The day after a storm, debris was about as usual. The trashcan lids along with the trash,
the dead leaves, and the plastic flowers.
She always noticed the plastic flowers that ended up outside their boundary fence,
the flowers rolling through the ditches.
How terrible that they were blown away from their stones, the final resting places.
So as she was driving by, she turned in and parked on the edge of the cemetery. After
gathering all the flowers that had been strung about, she proceeded in placing them on
the graves. But she noticed the graves still missing the hints of eternal love symbolized
by a fake flora, and she returned an hour later with an armful of plastic roses and every
other imaginable flower to brighten a stone.
And so this continued, her visiting the cemeteries near and far making sure that
every pot had the fake life. The people who drove by mocked her and laughed at her
even in her old age. She was crazy they thought, putting flowers on graves of people she
didn’t even know.
Then came a sunny morning, no breeze to blow the flowers away, and she knew it
was her last. But who would put flowers on her grave?
A lonely soul put a blue iris on her grave the next Memorial Day after seeing hers
had no flower. Some how it managed to endure the toughest winds and seemed ageless,
for this iris wasn’t plastic.
One day after a storm, the driver of a small gray car noticed the flower and the
flowers in the ditch….