MissMeliss: Escribition

I’m a big fan of Nero Wolfe mysteries, so when Fuzzy brought me an orchid last night, I was tickled. He doesn’t know the connection, just thought it was pretty and interesting. He’s so sweet.

We’re not going out tonight, as we have to bring Zorro to the vet at dawn. Instead, I’m making Fuzzy’s favorite scary foods (meatloaf and green beans) and we’ll watch Smallville and Lost, and light a fire. Sometimes staying in and being all cozy with blankets on the couch is really the best way to celebrate.

Last year, in honor of the day, I posted my favorite Valentine’s Day poem, John Fuller’s “Valentine.” I’m too lazy - and busy - this morning to cut and paste, but the link is here: John Fuller Said It Best.

Have a happy day full of love and joy.
And chocolate.

I love flowers. One of my favorite adventures with my mother, when we lived in San Jose, was to go downtown to the warehouse of one of her friends who sold wholesale flowers, and just look at all the different combinations of green leaves and brightly-colored petals. I wanted to take home all of them.

I come by this love honestly. My earliest memories include my mother making sure there were flowers on the table, and my grandfather coming home with stalks of gladiolas stuck in a champagne cooler or plain metal watering can full of water, to keep them fresh.

He sent my grandmother roses for every birthday and anniversary.

She, too, loved flowers, and grew brilliant houseplants that were petted and cooed and fussed over. My grandmother was the living proof that talking to your plants really does help them. Her favorites were African violets, and she always called them her babies. It was sweet.

Fuzzy didn’t grow up with flowers as a big thing in his family, but he’s learning to appreciate them, and he’s also learned to make me smile by coming home with something pretty and festive whenever I send him to grocery shop without me. He’s also learned my rule for flower purchases: if you don’t know what someone likes, get something seasonal, or a little bit whimsical.

It’s a grey day outside my windows, but it’s not the grey of an impending storm so much as a day that seems somehow muted, shrouded. Or maybe that’s just how I’m choosing to see the world, today.

I came home from a day of beautification and book-browsing to an email informing me a cousin had died. I didn’t have a particularly close relationship with her; she is my mother’s generation, after all, and while I’m sad for her family, I also know she’d been fighting serious kidney disease, in and out of hospitals, for much of her life. Her death is an end to that, and end to her pain and her struggle. If death can be a balm, this one is.

She did not “pass” and she is not “gone,” and we did not “lose” her. I hate those words. She was not taking a test, she remains very much present in our hearts and minds, and she is not an object to be misplaced like a stray ring of keys. I hate that people are afraid of death. In the garden of life, as in any garden, there has to be death to complete the cycle. A flower must start from a seed, bloom, grow, wither, die, and return to the soil to offer nutrients to the next flower.

Mind you, I don’t think we should actively seek death, except in the case of terminal illness, because it seems to me that to do so is to give up.

I don’t believe in giving up.

But I do believe that sometimes you have to rest, and today, I see the grey sky as a resting state.
Soft clouds.
Balmy breeze.
A hint of coming change.
A whisper of winter far down the road.
Pencil strokes of thoughts, rather than bold declarations in fat black ink.

Grey.