santos scribes

it’s the black bucket, perch beside the deep silver sink who summons me today. teeming now it began its quest for emptiness yesterday – the soft relentless whisper coming from beneath the heaped seedy tomato pulp and all those black, run-thru coffee grinds. in summer things move more slowly around here- in preparation of the quicken pace of mid-August that will run us straight through to the end of the year.

and so, I take the long way down to our trusty corner spot today, to toss yesterday’s food scraps onto a pile of next year’s vegetable soils.

in bare feet and fraying denim, I glide through sliding glass doors out to our raised wooden deck and I gaze the distance to my left until I find Sandra’s Stems, a family flower garden four years and three lifetimes in the making. my eyes comb quickly with something like longing: will today be the day my mother uses her otherworldly powers to put up a new wildflower or two? no it’s only the echinacea, blooming still

and so, silver handled black bucket in hand I plop down three sun drenched steps ready to round the corner and coast the slight slope to our mercurial mess of prickly weeds & cracked eggshells, browning banana peels & drying avocado skins. with the lazy turn, I smile a hello to the Early Girls and Sungold’s, shake my head at the cross-pollinating zucchini squash and sugar pumpkins

my step stutters at the now five-foot towering bouquet of sunflowers that just ten days ago was a single flower mid-wink. today Medusa’s yellow head is swarmed with bees, not one of which is content to wait their turn to feed and even with all this fickle fixed natural commotion around me, it’s the postage stamp cornfield just a few feet ahead that gives me the greatest pause for consideration.

the 3×10 foot rectangle appears to be thriving under the tutelage and proxy of my husband Robert and his late father Tony, a Cornhusker even in death, I gather. over the weeks and months, I’ve watched the stalks grow and the squash blossoms bloom, the viny rows of waxy yellow beans lengthen but today I sense something unseen mixed into our 3 sisters garden. something rustles the air at my ears, peaks my curiosity. it sounds sharp and ancient like fresh white printer paper shuffling around a very large, very empty oak desk but when I tip my head to look up it’s just the long dancing leaves: ribboned & breathless, their purple silken tips thick and swaying in a midday breeze.