four

Gardening with Margaret. It is a silent endeavor, as is much of my day these days. She, like so many others, has lost her words. She can't find them anymore. And I panic with the writer's block that I have allowed for this long, which seem utterly self indulgent in the face of this distant possibility. Losing words. And I can't decide whether it would be tragedy or peace. Peace in not knowing, not having to search the cobwebbed backrooms, the attics and crawlspaces, for just that precisely descriptive modifier that no one would have thought of-- black as a bible, rabid neon halflight, the great flat hand of God -- these words that have entranced me my whole life. If I didn't have them, if they were lost to me, what would be left? Margaret can still pull weeds. "There is something..." she says, pointing to a sprouting bit of green that I overlooked on my side of the waist high bed. I don't make her say the word. I don't even embarrass her by knowing it myself. I just pull it. The something.

I like the quiet of it, the job, and in the words of Graham Nash, "... some of my actions remind me of me."