Dust to Dust

My mother's only sixty-two this year. She just celebrated a birthday without much fanfare, just the requisite backyard barbecue in the lush, green surrounding of her garden accompanied by a highball full of cheap red wine. I say she's only sixty-two but I've been thinking lately of things I'll miss about her when she's gone. Not to be morbid but we all have an end coming sooner or later (maybe hers will come sooner courtesy of her pack-a-day Vantage cigarette habit?). My mother would like this line of thinking about mortality, by the way, and consider me a realist for stating things so plainly. No, she won't quit smoking. Her reason? She likes it. Fair enough. 

On her fortieth birthday a collection of friends bought her forty roses. She still has them, plus or minus a few that went wayward. Her garden is perfection. The roses are in full bloom now and it's just as gorgeous as they were when newly planted. She tends to her garden as if it were her full time job though it isn't and her time is divided between work from home, work around the house, and my father-the piece of work. Her garden is a living masterpiece that she's single-handedly created. Passersby are always asking her the secret from the sidewalk-side of the fence. Knowing her she replies it's luck or hard work or just smiles and says thank you. 

The other day it occurred to me, in a moment of magical-realist imagining, that when my mother leaves the earth her garden might suddenly and spontaneously die. Surely, this won't occur. The reality is however, that when she's no longer able to do the work, I don't know that I will have enough time to create a garden as well cultivated as my mothers. As beautiful as it is, I'm not sure our small family would care to spend a chunk of our discretionary income on things that bloom, wither, rot, get stepped on or eaten by the dog. How will I ever find the time to carefully prune, then fertilize, and constantly weed the stray plants? 

I wonder if I'll manage to don a pair of dusty, rubberized gardening gloves time and time again as the seasons change like she has throughout her lifetime. Will I sharpen the shears and bear the grinding sound of metal on metal? Will I get over my aversion to gloves that may or may not contain black widow spiders? A little (or a lot) of dirt never bothered me. Life is, after all, a dust to dust affair, dirty and messy. What I do know is if I take up the mantle of her garden, I'll think of my mother happy and in the sun, her sinewy long limbs hanging by her sides, tired from shoveling and sore from contorting herself as she wrangles the weeds. I'll think of her tanned and weathered, smiling as she watches the seedlings grow, bloom, and fall back into the earth. 

The Startling Reality of Things

The startling reality of things

Is my discovery every single day
Everything is what it is,
And it’s hard to explain to anyone how much this delights me
And suffices me.

To be whole, it is enough simply to exist.

I’ve written a good many poems.
I shall write many more, naturally.
Each of my poems speaks of this,
And yet all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is one way of saying this.

Sometimes I start looking at stone.
I don’t start thinking, Does it have feeling?
I don’t fuss about calling it my sister.
But I get pleasure out of its being a stone,
Enjoying because it feels nothing,
Enjoying it because it’s not at all related to me.

Occasionally I hear the wind blow,
And find that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth having been born.

I don’t know what others reading this will think;
But I find it must be good since it’s what I think without effort,
With no idea what other people are listening to me think;
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as words say it.

I was once called a materialist poet
And I was surprised, because I didn’t imagine
I could be called anything at all.
I was once called a materialist poet: I see.
If what I write has any merit, it’s not in me;
The merit is there, in my verses.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.

Fernando Pessoa (Portugal – 1888-1935)