Because pressed flat in the bottom of that pot, under a circle of newspaper, wrapped in a bread bag, were eleven seed packets.
Not store packets. Envelopes. The little brown coin envelopes you buy at the office supply, folded shut, labeled in Buck’s handwriting with a carpenter’s pencil.
Mama’s peonies, front bed. Mama’s larkspur. The orange daylilies by the pump house. Zinnias, the ones she wouldn’t shut up about. Hollyhocks — back fence, north end.
My mother’s garden. Every bit of it.
She died in 2021 and that place sold at auction the following spring, and the people who bought it scraped the whole hillside in September for a shop building. I drove past it once and never went back.
Buck went back. Four times, between July and October of that year, with a paper sack in his jacket, and he asked the new owner’s permission the first time and got told to help himself.
He collected seed off my mother’s beds after she was gone and before the dozer came, and he dried it in the shop on window screens, and he labeled every envelope, and he sat on that for three years waiting for a reason to hand it to me.
The pot was empty because the pot was not the gift. The pot was so I’d have somewhere to start.
And I left it on the back step all summer without one thing in it, on purpose, because I was hurt about a necklace.
Three weeks after that he went down in the yard.
In with the envelopes, on a scrap of the same paper sack:
“Junie — I couldn’t save the place. This is what I could get. Plant a little every year so you never run out of her.”
Plant a little every year so you never run out of her.
I put the zinnias in that pot in April because zinnias are forgiving and I did not trust my hands. They came up thick as anything.
The peonies went in along the south side of the house in the fall, which is when you do it, which I had to call the extension office to find out.
They won’t bloom for two, three years. That’s all right. I intend to be here.
The mower’s in the shed with the bow still on it. Our nephew cuts my grass now and won’t take money for it, and I have quit fighting him about it.
I’ve got eight envelopes left. I only plant one or two a year. Buck said not to run out.