An urban vignette
The flower.
Stopped and smelled a flower today. Just now. Moments ago. A magnificent iris flower! A densely purple blossom on the edge of the sidewalk here in Seattle. Smoofed it this Sunday afternoon at about twenty minutes to five. I mean I walked over there, bent over, and sniffed the darn thang. No, no snorting! Stuck my nose into its blossom, tho. Like a lover too embarrassed to be seen mounting his beloved in public. Gently, slightly, carefully yet a bit brusquely I plowed my nose between its petals until they barely touched my cheeks. Lingered a moment all too brief in time, then pulled out quickly lest anyone among the general public would think I was a flower snorter or some kind of foolish and possibly dangerous nutter.
Oh my goodness, the scent of these blooms stimulated my mild synesthesia. Made me horny as a dog, too! This iris smelled so intoxicating I felt lost in enchantment. For a moment I could barely move as I smelled colors and saw smells and felt sounds all around. As light and shadow turned inside out beneath the brightness of day on a planet spinning toward night, right here within the next moment already passing I realized just how much of a ghost I’ve become. Aye, a damn ghost! Been ghosting thru life as if I was some broken and forgotten clumpenproletariat of chunky concrete abandoned against some godforsaken wall of a cobblestone alley in a rundown factory town on the edge of perpetual shadow.
Instead of being fully aware of the blooms I was reminded of stories from my past. Irises were my mother’s favorite flowers. She burst into tears the time my father mowed down her row of irises with the riding lawnmower because tall grass grew like weeds in their midst, and Daddy was tired of weaving in and out as my mother wasn’t going to go weed them by hand. Momma’s reaction was so emotionally cathartic he didn’t ever mow down all her flowers again.
His own mother, the one who died a couple of months after Pearl Harbor when he was nearly 12, was once berated for spending hard-earned coin on an iris bulb instead of on food for the family during the midst of the Great Depression. My grandmother loved flowers, loved irises in particular, and cried out what’s the point of living merely to eat if people couldn’t have any art or anything beautiful, or so I recall the retelling of this long ago tale.
My second ex-wife’s mother also loved flowers and loved to garden in her flower beds. Irises were her favorite flowers, too. So here I am standing on the sidewalk with grocery shopping bags bunched up in my hands while I gaze down at these silky blossoms I’d smelled with such pleasure.
Whoa…I realized I wasn’t even present to the flower but more concerned about what others may think. How stupid of me, but then there I go beating myself up again. Thus I took a deep breath and shook all those matters out as I let go and let go again. Sometimes presence is the greatest gift.
The smell…of the flower, not the alley…felt intoxicatingly purple. The smell was a deep, rich purple vibrating between indigo and violent with a blast of silky chocolate noise. The flower smelled so alive, so effervescent with the sweetness of life. This type of luscious aroma is distinctly different from the sweetness of death and the swollen ripeness of decay. Smelled erotic.
See, I had forgotten what it felt to feel alive. As I stood up from this contemplation on Nature with my grocery totes in hand, for the Aurora PCC organic grocery store was close at hand, newfound awareness hummed thru me with all of my senses sparkling like small Tesla coils at Christmas. I resolved to live again. Thus I stepped into the store and the smells and colors made love to me for I was finally present to the gifts of being alive in this body of mine.
William Dudley Bass
Sunday – Thursday 19-23 May 2019
Seattle, Washington, USA
Irises blooming next to the North Aurora/Green Lake PCC on the north side of Winona Avenue North & Olde 99.
Copyright © 2019 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.