By Tish Davis
Concord Township, Ohio, USA
A few rose petals have fallen away from the vase that rests on the patient’s night table. I add water to rejuvenate the stems, but it’s hopeless. The flowers are dead.
The elderly woman tells me that she enjoyed watching the flowers change. She always grew roses in her garden. She drifts into detail—of pouring boiling water over the soil to sterilize it, of covering flats with a screen to protect the grains from mice and ants. Sometimes, the containers would spend a second winter outside to give the slower seeds another chance to germinate.
At the beginning of autumn, she’d return each tool to its proper hook in the potting shed then relax on the porch swing with her husband. By now she is unable to stay awake. The light changes. As she naps, I notice that the roses donated by our church have dried perfectly.
bells
beyond the garden
the garden beyond
first published in Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose 2 (December 2009)