Planting seeds

My mother knew every plant in the garden,

her mother knew even more still,

never guessing or approximating names.

I never saw her, Grammy,

in her seersucker skirt,

walking among the tall phlox,

nursing a withering columbine,

leaning down to touch

the earlobe leaves of the nasturtium.

I just know that what my mother knew

her mother knew before her.

Some knowledge multiplied in the transfer,

some divided, some slipped away

like other warm chested bourbon assurances.

Some snaked away like cigarette ash.

How do we chose what parts

of love we'll carry on?

When do we decide what gnat details

are worth preserving?

I am a woman without a mother,

a woman without her mother's mother.

A woman without a daughter.

But I have a garden on the side of my house

that I share with my neighbors and their children,

and this spring, the pincushion flowers sprouted,

in June, Asiatic lilies were added,

miniature snapdragons popped out July,

and now, in August, it's all in full bloom.

It's a messy garden, some tall plants in front of short,

a jungle of wildflowers lipping over the stone edge,

stretches where nothing has grown,

and the dirt lies fallow and hardening.

But I am there most afternoons,

and Sheridan finds me.

Then she crouches over the green, pointing.

I say zinnia, she says zinnia.

I say sunflower, she says sunflower.

I say weed, she says weed.

Then she lifts her head to mine and smiles,

just as I did to my mother when I was two,

and she did to her mother when she was two,

and she did to her mother and mother's mother

all the way back

to lands across the sea,

to plots of Scottish heather,

to hills of green upon green,

three hundred summers ago.