“Sun rise, sun set, and all the little leaves wave anyway.”
My mother used to tell that to me when I was young. I didn’t understand what she meant, at the time. Some wise philosophical mumbo-jumbo, filed with the rest of her odd sayings. “Two makes the loneliest pair.” “All is but a memory.” “Supper is at 5 o’ clock.”
She had two that actually stuck with me though. Two I understood from the get-go and helped define me as a person.
“Sometimes, we focus so much on the spider’s web, we don’t see the garden it inhabits.”
In the summer of 2012 I found myself at a low. Macular degeneration. Early onset. My vision began fading by winter of that year, and come 2013 my vision was so limited I couldn’t see a Toyota bumper to bumper. The tunnel vision was soul-crushing. It had come fast and hard, and would only get worse with age, though its progress was virtually unnoticeable at that point. Losing less than a millimeter of vision every few days is hard to spot.
I was a big gardener around this time. Plants were a tremendous part of my life since childhood. Mom was a florist and took pride in every bouquet, every pot, every single seed she planted. I couldn’t really blame her. She basically had a trillion other kids, except those ones didn’t babble endlessly about the newest movies coming out they wanted to see. For a long time, I didn’t care for plants one way or another. They were merely there, in the scene of my life, and not really worth paying attention to. Then Mom got ill. Really ill. Cancer. For a long time she spent all her days in the hospital, pumped full of junk to keep her comfortable. When she was gone, I learned to care for her plants in her absence. As it turned out, I was a regular green thumb. Who knew? When she got better, I helped around her shop, and soon enough we ran her business together. Then we ran her businessES together. Her little flower corner had become a store in every town north of the Mason Dixon. She would’ve been so proud.
She never saw her business at its peak. Remission. Died a month after the diagnosis. I was on my way to a movie when I found out. I don’t like cinema much anymore.
Things only got worse from there. I wasn’t business savvy like her. I sold the company for a good sum, but it was hollow. Her name became a corporate logo, no soul, no love behind it. Nobody knew of her dedication. Nobody knew how hard she worked.
Nobody stopped to smell the roses she planted.
I had finally planted the last of my 2013 garden and sat down to admire what little I could see at once when I felt a sense of calm wash over me. From a distance, I spotted something. A colorful mass of fur in the bushes. Curious, I took my little pair of binoculars for bird-spotting out and took a closer look.
Fluffies.
I monitored their activities day to day. It was fascinating to me. It was like seeing children play the most extreme game of House imaginable. Day in and day out I would document their lives, conflicts, triumphs and misadventures. I recall in particular one day in the late fall of 2013 a day that reminded me of Mom’s sayings.
It had just been raining and the Fluffies were caked in mud. They were difficult to track and hard to hear since I couldn’t figure out which microphones in my garden were the ones closest to them. Regardless, I caught a glimpse of them all together, admiring a fresh pot of Hydrangea I had set out. They all came to admire it, except for one fluffy. Red. I never knew their names properly; I’m not sure they even had any. But the red fluffy was wiser than the average bear. No, Red, took the time to admire how the Hydrangea pot had been placed in the garden. Red noticed how the Hydrangea happened to be in two similar locations opposite one another in the garden.
He was very observant. He had noticed the eyes of the mosaic I planted of Mom.
He noticed the garden beyond the web.
It’s been years since then. That fluffy family has long since migrated from here, and I have only had the occasional stray since. I don’t know what happened to them. Maybe they’re frolicking about the wilderness of the nearby woods. Maybe they’ve gone to the city an hour away. Maybe they’ve simply disappeared. I don’t think I’ll ever know. I don’t think I want to. They’ve made their mark.
This year, I went out the garden again. My vision has gotten to the absolute limits of visibility. Within a month or two, I will be completely blind. As I gazed around the beauty of the garden, I couldn’t help but cry for the things I would never see again. I gazed at the pots of Hydrangea, still strong and thriving, and gently ran my fingers against the petals. So beautiful. So precious. They were so dazzlingly green, full of life and exuberance, just like Mom, just like those fluffies always getting into trouble, just like me when I was a young man. In time, they would turn to brown and pass on, leaving another to take their place, just as Mom had, as the fluffies had, as I would when I went to my nursing home.
And in that moment, I truly understood why Mom said that green was the saddest color.
