by Kathryn Jankowski

Splashy with color and promising a horticultural paradise, garden catalogues once lured me into purchasing plants better situated elsewhere. Impulse buys, the mark of a novice, raw and unseasoned.

Wiser now, I’ve transformed my yard into a certified wildlife refuge full of blossoms, berries and shelter. A riot of color during spring and summer, it fades as temperatures plummet, along with my mood: a drunk driver killed my mother, Juanita, the week before Christmas. Confined to a hospital bed with a fractured pelvis and sacrum, I never had a chance to say goodbye. Therapists counseled me to move past the guilt of surviving. Decades later, I still mourn.

The dreamer in me looks for signs she lives on. In her book, Animal Medicine, Erika Buenaflor says ancient Hispanic civilizations considered mariposas spirits of their ancestors. That orange-and-black Monarch flitting through a bed of zinnias could be my mother prompting me to live in the moment, not the past. Sage advice. But butterflies go dormant in winter, when I’m most in need of comfort.

I bought a Mole Poblano salvia after reading from a trusted source that it flourished almost year-round in my zone. It grew quickly, its leaves a heart-shaped, fluorescent green. The flowers? None. It seemed ill-fated.

Come December, black calyces appeared. On the anniversary of Mama’s death, when the mist shrouding the yard echoed my desolation, they flared into tubular blooms, a vibrant red. The color she painted her lips.

Kathryn Jankowski is a Slavic/Hispanic writer from northern California. A finalist for the 2023 Anne C. Barnhill Creative Nonfiction Prize, her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Rappahannock Review, Longridge Review, Rockvale Review, Sky Island Journal and Microfiction Monday.