My Girl, My Garden, My Pioneer Style Fringed Leather Jacket

My girl knows two essential skills:  1) How to use a can of WD-40 and 2) How to do that trick that, by blowing on your thumb, lifts the baseball cap off the top of your head.  Please, girl of my heart, never forget you can fix things as well as the next fella, that you know magic tricks and how to make yourself laugh beyond yourself.

My Garden knows two essential things:  1)  How to grow and 2) How to die.  I take notes with the shovel, the row, the dirt crusted gloves holding the shape of my hands.  I eat her death and her dreaming while I slept.  Unlike me, she has seen every passing moon and knows what attention means standing still beneath the sky for over 4 months, letting herself unfurl and bloom, leaves unfolding to accept the loving son without a doubt about what she was to be, what she could do, her potential, her worth.  She was born from seeds weighing less than 8 ounces.  She simply became what God intended her to be.  Not once did she brag to me.  Not once did she heave beneath the suffocating weeds, greedy aphid, heavy winds.  Not once did she say to me, "Who are you?"  She let me in each time and accepted whatever time I had to mend and support, to kneel.  And God knew how much we needed each other, so  He brought us together, so sacred symbiosis sing.

My Pioneer Style Fringed Leather Jacket knows two essential things:  1) It is altogether fitting and proper to be found for 10 dollars at Et. Cetera, and the woman with pale blue eyes and white hair will hold it a little too long as she puts it in the plastic bag until she finally looks up and says, "I used to have a jacket just like this."  "You should take it."  "No, that was a long time ago.  This will look nice on you." and 2)  When I wear this jacket I will remember the woman who wore it before, a pioneer of something, her life perhaps.  Digging in, looking wide, dreaming so big it hurt to blink, so she never slept and the flat lands opened like hands that hold an invisible grace.