by Kathy Wade
Before I could say Summer is coming,
I’d wait for the iris to open.
This family of purple and white
by some happy accident was sprinkled
with a few rare pale peach blossoms.
Before they came to us, they had been
in the dirt of four Ohio counties
and three townships. Decades ago,
they had come to our inner-city garden
from a teacher friend in Clermont County,
who got them from his brother’s farm
next county over. Some we’d gotten from
two spinsters on the Ohio near New Richmond.
If it was a jolt for them to be in our rocky
inner–city clay, they didn’t let on.
In the years they spent with us
they increased and multiplied, filling
our back-yard garden with sweetness.
Parking my car at the curb
I would smell them and celebrate
Spring’s leaning into Summer.
I’d cut a fist-full of dripping stalks
with the kitchen knife, peer through
their petals into the wet, sexy center,
arrange them in a tall vase,
and let them perfume the rooms,
dripping juice and pollen
on the dining room table.
Before we moved to a shady condo,
before the downsizing that didn’t take,
(before the three-year disaster where
our hi-rise condo went up in smoke),
before all that: friends and family came
to our inner-city garden armed with shovels
and took their pick of our iris.
It was November so no one was sure
where the peach ones would land.
My sister dug up all the bulbs
her buckets would hold and hauled them
to her cabin at Cowan Lake. When she put up
the cabin for sale, we knew what we had to do.
Years later, we moved again to suburbia,
created a bed and shamelessly begged
for our long-lost iris. Each day they’d swell,
bulge heavier with bud. From the
kitchen window we watched and prayed:
Please, let the peach be there. Let it be
first to open. Once it unfolds we will know
Spring is folding into Summer!
~~~
Background reflection by Kathy Wade – Darla and the Peach Iris
Every Spring I am dazzled by the iris: their lavish purple tongues and sweet perfume. I remember how – first – we dug up the tubers from a friend’s garden in New Richmond overlooking the Ohio River. How later we’d been given yellows and a delicate peach to add to the blues and purples. How they turned our inner-city backyard into an exotic garden with aromas we could smell from the street. How when we sold the house and moved into a condo, relatives dug up the almost-blooming spikes and off they went in boxes and buckets to assorted lake-houses, yards and flower beds across three counties. When we ditched the condo and moved to a house with a half-acre yard, shameless begging brought some of the mud-encrusted iris tubers back to us. We planted them in fall, not knowing if the peach one was in the batch. The following April we waited and hoped and clapped for joy when two peach heads unveiled themselves.
I turned this iris story into a poem and read it at a public Read-around at Women Writing for (a) Change. Darla, one of my writers, asked me for a copy. “Anything for Darla,” I remember thinking — that Darla, a joyful, generous writer, would want one of my poems seemed the ultimate affirmation. Darla was a self-described, four-time cancer survivor. Her sense of humor made us laugh; her stories made us cry. One spring, when the cancer moved to her lungs, it became too hard for her to speak, and with a brave smile Darla withdrew from class, clutching to the hope that she would still be able to complete her memoir, inspiring others to fight the fight.
Darla died the following July. Later, one of Darla’s friends visited the writing center to donate gift items she and Darla had been selling to raise funds for cancer research. During Darla’s final days, she did not have the strength to read or write, so family and friends read her favorite passages from the Bible, but a piece of paper with a poem about a peach iris kept falling out, and Darla would whisper: “Read me the iris poem again.” Darla’s friend asked me, “Do you know who wrote that poem, or where I could get a copy? It got lost in the confusion. It meant so much to Darla.” In tears, I told her it was my poem. I would see that she got a copy.
Image source: https://tinyurl.com/mucjkwpa