Wildflowers

I have this bad habit of searching for meaning. I go to the dictionary looking for trouble in simple words, words I use daily, only to see if they are defined in ways that make me feel differently. Not sure why I need to do that. I wasn't going to write anything today, in fact, because today is a good day and for once I don't have to improve it. Heaven knows how long it has been since a day like this one. I sat outside. A clear sky. A breeze gently moving the flowers that have grown next to the cactus. Everything is. But then again, as if looking for trouble, I had to start wondering if I was neglecting the cactus that my parents had lovingly maintained for decades. I'd never seen wildflowers growing around it before. Am I supposed to pluck them?

The dictionary says a garden is a plot of ground where herbs, fruits, flowers, or vegetables are cultivated. Cultivated. Human intervention is clearly implied. Since I returned home, and against my mother's will, I've been watering the garden. I've watered the garden but I've let it be the rest of the time. When flowers open and birds visit, I stare at it. That's all I do: water and marvel. Then this young guy comes from time to time to trim the hedge. His chainsaw beheads dionysian flowers and wakes everyone up. My mum sends him. I know she doesn't share my preferences for romantic aesthetics, but after decapitations, the garden blooms right on time and I see her motives are not so bad. The thing is... what do we gain, mum?

In old pictures the garden looks glorious. My father was peerless in keeping it at bay. I can see him trimming bushes with big iron scissors in the classic Nasrid style. I can hear the snips and the spaces between them anytime I want. I can play French skipping while he prunes, bury handwritten predictions and swing under a lemon tree we had many years ago. Sometimes, I can even trick myself into entering the croquet ground of those black and white pictures from before I was born. My dad and I: a bicephalous playing card painting the roses red, keeping my unknown grandparents happy. Toddlers in flared pants, mum, playful and there, as I never saw her, all of us blinded by sunlight. Just like Alice dreams of wonders under a common tree, I dream of harmony in a perfectly symmetrical garden. But harmony has as much to do with symmetry as wonders have with common trees. As Versailles-esque as the garden looked, as neatly outlined as it still is, the truth is that it's been a constant fight to make something harmonious out of it and nobody's ever been able to lie on its ground, because the grass was torn out and you can't lie on mud surrounded by spiky spherical bushes.

So, what do we do now mum? Am I expected to cut the precious wildflowers? Am I to carry on working on this plot of ground the way you guys did because that's the way it's always been and I have a soft spot for the glorious past, a wild imagination, and the feeling I'm meant to shape what exists into something that perhaps never was and maybe it should not even be? Or am I to pluck the flowers because the garden is - above all - yours?

I have to tell you, mum, you have a strange way to care for a garden: no water, little lying down, lots of chops. And I have a strange way to search for meaning: too much marvelling, no trimming, a taste for trouble and an incredible tolerance for beheadings. And you know what? So be it. So be the wildflower around the cactus, and the chainsaw when it comes, and let's let my watering happen and your idea of a garden prevail. I'm going to stare at it all. I'm going to let the old pictures be pictures from a time I didn't live, couldn't judge and won't restore. Let's let the garden be as it is now: a cypress fort that makes us invisible, a ground stubbornly fertile in spite of us. And I'm going to marvel just the same because today is a good day and I don't have to improve it, yet I do.