Wildflower Freed

The edge of my spade sliced into the compacted earth, cutting a deep, gaping wound.  I kept digging, gashing open an empty hole that refused to bleed and reopening fresh wounds within me.  My eyes, that were so used to seeing her smiling face beside me in our little patch, betrayed my inward grief.  With grubby, earth-covered hands, I wiped at the pair of traitors, trying to remember a time when I once had enjoyed gardening.

Like the hole that I dug, there was nothing left but the gaping emptiness.  A cruel gardener ripped from my well-tended beds the most beautiful wildflower of my garden.  Nothing was left but the hole she had once filled.

“Get a hold of yourself, Don,” I murmured to myself, hands shaking.  I had loved her so much, and she knew.  She knew that I had loved her, and I watched that shining sun’s death, had seen her red-orange sunset fill the sky with a spectacular display of hues in separate brushstrokes until the cold darkness of perpetual night remained in her glowing presence.  There would be no more day.

I resumed digging, remembering every day we’d spent, kneeling in the warm, earthy soil, laughing and tending the--our--garden.  Hardly a decade after we‘d begun our project, she was dead, far too young.  But isn’t any age too young to die?

The hot tears slid again down my face, now from the daily joy we had taken together.  I could almost feel her here, kneeling beside me as before, talking and laughing as we toiled, sweating in the summer heat or shivering in the winter’s bitter cold.  I only wish she had not gone, but one thing I know I’ll never regret was the gift of life in our lush garden.

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