The lady loved her garden.
Daily, she walked among
the flowers and edges full
of roses, iris, herbaceous
plants which swished in the
wind despite the walls on the
high hill. Created out of her
own memory and will, the
plants beckoned to the past,
to her lost loves, to her children
gone far away. She reveled in
the colors and the scents.
But, a dream disturbed her
rest, showing her black and
grey plants of ugliness, sticks
with misshapen bulbous blooms
hardly the things of beauty she
made so carefully. These choking
plants grew in her heart, like
loves which concealed power
keeping her from the One, the
Bridegroom, Who was lost in
memory and imagination. She
cried in her deep dream.
When she awoke, tears dried,
she rose and looked out the
long window to the windy hills,
the blue hills of a starker beauty,
hills of the west. and she knew
her garden tied her to the earth,
just as her imagination tied her
wrapped in living signs and symbols
to old loves and old days of joy.
She waited, and at the end of
August, she summoned her
helpers to burn every bit of
plant, but to save three trees
in the corner, trees of Rowan.
The smoke tore through the
paths and hexagonal herbal
glories, licking up the lavender
and destroying even the tall rose
borders, clinging to the walls. Her
favorite blue poppy glowed in the
dust of the smoke, succumbed, fell.
The willow shook, berry bushes choked.
All was gone, but the three, guarded by
the new centurions. She wept but not
for sadness, but for joy, as her past
died in the ashes. She had killed her
imagination in one great act of denial.
The gardeners walked away to
their homes, saddened, now without
positions, and complained to their
wives of such folly as they had
done that day. But, the lady knew
something more than they, that her
imagination was free to think on one
thing, the symmetry of the three trees
waiting for winter, then spring, when
the whispers of enchantment had faded
into forgotten memory with new red
berries reminding her of the one thing
necessary. Years later, her sons came
upon the three trees and knelt by the
lichen-ed stone of her grave, grace
from grace, the old ways gone and
a new faith reached out to the new.