LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT GARDENING

MARY CHRISTINE DELEA

the scent of flowers and fruit and vegetables rising from soil will make you crazy. Those perfumes find the pleasure center of your brain and burn there, make you forget the slugs, the worms, the dirty fingernails, and the pained knees, sore lower back. Those wooden boxes in the backyard tempt all kinds of dreams, will make you believe you can eat healthier, spend more time outside and be happy there. You’ll worry about weather, fret about deer and rabbits, learn the difference between heritage and hybrid and develop opinions about them. When you are not on the ground weeding, pruning, clipping, deadheading, aerating, and planting out, you will spend your time sitting in a lawn chair, staring out those rectangular segments of life growing, those things you put into the ground with so many expectations. Fruit will fall to earth as you watch, bruising and bursting before you can save them. Birds will eat your berries until all that is left is vine. Caterpillars will consume every vegetable you have cared for, indifferent to your devotion. But what will break your heart is black spot, blight, root rot, and rust smothering your flowers, stealing their scents, forcing you to kill some to save others, a task no lover should ever be forced to do.

MARY CHRISTINE DELEA has a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing and is a former university professor. She currently volunteers for a few nonprofits. Her poems have most recently appeared in Broad River Review, Heron Tree, Ponder Review, and Black Moon. Delea’s website, mchristinedelea.com, includes a blog where she posts weekly writing prompts (Sundays) and—two times a week—poetry by other poets (Sundays and Wednesdays).