I could not bring back my brother, but I could bring beauty and joy back into the world with my stewardship of my backyard. The pruning, feeding, and simple enjoyment of each flower would pull me from the darkness that is losing a close loved one. The spiritual and physical discipline and care of them was a place to put my pain and see tangible results of beauty and care. I began to stray from tomatoes and obsess over roses. Like that single petal flower, it may be short, fragile, and tenuous, but it is worth blooming if only for a moment. Each stamen and petal fashioned from the nutrients in the soil, reminding me that life is still beautiful. Here was hope here was labour and work materialized. Then I saw it, a purple clematis, one I had planted two years ago, and it had given me its first bloom. #Devour rose locations map fullAs I walked out of my front door on the day of the burial, I was exhausted and full of the dread of the grief that was insurmountable. The hope that had been tangible had withered and replaced with a bleakness and hurt I could have never imagined. No goodbyes and only three weeks until my first son was born. I never knew what a garden could do until I lost my brother. #Devour rose locations map skinI love to see my salesman don his overalls and oil sodden gloves, and have his freckled skin splattered with dirt and fertilizer in preparation for this year’s harvest. You can imagine how flummoxed he is when he finds out I bought another vining, bushy rose that will make a beautiful, deadly, tangled mess among his structure and order. He neatly lines up his rows and measures to make neat hills of tomatoes and peppers and beans. I have a lot of hope that this is the year that the fig tree will grow on that hill and give me, or the birds, more than three figs. I take a pick axe and I garden with my Irish ancestors as I pull potatoes out of the dirt. Our backyard has a compacted red clay slope that only Sisyphus and I have the audacity to make verdure each spring. He used to grow food and flowers and take long walks in the woods I feel him with me as I rake rocks out of the unforgiving red hill I work with to produce a few blooms each spring. We always had a plate of fresh tomatoes, onion, and nana peppers with dinner, or it wasn’t really dinner was it? Grandparents and cousins would come with grocery bags of their excess crops to share with us, as four kids will eat you out of house and sanity. In fall, we would shuck an acre of corn and the cows would wait on the fence line, ready to devour the husks while we ate Silver Queen, slathered in butter. My parents used to have a long strip of red clay in the Hickory Flats, and I remember picking peas from it in the summer, covered in sweat and bees.
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