Last year, your 30th, was especially hard for me. I was so excited for my 30th - I spent practically the entire year of 29 getting pumped up for turning 30. Man, I wonder what we would have been like together as adults. Would we even still get along? How much of my personality would be different if we had been together for all those many, many extra years? So different. So different.
I stood in the rain last year, on your 30th birthday, tears pouring down my face, jabbing holes in the wet soil, sprinkling in poppy seeds and covering them, feeling your energy and putting it into those seeds, hoping beyond all hope that they would bloom despite the uncertainty of the spring ahead. And then March got cold. It froze, and froze, and froze. I shivered in 20-degree weather on the last day of March, and I thought about those seeds. I thought about how I should have waited and given them a better chance later in the year. But I needed to plant them on your birthday. I needed to immerse them in the earth and feel the dirt and rain and bugs and pain and everything, on your birthday. So maybe it was a selfish move to plant them that day. But maybe not. And besides, the packet said I could plant them in March in Ohio. And so I did.
At first I thought the foliage was just one more of the neverending diversity of weeds thriving in the biome of my yard. Nonetheless, I continued to always spray the hose down to the front of my yard where I had planted those seeds on a rainy March 13, making sure the entire area was fully saturated with life-giving water. Water and earth. Air and fire. Dust to dust.
And then the blooms came! The first poppy flowers opened in May, a light orange cup slowly opening up. I cried tears of joy, remembering my heartbreak, on your birthday and so many times over the years gone by. Every year, I ritually mourned you on your birthday and your death-day, never realizing that I should celebrate you, that I should create beauty in your memory, new memories in your image, joy in the sadness of your wake. And there was proof! Proof in the bloom of a non-native plant, the state flower of California thriving in the Ohio summer, beauty in my otherwise chaotic front yard.
At your funeral they gave us all seed packets. We were supposed to plant flowers in your memory. I never could bring myself to open the packet and sprinkle the seeds in your memory. I kept the seed packet for over a decade, still adorned with the ribbon someone had carefully affixed in preparation for the ceremony. I toted the seed packet, together with various other pieces of cobbled-together memorabilia, in an old gift sack from around 1991, for year after year, apartment after apartment, across the country and back. Finally, it got lost in a move, and I still kick myself every day for inadvertently abandoning those photographs which will never be replaced, a letter you wrote me before you got sick that was heartbreakingly premonitious, and various other relics of a childhood left behind. I no longer have those tangible memories, so carefully preserved. I am left, now, with nothing but the memories in my mind, which I dearly hope that I am not changing too drastically as the years go by. So now it is time to look at the future and find new ways to create tangible memories for you. So I finally plant those seeds, 16 years overdue.
The poppies bloomed all summer. Their last blooms did not fade until well after the first frost in September. The plant grew and grew, the unique blue-green leaves extending across my front garden, more and more orange blooms dotting the landscape every time I looked and continuing to draw the curious attention of passers-by; even my friends educated in flora and fauna did not recognize the simple California poppy. After all these years, I finally have land to call my own. So perhaps that is why I never planted those seeds, and instead carted them around all those years while I searched for my roots without knowing it. So now I have my own piece of land in this earth, and I can use it to create joy and beauty. Soil, water, air. Summer blooms, winter hibernation, fall leaves, spring rains. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Happy 31st, Robina. I love and miss you, every day, but I know that you are here with me.
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