Cerastium tomentosum.
Invasive flowers, gorgeous perennials in the form of tiny white flowers with frosted foliage, and every time I see them I stop and take a picture. I took the picture to the ladies at the garden nursery and followed them all the way to the back where I was introduced to some tiny little boxes full of dirt with yellowy-green bits of moss in them.
They've been cut back. No worries, they grow quickly.
Ironic. We move to the rainforest and I find the neatest flowering shrubs that remind me of the beach because there used to be a half-barrel by the steps just full of this stuff and it was always windblown and beautiful and to this day reminds me of weathered boards and eyelet lace, two requirements for Bridget's beach, along with that famous pale turquoise string bikini that I still have somewhere because it remains Jacob's Favorite Outfit.
He had these flowers, by the driveway just off the road, we just never knew they had a name. Pretty wildflowers. That was it.
Snow in Summer, they're called. Snort. What the fuck. I came here to get away from the snow and now I'm going to plant it all over the place! A carpet of white to cover the green. I don't care if it's invasive either until it chokes off the roses. I have more roses, by the way. These ones are a vintage pink, the shade of the Avon lipstick my mom wore in the early seventies, that coral-pink that looks good with a tan. The lilacs are lilac-colored, of course and really, Ben doesn't seem to mind if all the flowers are pink and purple and white. He chose a cherry tree (for more pink, I guess) and an orange tree (with actual oranges!) and some begonias because he said they remind him of me, and they're an ivory with pale pink inside. Oh please. That isn't what he meant. He said they were breathtakingly, so maybe I get it though they could still die because I'll be so slow to turn this ground but oh, I do love flowers so much and this is the perfect place for endless wild gardens made impossible by the wind.
There's your common thread.
The wind brings everything and then whips it away again. It breathes through my hair and causes you to turn back. It carries the seeds of these flowers and dreams of Jacob who is gone but who resorted to cut flowers because things that are forgotten can't grow, princess and so just enjoy these and let someone else worry about all of that. And Ben took me for so many long walks to see the ones down the street that I carried lilacs the day we got married, even though there was no church, no aisle and no formalities and everyone was horrified because they were ruined the moment they were cut, and dripped their strange little petals everywhere, in our drinks, in my hair, ground into the carpet and yet they are all I want to smell forever and ever because I don't want to smell the roses, I just want to see them. Because roses smell like funerals and Bridget doesn't like those, oh no. Not one little bit and that's sad but they've been ruined that way.
Perhaps someday someone will make me a hybrid of sorts, a rose-lilac combination that looks beautiful, like a rose, but smells of the lilacs. We can call it a Lilose or a Rilac. I don't really care. I just hope it all works out. I'll plant them everywhere, instead of all this snow.
