She caught me completely off guard, standing there in the broad daylight, a short way from her sisters. A clear family resemblance, no doubt. But this one . . . she really stood out. What was her story?
Was she destined for love? Picked on a whim to impress, formed into a corsage for a debutante’s wrist, or delicately primped and arranged into a Valentine’s Day bouquet? Boxed and delivered? Cellophaned . . . or worse — consigned to the Piggly Wiggly chillbox, next-door neighbor to the Pabst Blue Ribbon, ignored and rotting like the too-early-for-eating Costa Rican melons?
Perhaps fate would ordain she honor someone’s mother, one of Lincoln’s best ideas approaching just around the bend.
Or might she mark someone’s passing — honoring and assuaging a sister, a father, an entire family, or nation, or generation?
Might her stamens and pistils instead serve to edify, to explain, to teach a class of future botanists, fathers, accountants, felons, physicians, software engineers, heroin addicts, furniture store clerks?
Instead, hers was the story of a symbol, an archetype, one transfigured by fingers tapping on a keyboard into Plato’s world of forms. A real, tangible blossom now become the poster child of memory, of dreams, of sorrows, aspirations, regrets, and passions.
