The Flowers Need Water

The spring lupine was blooming beneath the morning sun.

Its blue-violet flowers rose on slender stalks above the garden soil, swaying gently in the mountain breeze. Bees moved lazily among the blossoms, and the damp earth carried the rich, dark scent of winter rains giving way to spring.

Terri had been admiring them only moments before.

She remembered—or thought she remembered—kneeling beside the flower bed, loosening the soil around the roots with her fingers. She had always enjoyed this part of gardening. There was something comforting about working with the earth, about knowing that even the smallest seed could become something beautiful if given enough time and care.

She had pressed a little soil around the base of the lupine.

Then she had stopped.

Now she stood motionless in the garden, staring at her left hand.

It was held slightly away from her body, her fingers curled as though they were still holding a small garden tool. Soil had gathered beneath her fingernails. A dark smear crossed the palm, and a tiny fragment of dried leaf clung to the skin near her thumb.

She turned her hand over.

Then back again.

Whose hand was this?

The thought came without warning, and with it a peculiar uneasiness. She knew that the hand belonged to her, because it moved when she moved it. She could open her fingers and close them. She could raise it toward the sunlight and watch the fine lines in her palm deepen.

But knowing that it was her hand did not tell her who she was.

She looked down at her clothes.

An old shirt. A pair of old gardening trousers. Shoes dusted with soil.

She glanced around the garden.

The lupine. The roses. The stone path leading toward the porch. The wooden fence that had begun to lean after the winter storms.

Everything seemed familiar in the way a dream sometimes seems familiar. She felt that she ought to recognize this place, that she ought to know what she was doing here.

But the knowledge would not come.

A moment earlier, there had been a purpose.

Now there was only the hand.

And the flowers.

And the strange, frightening sensation that she had arrived in the middle of a life already in progress.

Terri lifted her gaze toward her cabin.

A small building stood beyond the garden, its windows reflecting the pale sky. She studied it carefully, searching for some clue. Was it her home? Had she come here to visit someone? Was she expected somewhere else?

She could not remember.

She tried to summon her name.

The effort brought a blankness so complete that she felt as though she were standing at the edge of a great empty room.

Surely she had a name.

Surely she had been someone before this moment.

There must have been a childhood, a mother, a father. There must have been people who had called to her across rooms, who had waited for her at doorways, who had loved her and depended upon her.

There must have been children.

The word surfaced faintly.

Children.

She felt a small movement inside her chest, a stirring of tenderness mixed with grief. But when she reached for the faces that belonged to that feeling, the darkness closed over them.

She could not see their eyes.

She could not hear their voices.

She did not know whether they were young or grown, near or far away.

The feeling remained, but the people were gone.

Terri lowered her head.

The soil on her hand seemed suddenly important. She rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger, watching the dark grains crumble and fall.

Perhaps she had been planting something.

Perhaps she had been trying to help the flowers grow.

She looked at the lupine again.

The flowers moved in the breeze, their blue petals trembling against the green leaves. They seemed impossibly beautiful, so certain of their place in the world.

Terri wondered how they knew what to do.

No one had taught the lupine to bloom each spring. It did not need to remember the previous year's flowers. It did not have to recall the rain, the cold, or the long months beneath the earth.

The season came, and something within the plant answered.

Perhaps she had once understood such things.

Perhaps she had written about them, or spoken about them to someone she loved.

Perhaps she had simply stood in this same garden many years ago and felt the quiet wonder of being alive.

She searched for that memory.

Nothing.

Only the flowers, the sunlight, and the soil beneath her fingernails.

A breeze moved through the garden, lifting a strand of gray hair across her cheek. Terri blinked and looked toward the mountains. They rose beyond the trees, their upper slopes softened by drifting clouds.

For an instant, the landscape seemed to open onto something vast and unknowable.

She felt very small.

Not merely old, or confused, or forgetful.

Small in the way a child might feel after waking in an unfamiliar room. Small in the way a traveler might feel after stepping off a train in a country where no one speaks her language.

She wanted someone to explain what was happening.

She wanted someone to tell her where she belonged.

She wanted to go home.

But she could not remember where home was.

A tear gathered in the corner of her eye. She brushed it away with the back of the soil-stained hand and stared at the dark mark it left against her skin.

Then, from somewhere deep inside her, a thought emerged.

The flowers need water.

She did not know where the thought had come from. It seemed to belong to a different moment, to the woman who had stood here before the world dissolved around her.

But the garden hose lay coiled beside the porch.

Terri looked at it.

She took one uncertain step, then another.

The path beneath her shoes felt familiar. Her feet seemed to know something her mind had forgotten. She reached the hose and stood looking down at it for a long while before bending to pick it up.

She turned the spigot.

Water rushed through the hose.

The sound startled her, but she held on. She carried the nozzle back toward the flower bed and watched the water darken the soil around the lupine.

The earth drank.

A few drops splashed against her shoes.

Terri stood watching the water soak into the ground, and for a little while she was no longer trying to remember who she was.

She was simply doing something.

Something gentle.

Something that might help.

When she finished, she turned off the water and returned the hose to its place. Then she stood among the flowers, looking at the damp earth.

She still could not remember her name.

She still did not know how she had come to be in this garden, or how long she had lived in the cabin beyond it.

The questions remained, waiting in the darkness.

But the lupine stood upright in the sunlight, and the soil around its roots was moist.

Terri reached out and touched one of the blossoms.

The petals were soft against her fingertips.

She smiled faintly.

Perhaps she had planted these flowers.

Perhaps someone else had.

Perhaps they had been growing here long before she arrived.

It did not matter just then.

They were beautiful.

And for one small moment, that was enough.

---

Later, when the afternoon shadows stretched across the garden, Terri would sit by the window and wonder why her hands smelled of earth. She might look outside and fail to recognize the flowers she had watered. She might even forget that she had stood among them at all.

The day would fold itself into the growing darkness of her mind, another experience without a story to hold it together.

But the lupine would remain.

Its roots would settle into the damp soil. Its blossoms would turn toward the sun. And beneath the ground, where nothing could be seen, the quiet work of growing would continue.

Terri could no longer trust her memories to tell her who she was.

She could no longer follow the path of her life from beginning to end.

Yet sometimes, without knowing why, she still reached toward something living.

A flower.

A bird.

A patch of thirsty earth.

Perhaps these were the last small threads connecting her to the world outside the forest.

Perhaps they were simply things she could still love without needing to remember their names.

And perhaps, on that spring morning, while Terri stood bewildered in her garden, the flowers were doing what they had always done.

They were meeting her where she was.

Not asking her to remember.

Not asking her to explain.

Only blooming.