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IN SPRING’S SHADOW
Beth Colburn-Orozco
If plants have souls, as I imagine they do, I sent my tomato plants straight to purgatory before they even had a chance to bud. This is really the last of my worries right now; the little biodegradable cups that hold their skeletal remains are much less unsettling than the persistent buzzing of my doorbell. I know who is there, and he knows I am in here. This is how it is with us. We fight, we make up, and then we fight again. I picture a Good Samaritan walking by my apartment building, seeing a madman attacking my doorbell. Without hesitation, he approaches and hits my husband over the head with a frying pan. This is a thought that disturbs me but not enough to make me get up from my kitchen table to let him in. There is no trick to growing vegetables. My mother’s side of the family has been farming as far back as anyone knows. Northern folks with the sense it takes to bury seeds in the rich soil and wait. I put my six little cups outside in my kitchen window box yesterday and forgot about them. For the past month, they lived warm, humid lives on a shelf in my bathroom, facing south. It dipped below twenty degrees last night, so they are all dead. Here lives the tomato killer, a sign hanging from my front door should read. These withered remnants of a once-promised harvest would cause my grandfather to hang his head in shame, wondering where he’d gone wrong. “I’m sorry,” I say to all the farmers who came before me. I crush what is left of the leaves between my fingers. They crumble like the wings from a dragonfly carcass. There is death all around me, and the doorbell continues to buzz, filling my house with the drone of ten-thousand angry bees. Eight years is too long to spend with someone who hates my cooking, loves to finish my crossword puzzles, leaving them on my bed stand to gloat, and once told his mother if he should ever marry me, to make sure she marches up to the altar and slaps him hard to wake him from his nightmare. I wish she would have.
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