"If a flower doesn't make you feel good, I don't know what will," she said, bending over and snipping the first zinnia bloom in the spring garden, like that was the last word on the subject."Well, it won't," I responded.
She said, "Well, I don't know what will, then."
At least she was consistent.
But here I was fresh out of surgery on a broken pinky finger, feeling groggy and depressed and in a bad mood. At the last minute I let the anesthesiologist talk me into going local.
"General won't make you feel good at all."
Well, I don't feel good and I don't know if I'd have felt worse if I had had a general but I would venture to say I wouldn't feel a whole lot worse.
Percocet. I want to take the whole bottle. That's another word for general anesthesia: suicide.
No, I don't really want to kill myself! I just want to feel sorry for myself and that's part of the process.
She came back up, her head beet red, holding the small vibrant pink -- almost unnaturally pink -- zinnia she had just snipped off the stem with a little doohickey she keeps in her garden apron. "Here."
I just looked at her.
"Take it and put it in some water. It'll last for a week or more."
I felt like she had laid a responsibility on me. I wanted to take it from her and drop it in the kitchen garbage, smiled to myself at the thought of it, picturing it lying there on top of the burned out lightbulb and the burned egg I tried to cook for myself one-handed this morning. A bit of my smile leaked out.
"See, you're already looking better," she said and I took the flower.
I smelled it.
"No smell," she informed me. "Zinnias are all about looks. Beauty!" She pointed out the dozens of little heads at the tops of all the slender green plants filling the front garden under her windows. They all had little crowns of color coming out. It was like a garden full of royalty, all these green heads with a variety of colorful crowns, all different color crowns. She told me to check back in a week and the colorful array would take my breath away. She promised. "Some of them as big as my hand!"
Her hands were small but that would be a lot bigger than the zinnia I was holding, twirling by its stem like a paper umbrella on a toothpick.
"Why did you pick this one so early? You should have waited till it got bigger," I said, looking for an argument.
"Pshaw!" she said, "The first one is always smaller. It's just coming out to see if this is a good garden in which to grow---
