Page 41 - North Star Literary & Art Magazine

Outside her house, the plants were doing well, even with all the snow they had. Some of them were blooming already, so she was kneeling again with her nippers ready to prune, trimming the foliage little by little, singing the melody from church last Sunday.
Dona nobis pacem pacem
Dona nobis pacem pacem
“Excuse me,” came an unfamiliar voice, “pardon the interruption, but I just noticed
how beautiful your garden is.”
She didn’t even realize that someone had been talking to her until she looked the
stranger in the eye—a woman that she’d never seen before, wearing a pair of spotless gardening gloves.
“I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” the woman added.
She might have been making a face at the woman, she didn’t know, but this was all a little peculiar.
“No, I don’t think we have.”
The woman ungloved her hand for a weak shake.
“I’m your new neighbor. My husband and I own the house across the street. It’s a
pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise,” she answered, laughing inwardly about how the woman called herself her
“new” neighbor.
The whole thing was all a bit strange, having finally met the proprietor of the
house-shaped cookie jar that she’s been ogling at for the better part of a year, and she was being asked about flowers of all things?
But the woman went on.
“Well, anyway. You see, I have this plant my husband gave me, and I’m not so sure what’s wrong with it. I’ve done everything I can, but it hasn’t bloomed yet. I think it might be dying. I thought—that maybe you might know what to do.”
The woman rocked on her toes, thinning her lips, looking down at her as if she were a ceramic garden fairy, ready to enlighten her with some kind of sage advice about how to make peonies miraculously pop out of the ground.
“Well, what kind is it?” She inquired, still dumbfounded, but the woman only looked over her shoulder, shyly informing her that she didn’t know.
An uncomfortable silence passed, and then the woman asked her “would you mind taking a look?”
Take a look? As in she might actually be able to see that honking glass edifice up close?
Perhaps it was worth going across the street for a few minutes. The pruning could wait a little while, just until she was back. She had to see it.
She took a breath.
“I don’t see why not.”
So, they set off across the street to the woman’s home, and a little past the front door, sure enough, there was a tiny garden patch with a miserable looking bush planted in the middle, practically dead, just like the woman explained.
Her eyes were examining the plant for all of three seconds before they began to wander, looking up at the crystal house, wondering how on earth it was built or how the woman lived in it, but then the woman bent down, stroking the pitiful boughs.
NORTH STAR 39