Because I cannot fix her heart,
I plant flowers in the two empty pots
on my mother’s high rise patio.
She’s always loved flowers around the house—
peonies and petunias in Wisconsin,
succulents and larkspur in Colorado.
She taught me when I was a girl
how to deadhead the plants
to produce more blooms,
how to make the snapdragon
open its reptilian mouth, how
to tell the story of Cinderella
by carefully dissecting the bleeding heart,
how to make touch me nots spit their seeds,
and how a few flowers around the home
bring immeasurable joy. And so
I pick out white and blue lobelia and
a soft gray vine and a hot pink begonia
and other flowers and vines I can’t name
and we sit on her patio together
in the late afternoon sun
and arrange the potted plants.
There is something about planting flowers
together that changes the way
you see the flowers—the same way
a soup tastes better when made
by someone who loves you—
and I thrill to think of her
looking out the window and seeing
the bright red geraniums surrounded
by purples and blues and greens
and thinking to herself, wow,
that girl really loves me, and
surely, surely, though it won’t
fix her heart, surely it will do some good,
those draping pink petunias
so familiar, so new.
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