I want to be that daring gardener who ploughs up her front yard -- to the horror of the Neighborhood Association -- and plants Birds of Paradise, waist high.

I want the confusion of their orange and purple plumage to lure the staid widow woman across the street from her manicured veranda. She will enter my jungle yard, throw up her skirt and dance like a cossack’s bride.

I want musicians…

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Leafing redbuds outside an open window, a birdbath with robins spritzing away winter from new feathers, and a writer sits in a green chair at a desk sharing her observations about relationships through pen on cotton paper.



The paper is swept off the desk by a breeze lifting through curtain sheers, and it floats away from her whitewashed clapboards and vegetable gardens, clearing the tops of trees and puffy clouds and across state lines, to readers afar in beds and in hammocks and in… Continue

Today, stooped, with her hands five inches into the soil, she found happiness.

There was a first, subtle shift as the banked coals within her started glowing.

She tilled a bed for simple snapdragons, pink and yellow, carefully avoiding the jagged leaves of poppies now three inches high.

The passing joggers and stroller-pushing mommies gave only a glance to the middle-aged woman pulling shallow winter weeds between her perennials.

Better that they didn't realize…

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First, the three-month drought took the garden and their little patch of yard, and after that, the unprotected topsoil washed away in the rains. Etta stood at the edge of the house where sharp, bevelled trenches ran downhill to nothing. What she mourned for was her tiny stand of Cahaba lilies, rare everywhere but one corner of Alabama, lost in the cruel dry months and deluge that had followed. Now, she supposed, she would have to wait for another…

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