Transient Gardner

All life in this world leaves a soul behind—not just people, and not just cats and dogs. I’m talking about everything. I’m talking birds, bees, fish, flowers, trees. Everything. You cannot stand at your window to catch the morning breeze without being washed over by the ghosts of a hundred thousand different lives.

My mother was many things. She was gentle in times that called for gentleness, and she was a raging typhoon in times that required strength. She was a poet. She was a gardener, and she was a ghost.

She taught me to tend to dead flowers year after year, budding in the fall and blooming in the winter. She taught me how to squint my eyes at barren planes and see that they were filled with translucent chrysanthemums, sparkling lisianthuses, glowing lavender, shining hydrangeas, and crystalized larkspur climbing through the clouds. Ephemeral purples and blues would bleed into the night sky, overtaking the stars and swirling around like oil leaking into asphalt on a rainy day. Smiling deeply, she would guide my bare hands into the soil, spread my fingers, and teach me to feel the endless vibrations of infinite lifecycles. We would till soil by moonlight and fall asleep at dawn, where I’d wave her goodbye. I would spend my days waiting for night to fall, waiting for my mom to come back to me.

In the spring and summer, I spent my time living. I went to school. I stared out windows wondering where she was and what she might be doing. I tended a living, breathing garden of flowers and veggies. When the fall would finally come and take them away, my mother would return and bring them back to me shiny and new—alive with the splendor of dying. I became nocturnal each year in turn with the falling leaves. 

One chilly autumn evening, I woke up to my mother hovering over me and staring. She looked like she was memorizing my face down to the last freckle. I shifted around in my pile of leaves and sat up to meet her gaze.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“For what?” I asked.

“To move on,” she said. 

“No,” I said. “You can’t.”

“I can,” she said. She reached out to wipe away the tears running down my face, but her pale hands just passed through me. “And I must,” she said.

“Please,” I begged. I fell to my knees. The wind picked up and ruffled my jacket. I’d never been so cold. The moon was full and glowing so bright that it stung my eyes. The air became hard, and the ground became soft. I felt like I would fall through the earth.

“I love you,” she said, and she was gone. As she faded, so did her garden. 

One by one, the ghosts of the flowers she’d carried through death passed on, leaving me alone in the empty fields of the living.