by Paul Skyrm

Created on: December 01, 2009   Last Updated: December 03, 2009

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My mother wore her hands as if they were the roots she pulled: gnarled bones lashed with sinewy muscles that harkened at a life as a tar-blooder or the rearing of two sons. The old man's hands were the same, but thicker he had laid tar on the gravel monuments of cities from Boston to Sacramento, so trains could roar through, transporting coal and timber. We opened the mud first twelve years ago and put his ashes in it; strange, how the ceremony of death seems as if it's a birthing: giving the womb back Her seed to incubate and one day grow into something that will inevitably perish. With that in mind, we opened that spot three feet above where his dust damps the clay and put a stand of daisy black-eyed susans, my mother's favorite my favorite cared more for hacksaws and coal-oil stoves.

These flowers are perennials; we don't have to do anything but prune them come autumn and they'll come back next year.

How can anything come back after its died, mom?

It would be a shame if our flowers didn't that's how they're constructed, that's what perennials are.

She made it seem all too simple: everything to itself is sculpted out of the dirt which comprises this theatre of existence and keeps to the tenets inculcate with its trolling. So why not the old man? Why didn't he carry on, year after year? Why weren't bones and organs and eyes and teeth perennial, so that instead of following the feline doctrine, there was no capping on many lives one could lead through the annals of time; there would be no time to keep because what to compass our life against? If for the simple sort of obliging clock-ins and clock-outs of the job, then throw me to the dingoes because I'll come up out of that scrum unfettered with slash or severing and move on to something more pliable.

People carry on forever they carry on in our thoughts and dreams. In their children that came after and those that will follow them: that is impermanence for people. With flowers, true, it's a whole other case-in-point, but we just have to understand that to each is afforded

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