Tiny Flowers

Weed, California, Saturday May 10, 2008: Usually around mid-day, the dogs and I like to take a little walk around the house and the very large vacant lot next door. It’s mostly an open field, with some tall and graceful trees at the far end.

If we have walked to the end, and walked around one or more of the trees … well, we know we’ve been somewhere.

Today, the air was cool, but the sun was warm on us, and I plodded along after Charlie the dashing young boy, and I was lost in thought, watching my feet, for the now fast-growing grasses can hide gopher holes.

And I saw …

Tiny little flowers, a pale lavender color, just tiny little things.

And I remembered … back when I was four and five and seven and nine, and visiting my grandmother’s farmhouse, and how along the paved walkway to the chicken yard and the barns beyond … on the left she kept bushy thick plants with a million tiny little flowers, in yellow and blue and purple and white.

I don’t know what they were called. I had forgotten them.

And now, those tiny, tiny flowers came back, over the years. And as I walked here in the now, I realized they were everywhere at my feet, the tiny purple flowers. Everywhere. I smiled.

“Hello,” I said, “Hello, Grandmother.”

I walked on through those tiny galaxies, and once again I felt loved.

I realize: the flowers are everywhere, if you look.

The world is filled with twilight and memories and shifting shapes, if you look. The ones who have gone have left ripples, and sometimes we feel them eddy around us. And within us as well.

Tiny flowers. Filling the world.