Volunteers and Me

This spring, I've planted nothing, not deliberately,
but volunteers arouse themselves, anyway
winter chasers of last year's garden optimisms.
Orange and yellow, round, on blossomy nasturtiums,
tiny, on second generation mininature marigolds
bold, and cupping their faces to the sun
on lanky California poppies. Everything
I planted last year was organic, I think I even see
sprigs of baby romaine lettuce, and a few
junior high school sized sunflower stalks,
my daughter's pictures on her 6th grade volleyball team
rimming the kitchen window when I peer out to stare.
Nearly ten years have gone by since she was that small,
and just last year the garden was a thing
worth tending to, a thing that earmarked this house
for a home, neatly sprouted, watered daily.
The wind, we're in the shadow desert and the mountains
take all the rain. We've choked since yesterday
on fine-grained sand. I am suddenly compassionate
for these brave pioneers pushing their way through
the dirt from last year's crop, unwatered since
the rains of early February and now we're past March equinox.
And so I take the hose, and spray them down, randomly
pull the weeds that dominate the garden this year,
thinning out the spaces so the poppies can sing,
so the nasturtiums can wink at my daughter when she
sometimes comes home, so the tiny marigolds make me realize
that no flower is too small. My efforts are schizophrenic,
I'm taking a number of diverse prescription drugs right now
for a strange garden of issues and ills, I should be resting
so that the hole in my jaw from a just-pulled wisdom tooth
can heal, I grab fat dandelion plants with forefinger and thumb
closest to the root and ripping these behemoths out, randomly
grabbing handfuls of tall, unwanted plants, I'm sure I'll quit
before I get them all, I have no plan and am tiring already,
it's important for my flowers to see. Any day, temperatures
in the desert will peak at 90, then 100, degrees, these flowers
may not survive. I will close the blinds and withdraw into the
tile floor cool of my house, and probably won't feel like
doing any more watering, Ill be planning my own exodus
from the heat, my daughter and I once made this our home,
but the uprooting from childhood to young adulthood
has rendered my once well-tended garden a strange thing.
meantime the volunteers smile at me, and I at them
thanking them silently for their brief-lived generosity.

Ruth Nolan
March 23, 2009
copyright (c) 2009 by Ruth Nolan