A Series of Musings @powderandclay

A Series of Musings: Death, Dying, and Spring

i. Lilacs and Violets The violet is a flower that symbolizes death; the lilac shouldn’t be taken inside the home without precautions if one wishes to avoid drawing restless spirits in with it. The flowers I’ve come to associate most strongly with the dead and their spirits bloom only for a few weeks, at the crux of spring– a time of life and birth. It’s May as I type this, and I’ve just made an anointing oil of hyacinths, lilacs, violets and dandelions from harvests I can only partake in once a year. Isn’t it odd that the only time I can steal lilacs from my neighbor’s overreaching bushes is when litters are birthed and eggs break open? Why is it that flowers that smell like the perfume on a casket only offer themselves up when new life claws its way from earth? Isn’t it interesting– the juxtaposition between life and death, of seedlings and violets in the cemetery?

ii. Honor I read something on tumblr that stuck with me. I don’t remember where I read it, or who said it, just that it’s now written somewhere under my skin, lingering in the ridges of my bones: “Everything dead deserves to be honored.” I arrange the bones a crick spirit gave me neatly beside stones and snake skins, unwilling to risk offending whatever lingers on them, hoping to please anyone who might see. “Everything dead deserves to be honored.” A baby bird fell out of its nest into my garden. My dad used to throw dead things in the weeds between our house and the neighbors. I wrap its broken body in a threadbare washcloth and bury it next to my tomatoes. “Everything dead deserves to be honored.” There’s a dead deer beside the river, and it doesn’t want to be disturbed. I don’t disturb it. “Everything dead deserves to be honored.” I clean Mrs. Elizabeth Warrick’s grave and leave her some lilacs. I don’t know who she is, and I never will. “Everything dead deserves to be honored.” Is this honor, or decency?

iii. Rot My compost bin is happiest in spring, I think. I fill it with grass clippings and rotted daylily leaves, I move every worm I find whilst planting my garden into it– the rain spurs it on, the wet rot of dead things returning where they came from. There’s something about this decomposition that makes me pause in reverence. My compost bin is an old wood thing, and the compost is reclaiming even its container. Is decay death or life? The boards are crumbling, and I need to build a new bin before this one falls apart. Is the consumption a part of the process of ending or beginning? The dirt that comes from the compost is dark, and it feels holy. My chest aches when my hands are clean, and the ache dissipates when my palms and knees and feet are stained black with earth. My hands are covered in the reclaimed remains of the life around me. Is it holy because it is made in a series of contradictions, or do I hold it dear because it will one day be made of me, too?

iv. Bones The crick was happy to see me this spring. I came back to her, as I always do when the melted snow makes her banks swell and the sun tempers her chill, to reclaim the piece of myself I left in her waters last fall. She gave me gifts, eager, presenting them one after the other; she gave me glass and stones and ochre and wood. She gave me bones– a jaw and three legs– fragile and brown. Where did these bones come from? There was an animal whose skin they laid under once, a part of her, sustained by her water and earth and foliage. They 3

died beside her or beneath her, their bones scattered by water and carrion birds. How many people stepped over the gifts she gave me? How many animals nosed them aside in favor of the plants nurtured by the last, disintegrating granules of their flesh? How long did she carry the last pieces of something that used to be before she gave them to me? I receive them with care and display them with pride– a last piece of something that lived and died in her embrace.