burial
In Atlanta, the flower in your front yard during cold weather is the pansy. You don't have much choice in the matter. It's the only blooming flower that can survive the winter.
I feel sort of like a farmer whenever October rolls around: Well, better go on down to the nursery and get my pansies.
The pansies come in lots of nice colors: purple, yellow, white, lavendar, blue, and a spectacular velvet red. At the nursery they set them out in long rows grouped by color. It always warms my heart watching people as they shop, gazing over the long rows of plants. I went yesterday to pick out my pansies, and I saw a young woman with a bunch of them in her shopping cart, just staring at them very intently. I know she was envisioning her yard, thinking about where she might plant the pansies, what they would look like, which colors would go in the hanging basket by the front door, which ones would go in the little beds under the windows...
I think about planting pansies this autumn and I think about how I've planted pansies for many autumns in a row. It's a ritual with me, something I look forward to every year. When I lived in Avondale Estates in 1997, planting them was a pleasure that perfectly captured my state of joyful independence, a long-anticipated reward for my first winter in my first apartment. I remember going with Brent to the nursery that year, and I remember how he instructed me on picking the best plants (avoid the rootbound pots, and look for the unopened buds on the flowers. I remember him brusquely pushing back the leaves on the plants, revealing tightly curled blooms-to-be).
I remember planting pansies in 2001 when we lived in East Lake, the well-meaning but completely wretched Kunstlerian nightmare of an apartment. I think we were the only apartment on our block that had any non-standard-issue vegetation. (Now that we're well out of the situation, I would like to just say that I hated that apartment complex. I still remember the next-door-neighbors with a weary sigh. How many times do you have to beat on the wall at 2 am before they understand that now is not a good time for the breakdancing contest?)
The planting of the bulbs follows close behind the pansies. Picking the bulbs out at the nursery is an elaborate process soaked in religious overtones.
After I've got the bulbs, I like to wait until the absolute right moment to put them in the ground. It's usually good to come home early on the last Tuesday afternoon in October and put them in the ground then. A dreary, overcast afternoon is perfect. Before I get started I pull out all the tools, like a doctor preparing to perform surgery. Bulb planter, gloves, kneepads, watering can. As a last step before breaking the ground with a shovel, I mix a superstitious cocktail to shake in over each bulb: fertilizer, bone meal, mulch.
Every fall, planting bulbs, I remember a poem by Rebecca McClanahan called "Burial," a poem I came across years ago, loaded with images so vivid that it continues to haunt me, almost ten years after the discovery:
Like a sister who borrows
a blouse without asking,
the earth slipped
the ring from my finger
as I worked the soil
our first married spring
when your leaving
was a seed planted
beneath my knowing...
I ask questions every year as I put the bulbs down, their dismal little peaks pointed hopefully toward the gray sky. I ask them to whisper the future to me, to illuminate the things that are still in darkness. I ask them to soak up all the secrets hidden in the ground, and to bring forth something beautiful and unexpected and perfect when the time is right. Somehow, they always do.
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