Unspoken Messages

"Are you ready to order, or shall I come back."

I think so. Yes, I am ready to order. Myself, order myself, reorder my molecules and begin again. Ha, I laugh at the odd approach to the simple word. I imagine a game of chinese checkers with the marbles rolling around until they hit their little circles and stay put, all in order.

"I'd like a mocha, please."

There is a swirl of air currents after the young man as he leaves. He is in such a hurry, but he has nice eyes that look kind. He is not impatient. I see he is moving from table to table, looking for missing forks, unfilled glasses, and guests who need more coffee. He is attentive and quick, and his eyes are warm.

I twiddle my iPhone and look at yesterday's images, taken when I was sitting in a different diner, sitting across from red leather and gleaming chrome, polished steel, a room without life but colorful nonetheless. I look around this room and listen to it.  There are voices nearby, but I cannot hear words. I look at the walls, the pictures hanging askew on the wall, and hear the distant bustle and clang of the kitchen workers.

The flowers in the vase on my table are bright and cheerful, dying to get my attention. Ah, dying. Yes, unfortunately dying little bit by little bit, small degrees of loss of their vitality. I look at them very carefully. It used to be that the colors of flowers and the blossoms themselves spoke messages from a person who gave them to the one who received them. Red always represented love and passion. Roses, daisies, irises and chrysanthemums all had their implicit meaning, conveying something far beyond mere words.

I lean in and wonder what this bouquet of bright life means, what message I would have known if I had lived a hundred years ago.  I fiddle with the flowers, touching their soft petals and delicate coolness. I pull out a few withered and spent pieces. Ah, they are dying to tell me something? A small feeling of their desperate signaling overcomes me. I lean in and detect - fragrance? No. Just beauty, simply beauty standing silently in a vase, quietly perfect.

The young man brings the cup of mocha and sets it before me. His eyes again. I see the warm life in his eyes and the room around him, hear the murmuring people who are eating their food and sipping their coffee. I am glad that it's not quiet.

Wow, I'm a Gardener

I walked around Cypress Garden Nursery today, drunk on beauty and fragrance.  I feasted my eyes on a froth of flowers and realized the Cypress Garden had simply transferred all their knowledge about growing healthy vibrant plants to me.  I have at last replicated their success, at least a much smaller version, and I am immensely grateful to them for that.

This year, my garden, which is largely a container garden, has sprung from a sad, ratty ugliness born of serious neglect to become the most abundant garden I've ever grown before.  What's my secret?  First of all, I had to pay attention to it more often.  Then, heavy pruning in January, regular feeding with an organic fertilizer and regular watering -- if rain wasn't doing the job -- has turned the tide.  (I have settled on E.B. White organic fertilizer, and I don't get paid to say so.)  My plants are growing abundantly and are producing profuse amounts of flowers.  A couple of plants are very challenging, and I still I need to figure them out, but the majority are dancing on their stems in apparent happiness.  I like to think so anyway.

Pruning is the one area that takes time to master, and I have asked a lot of questions.  If injudicious cuts are made, you can lose a plant, but if you don't prune out dead wood at the beginning of the growing season, the plant is stuck with it and vitality is lost.  Roses, the most vulnerable plants to pests and horrible afflictions, need pruning in January and then constant attention to battle the waves of predators that materialize from nowhere.  So, I remembered that and accomplished my pruning when the yard was still cold and dreary.  Now the roses are popping out all over the plants like nobody's business.

It is said that life happens in seasons not in 30-minute segments, so I am in this for the long haul now.  Sticking with the plants as they go through their life cycle is proving to me that keeping my eyes on the prize (lots of flowers throughout the growing season) takes perseverance and a long-term focus, but wow is it worth it.  If my flowers could sing, I'd hear quite a chorus.

Red Flowers in a Vase

Morning came and went somewhere, like it walked up wearing a sparkling dress and said hello but left again.  It was a glistening morning, emerging brightly after the spitting gray storm that left in the night.

I sipped my coffee at the table and contemplated a vase with flowers.  It is a gently curving clear glass, with water pierced by emerald stems.  My mind brushed itself along the petals, poured their fragrance into all the hollows and valleys of memory and experience.  They spoke to me quietly in claret, blood-red crimson and scarlet, enfolding me in their velvet arms.  All the color was singing silently, moving everywhere like love, glowing like a sacred vow.

Out in the shine of the day, redness pursued me, haunted me and shouted out its glories.  Color was running in clouds in the streets, climbing to the treetops and bounding across the Gabilans, all the way to heaven.  Redness everywhere, all shades of it, sleek, shining, beaming, vital and eternal, recalled the redness of silent, tender flowers in a clear glass vase.

The sky has shifted from vigilant brilliant blue to a quiet rustle of silver organza strewn from Bonnie Doon to the Ventana and beyond.  Sounds of life in town are distant, wrapped in cotton quilts, listening in the streets and alleys for echoes, tapping on the fence posts.  Time is lying on the window sill, yawning and stretching languidly, idly thinking of promises and answers, keeping many secrets.

Refreshed by the passing brilliant day, twilight is striding in, cloaked in a soft grey wool, checking the windows for drafts, the lamps for light and the sky for stars.  Tenderly, it pauses at the vase and gently caresses the flowers, covers them in grey, then black, and then hushes them to sleep their deep crimson dreams.