When it’s time to dry flowers to refresh the vases, I always pick more than I need to ensure a good selection of colors across the spectrum. The ones not needed usually end up in the field to molder away.
For some unremembered slight reason, this year’s remnants never made it out of the shed but, with wires and nails needed for this year’s pickings, I think to remove last season’s remains.
Leached of all color, they float, apparently in midair, hung as they are by all-but-invisible florist’s wire.
Lashed by wind sweeping in through the open, north-facing lean to at the back of the shed, some, stripped of not only color but of leaves and blooms as well, are the mere skeletons of their former selves.
Shades of past lives, slim in the shadows, they sway slightly in the hot summer breeze—no spring zephyrs these.
Like my old man’s memories of summers past, they are hazy, fuzzy, inexact in their current form.
