by Alina Zollfrank
To my friends: I apologize. I didn’t mean to kill them, and no, I won’t tell you which survived.
To my grandma Uschi who used to whisper the good words while stroking my forehead:
thank you for teaching me how to give a care, even if sometimes, I flail.
::
Orchids are fickle fuckers. I don’t know why, but every time something big and scary happens in my life, people give me orchids. The first one, the one my grandma gifted me when I supposedly turned adult, lives on in my mom’s kitchen, after I abandoned it to move a whole ocean plus a continent and a half away. I get status updates every once in a while.
The last four were brought by well-meaning friends over the span of two years. Masked door-step visitors extended their plant offerings like protective shields or wishing wells when, mid-slice through the pandemic, my husband started on chemo-radiation and my own heart-lung function dropped to generator level. In front of my purple door, déjà vu: orchids one, two, three, four. Still, the last thing I needed was something else to care for. I mean, a small cactus would have been fine. Or a spider plant maybe. Better yet, a monthly supply of dairy-free dark chocolate. Nothing wrong with that. But orchids. Sheesh. So, I read the tags. Looked up instructions online. Moved other stuff around the house to carve out a home for the plants. But the bastards kept dropping those ridiculous initial blooms. Impossibly gangly stems turned brown. Drooped. Wilted. Died. Fragile orchid gone, gone, gone, gone.
::
The negativity comes through in everything you say, says my therapist.
We create the things we think, she says.
I’ve never seen a family attract so many health problems, she sighs.
Channeling something greater, brighter, will manifest the good, she says.
I want to say to her:
I manifest the fuck out of this life.
On my sticky yoga mat. On my daily walks, foot by foot by foot. When I stroke my child’s forehead and tell them about music, about family memories, about a magical book to calm them about their pain in this moment. As I pick midnight-blue currants, one by one, tartness in my hand and on my lips. While I nudge and nurture my hardy apple and plum trees, and the seaberry, too. In between cardiac scans and specialist shoulder shrugs, insurance debacles and trash day, my husband’s infusions and pureed food preparation. When I coax poetry out of cavernous insides, with burning fingers, with buzzing thoughts. At 4 am, when I startle awake covered in sweat and visualize soft moss all over my arms to ground me.
I create my vibrant reality, my boundless hope, and my infinite joy, goddammit.
::
One orchid pretend-died. That one, the second to last, my husband brought back from death with the sheer determination of the survivor coaching the survivee. It caught a sunburn in our south-facing window the other day, and after giving me an accusatory slant look, my spouse revived it – yet again. Come on. I swear, when I’m not in the room, he speaks to it in tongues. Or something. I’m really not sure what rejuvenation secrets he harbors. And I, I’ve killed, or pseudo-killed, all the orchids I’ve been given. I’m not to be trusted with them. Yet, here we are.
::
I’m rooted by the open kitchen window and, with one eye, watch the orchid do its thing. Across the street, the neighbors entertain visitors with well-rehearsed jokes. Laughter rises in modulated cadences, crescendos, ebbs. Quick pause. Mumbles of a new joke. Laughter rises in modulated cadences, crescendos, ebbs. Quick pause. Mumbles of a new joke. Again. Again. It must be exhausting to fake the funny, to fake the enlightenment. To fake functioning, to fake lightness. Ad nauseam.
::
I manifest the good with every damn breath I take while I witness laughter and growth outside and inside this home.
::
The violet orchid glares at me from its throne on the window sill. It’s grown so tall, it bumps into the kitchen blinds now, challenges me to do I don’t know what. It taunts me with aliveness, with freckles splashed generously on gossamer petals and sepals. I watch it stare back at me, and when I lean in, I think I hear it quip: Wanna hear a joke? There once was a fickle orchid who lived.
::
Alina Zollfrank from (former) East Germany loathes wildfire smoke and cares, more or less successfully, for two teens, a husband, three rescue dogs, and countless plants in the Pacific Northwest. She writes to get out of her whirring mind. Alina’s essays and poetry have been or will shortly be published in Last Leaves, Thimble, The Braided Way, Wordgathering, Feral, Two Thirds North, Red Ogre Review, October Hill, and Invisible City. She welcomes connections with other writers at https://zollizen.medium.com.
Image: Earl Wilcox
ID: pink orchids and buds on a peach background.
Psaltery & Lyre 