Ann Struthers

Today I planted the sand cherry with red leaves— and hope that I can go on digging in this yard, pruning the grape vine, twisting the silver lace on its trellis, the one that bloomed just before the frost flowered over all the garden. Next spring I will plant more zinnias, marigolds, straw flowers, pearly everlasting, and bleeding heart. I plant that for you, old love, old friend, and lilacs for remembering.   The lily-of-the-valley with cream-colored bells, bent over slightly, bowing to the inevitable, flowers for a few days, a week. Now its broad blade leaves are streaked with brown and the stem dried to a pale hair. In place of the silent bells, red berries like rose hips blaze close to the ground. It is important for me to be down on my knees, my fingers sifting the black earth, making those things grow which will grow. Sometimes I save a weed if its leaves are spread fern-like, hand-like, or if it grows with a certain impertinence. I let the goldenrod stay and the wild asters. I save the violets in spring.   People who kill violets will do anything.

Adolescent white pelicans squawk, rustle, flap their wings, lift off in a ragged spiral at imaginary danger. What danger on this island in the middle of Marble Lake? They’re off to feel the lift of wind under their iridescent wings, because they were born to fly, because they have nothing else to do, because wind and water are their elements, their Bach, their Homer, Shakespeare, and Spielberg. They wheel over the lake, the little farms, the tourist village with their camera eyes. In autumn something urges them toward Texas marshes. They follow their appetites and instincts, unlike the small beetles creeping along geometric roads, going toward small boxes, toward lives as narrow or as wide as the pond, as glistening or as gray as the sky. They do not know why. They fly, they fly.