All The Flowers I Have Cried Over

It is an underrated thing, those first weeks of spring when you go indoors from the stickly, winter trees and short, forgetful grass, and emerge again after a long rain to an explosion of lush, green, verdant nature. The color combination of wet, dark branch and light green, almost transparent leaf is one of the most beautiful and short lived. It is like looking through color-enhanced glasses — like seeing everything infused with extra paint. Like a Bob Ross canvas before the artist takes a clean brush to everything to smooth out the brush strokes and catch where he laid a heavy hand. 

This display comes with a fully soaked and awakened earth. It comes with a smell you can feel. 

Last week I drove home from work with my car windows down for the first time this year. I like the outside to come in. Channeling down a backroad I have driven for decades, one I know every inch of, each curve and bump, every crack and pothole, exactly which brush to keep an eye on that wildlife prefers to emerge from, I am shocked by something unexpected. It is the first day after the spring rain and the grass is abundant. Yard work has resumed, tulips are politely rising up out of their seats to greet everyone who enters their party, crows are gathering to practice their lines together. It is the season of just getting out and doing. It doesn’t matter what you do, just so long as you move about. A small shovel or a broom helps in this effort — most people will see you and think you are extremely timely and industrious. And after such a long winter, a t-shirt on a day still too brisk for no sleeves is an absolute delight. 

But returning to my moment of surprise, as I passed by a house with a grassy blanket around its feet, I eyed the resident moving a lawnmower over the green. Blades to blades: what a poignant scenario. Minding my own business, through my open window, with the sound of the guttural rumble of the machine, comes the smell of freshly-trimmed grass, with the damp earth and the thick air full of pollen and potential. 

Normally this would result in a headache. But this day, I am shot back to childhood. Propelled to approximately age seven, a dusky, mild evening in late spring or early summer, where a storm wants to blow through and show off his new wardrobe. The windows are open because my mother has been cooking and the house is too warm. My father has come home from work, shed button-down for white undershirt and is riding around the yard cutting the grass before the rain. I am not wearing any shoes. My hair is strangled into a ponytail. I am hot from running in the grass, feeling very melancholic over all of the violets and clover and dandelion that will be dead in a matter of minutes. 

All the flowers I have cried over. 

The whole universe may as well begin and end on my street. Grey asphalt road cutting through from here to heaven. The lawn mower moving absent-mindedly around the dogwood tree in the front and the marker where our well is, passing around the exposed roots of trees, and the swing set, and the little white shed where it lives among the winter mice and summer hornets. I am very alive, and the east coast oxygen is in my little lungs, and I do not know it, but my hippocampus is thriving, hand making a book mark to place here so I can remember it later. I like to imagine the book mark is one of those made of contact paper with little pressed flowers enclosed between the sticky sides. The violets I could not save. 

There are three minutes remaining in my drive and I am silent. There is such power in our bodies and I am in awe of it. And what do you do? You can’t thank the person mowing their lawn. You can’t thank the earth for the way it smells a few days in the year. You could thank God for giving you a nose and a part of your brain that is named after a seahorse for the way it is shaped, but what good would it do? The point seems to be that everything is happening and you are just passing through it. So I pass through and remember. There are other places in the narrative to note and dog ear. Other book marks to make.