Fiction Forge Indy: Flower Boxes and Hummingbirds

Monday, May 25, 2020

Flower Boxes and Hummingbirds

These are strange times.

Every time I try to think about society and politics and the economy, I'm glad that I don't really need to consider any of these things very much. Lately, I have been going out to dig in the dirt.

Gardening is a new thing for me. With lots of help from my parents and my husband, two new planter boxes sit in our back yard. I'm practical. One has seedlings for vegetables--I insisted on this. I watch for tomatoes and beans to sprout so we can cook them for dinner.

The other planter box is very intentional and impractical. My grandmother moved into an assisted living home last fall, and before she moved out of her home, we went and dug irises and mums and peonies and lilies out of her yard. Now, they live in the planter box in our backyard.

I didn't have high hopes, but the irises are incredible and everything else seems to be loving the Indiana spring. This week, I sent pictures of the deep purple irises, and another is two-toned with deep purple and light blue.

After sending pictures to my grandma, we talked about gardening and flowers, but Saturday, we got to talking about hummingbirds. I know she's glad to see the pictures of the irises I send her, but she misses watching the flowers and birds in her garden and back deck.

This made me remember an essay about hummingbirds. I really enjoyed the essay--I used this essay back when I taught. I went back to read the essay, and it is both sweeter and sadder than I remember it:
Joyas Volardores by Brian Doyle

Brian Doyle died three years ago. I didn't know that. I do know that this beautiful little essay touched my heart. Even today, when my grandmother mentioned hummingbirds, the words of this essay, "So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment" echoes with me.

It's funny and strange how a brief conversation about hummingbirds can trigger a memory about an essay I haven't read in years.

That's the lovely and wonderful and universal memory in great writing.

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Mike

Hi. My name is Michael Moir and I'm a writer.

I don't know when I became addicted to the printed word, but over time I have found that I can't put it away from me. My therapist says it has to do with the little yellow books that were forced upon me in Kindergarten (See Spot Run...Run, Spot, Run! RUN!!!), but in the depth of my soul, I know it is deeper than that. I was born with this in my very DNA. Phrasing, grammar, and plot structure are as sure in my being as cytosine is to guanine. It is a dark and wildly fantastic creature that gires and gimbles in the shadowed places of my soul. I have been told that I must find a way to purge the wordful animal within (my therapist recommended me to a witch doctor in the Andes), but I have decided to learn to live with it. This desire, this compulsion, this demon that is writing is me and I am it.

I call him Steve.

Randy

Hi! I am Randy. I'm pretty sure that I started writing when I held my first crayola. Unfortunately, I grabbed the white one which left little proof of my brilliant earlier works! I write fiction that's often centered on gay characters - but sometimes off-centered gay characters, too -Ha! Because of the poor recording or admittance of such affairs due to prevailing political and religious views, such historical possibilities of gay relations are difficult to accept, let alone imagine. But, of course gay relations occurred, and much more often than the historical records dictate. I like to give honor to my gay brothers and sisters of our hushed past by conjuring such situation backdrops of history and breathing life into what I cannot know really occurred, but what I feel is closer to reality than it is to fiction.