orchid ovenbird I don’t remember where I bought the orchid. A small market, maybe. It must have been somewhere close to the room I lived in then, twenty years ago, because I was afraid to stray too far from my home on the wide campus that seemed as large as a country. Its leaves were smooth, aquatic arms; its twisting roots were fingers reaching from the mossy substrate; its blooms were faces, innocent and amazed, and in the moment I saw it, all elegance and supple spine, I knew it had something to teach me about beauty and the ephemeral. I took it home. (Did I live close? the salesperson asked, because it wouldn’t tolerate the cold. I wasn’t far, I assured her and walked quickly back to my little room tucked into the trees.) I set it by a window that dripped diffuse eastern light into all its open mouths, and it became a silent companion, bending its head over my books, like a benevolent mentor reviewing my work. It is not hyperbole to say I loved that phalaenopsis. It was with me through grad school and through a move into an apartment with a boyfriend who would become a husband, but it never adjusted to the new window there. The sun was too strong and it withered. So like me, who has never done well with too much light. Maybe I have an orchid’s heart that seeks the shade and a gentle mist of rain. So when the tender heart that bloomed outside my body died, I mourned its loss profoundly. I hoped, for a while, that I could bring it back, but it never sent up another silvery shoot. My grief was too large, everyone said. Flowers are built to die. (But so are we…so are we.) And the years passed and I took the orchid with me, a sepia memory, captured in a single melting Polaroid. I shared the picture once, in a public place, not expecting anyone to respond. But one person shared a story of similar grief—a plant left accidentally overnight in the freezing cold. And I smiled to meet another with a heart like tissue paper, delicate and translucent enough to let everything through. To be seen without ridicule was like flowers arriving, unexpected, on my doorstep. 261029 what's it to you? who go blather from