Gladioli

It was that rare spring moment. The morning was cold, but the breeze felt baked. Their naked green stalks were just emerging from the dirt. In English the flower is called gladiolus, meaning little sword, from the Latin gladius, like gladiator. The word has another nested in it, glad, from the Old English for bright and shining, conditions necessary to coax the pointy tips of the leaves from their fibrous tunic, ridged planar leaves that fan out well before the blooms ascend in a snug, upright swirl. Even nude, the shoots were so showy, knocking around behind my son while he dug in the front yard with a little shovel. Far off, an ambulance sounded, then another. From the top of a cruddy palm tree down the block, a crow squawked. Still in pajamas, hair unbrushed, I marinated in the musk of my own coffee breath, eyed them with suspicion and ceremoniousness, remembering how carefully I’d buried belowground their hard little corms brought home months ago in a brown paper bag I bought in a white paper mask when nurseries were one of the few places outside our home where George and I could go. Soon they should bloom. What is soon anymore? (Soon is June). I want to like these gladioli. I don’t know yet if I will.

Maybe it was the Santa Anas stirring up strong feelings in me. Dry winds on my skin, a novelty in April and an unsettling signal of fire season down the line. But I joined a kinship of belligerence with the crow. Why should a flower be subjected to the iniquities of conventional taste? Isn’t it our important lives that could be called incidental? If every flower perished overnight, people wouldn’t last very long, but in the reverse scenario, flowers would persist. Flowers might even thrive.