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by Alyson Giantisco

Philadelphia becomes a movie set when it rains. Neon slices through water droplets that crash against the dark street, tiny prisms spinning through the night. I’m watching film roll through my mind, filling my head with stories. I’m overwhelmed with flashing color and flickering movement.

I’m waiting for my life to take flight, everyday feeling as if I’m shooting the same scene over and over. But more immediately, I’m waiting for the number 57 bus, whose route looks like a four-year-old almost made the bus line straight, but whose hand on the ruler was bumped once, twice.

I’ve blended into the scenery on this damp corner, still and solitary against the telephone pole looming above me. There is no bus shelter. Instead I make myself small under an umbrella decorated with images of dancing ladies. They swing their arms wide, carefree and twirling across the gentle arc of the fabric. I spin the umbrella, spin myself, and we are dancing together on the lonely city sidewalk.

It’s easy to lose myself when my surroundings look like a dystopian sci-fi movie. Bright signs are harsh in the deep gray of evening. The mist in the air catches the light, refracts through the night, breaks against the pavement.

The bus crests the hill and approaches. I step off the sidewalk, over the rill of sludge sliding southward in the vee of where the curb meets street. The bus exhales as it stops, the doors folding in on themselves as the driver reaches and presses the button to kneel the front tire. It beeps in five quick chirps, but I’m already on the bus before the second beep. The two tones that verify payment follow me as I sidestep a walker and seek a seat. The aisle is slick, and I expect that the bus leaks. I touch the seat before I sit. You can’t always see the wet spots. Moisture is camouflaged by the patterned fabric that stretches taught on the steel chair frames.

For a moment, I am caught up in wondering about the seat fabric, wondering at the satisfaction of the designer as they chose the pattern, the contentment of those first riders to sit upon the seats. The once royal blue background has small geometric diamonds of color that remind me of confetti. New, it must have celebrated friendship and travel, but now, worn and stained, brown and faded, it embodies SEPTA’s slogan We’re Getting There. The implication that We’re Not There Yet is both an entertaining gaffe and a reminder of SEPTA’s struggles.

Behind me, a man rummages through his belongings. He removes everything from his pack, one item by one item, carefully setting them out in a neat line across the back bench. He is a mess of arms looking for—and I assume by his frustrated continual mutterings, not finding—that for which he is searching. Suddenly he repacks with swift jilted movements. He bundles his bag against himself and hustles off the bus at the next corner. I watch him head down the block, and bet he’ll jump the same bus line in the opposite direction to return for whatever he is missing. I can’t help but feel a kinship for this scattered desperate man. I too am looking for something I’ve misplaced, only I can’t seem to remember what it is. I hope the best for him. I imagine him returning to the restaurant he works at and finding the check slid tucked into the pocket of his apron, or his phone lying on the counter. Or maybe he’s coming from the purple carpeted, golden draped basement of his spiritual guru, and forgotten the slip of paper where he wrote down the meaning of life. Something about a fish? Or maybe it was a wish?

On the bus, a motley group of city secondary is seated around me. We who ride the bus alone on a Saturday night. We are the left-behinds. We are the after-thoughts. No couples get on the bus as we ride. Ten, then twenty minutes. It’s a quiet night. Four, five, six more blocks pass before we add to our crew. The driver is all but invisible behind the partition that shields her from our sight. Her arm emerges to push the lever for the door to open, then pulls the door closed.

We riders are all urbanites who understand silence, and most importantly, how to space ourselves throughout the bus to remain apart together. I imagine the lives of my fellow riders, their comings and goings. I notice their belongings, their tired expressions, and their imagined stories make me melancholy. I turn my face to the window instead.

Through the reflected faces of my fellow passengers, I watch people outside who scurry in the rain, darting across streets from awning to awning. This part of town is busy, and a horde of people hunch inside the small dry domes of their umbrellas. Others stand under overhangs, prioritizing some body parts while sacrificing others to the rain. A group of young hip smokers hug themselves against the damp. They are without umbrellas, and they blink into the night as if willing the downpour to stop, then shift, huddle closer. The light catches on their bright pointed elbows, stark against the black of their clothing. Around them people step wide, jostling one another. On the sidewalk, there is only room for two small umbrellas to pass, and the constant negotiation for space is an urban ballet.
Such a flurry of movement, but I’m parted from all but the visual. My mind fills in the other senses: a note of cigarette smoke just under the city dampness, the shuffling of pedestrians, the crash and splash as traffic flies through puddles, the chill that makes you feel uncomfortable but alive. The umbrellas spring—a quick metal zing and click—as doors open and patrons alight into the night. The traffic light turns green and cars accelerate, pushing the water pooled by clogged drains in small arcs that splash upon the sidewalk and scatter everyone nearby.

Inside the bus, there is an overwhelming silence.

At the next light, the bus turns and I gather my things. I swing my leg out into the aisle, prepping for my departure. My thigh is hit with an icy droplet. I have found the leak that has moistened the seat next to me.

I step off the bus opening my umbrella in one perfectly graceful movement that would make Mary Poppins proud. I dally on the pavement, but in only a moment I reach my house. The movie magic breaks. I shake my umbrella on my stoop as I stand under the jam. Shake myself free of any lingering fantasy. I pass through my door. I am home.

Alyson Giantisco is lucky in cards and enjoys winning. She believes in gratitude, celebration, the Oxford comma, and creativity. Giantisco trained in design, and continues to make and show artwork. She lives, works, and plays in Philadelphia.

It started innocently enough. A hike in the Oakland woods after a heavy rain. The ground still wet, the dense foliage sated and glistening. She hiked for exercise, to meditate, to escape the demands of a job in graphic design. It was a routine, an enjoyable way to recharge.

But then, fungi! That was the beginning, the gateway. Suddenly, she noticed them–there, and there, and there–as any of us might do in our own yards: mushrooms. The kind we, and even our pets, sense would kill us with one bite. Yes, my cousin, Lauren, noticed the fungi before anything else. Sprouting up overnight, matted in the dirt, tangled in the weeds, clinging to bark. Varying in placement, infinite in color, size and shape. The more she looked, the more she saw, a modern day Thoreau peering into a seemingly bottomless pond. Fungi. Orange and red, spotted and striped, top heavy and skinny, clustered and solitary, all of them called to her, and she responded with awe—and her camera. Obsessed, evangelical, her images were stunning, her enthusiasm contagious.

And yet, this was only a prelude to something deeper, something both smaller and far more vast. Like The Incredible Shrinking Man, whose profundity grew as he shrank and ultimately merged with the universe. For despite their beauty, their endless photographic potential, fungi were discrete, had limits, the hunt for them a beloved, but self-contained, hobby. Slime mold,  well, that was something else. That was a passion. That was love. That was the meaning of life.

My cousin and I are like sisters. I’m three years older, perfect for corrupting her early, which I did. I taught her about cutting class, forging signatures, and especially about boys, leading her astray before our parents knew we were gone. But she taught me a few things, too: about driving ninety miles an hour in the Hollywood Hills, about smoking low tar cigarettes, about the possible side effects of immersion in another culture. After a few months in Paris, she returned unable (or unwilling) to speak English, requiring me to rely on my high school French to communicate with her.

More than anything, however, Lauren taught me about nature, the appreciation of which began in her childhood home. Both of our dads were physicians, but hers was also a naturalist, her house a kind of urban zoo. In the backyard was a giant tortoise so big you could ride him, although I never did. The den was a dedicated aquarium, with built-in viewing spots for my uncle’s rare collection—vipers, lion fish, poison dart frogs from the Amazon among the most exotic.  Sadly, some of them didn’t make it. But none went to waste. In the guest bathroom medicine cabinet were jars filled with the pickled unlucky, a surprise if you happened to be looking for an aspirin.

I’m sure there were other unusual pets lurking around. No animal living at my cousin’s was mundane–even the dog. Duchess was her name, and she looked and acted the part: lithe and regal, a descendant of royalty. So when she went into heat, my aunt celebrated the bitch with a wedding and a canine gown that would put “Say Yes to the Dress” to shame.

When her daughter was young, Lauren followed in her father’s footsteps, harboring a menagerie of rats, mice, preying mantises and enough crickets to feed an army. Today, however, she only has a cat, to which I’m deathly allergic. She likes dogs, although, maybe because of Duchess, not enough to own one. Moreover, because of her aversion to interspecies mingling, she nearly pukes seeing me swap spit with my collie and two rescues—something to do with what occurs on the molecular level.  But slime. Slime is another matter.

“First,” my cousin says, “slime molds aren’t mold at all. They may seem more closely related to animals than fungi if you see them in their creeping phase. Because they’re so unlike anything else, science has found slime mold difficult to classify. They transform dramatically during their life cycle going from an on-the-move feeding phase to a fixed reproductive phase. Some of the fruiting bodies I witnessed through my close-up lens were stunningly alien and beautiful; pink elongated jelly beans on stalks, fuzzy netted puffballs, geometrically spaced iridescent orbs, tiny blueberries hanging from delicate threads.”

Also, although they are only one-celled, like amoeba, slime mold change form and possess striking intelligence. Indeed, they can solve mazes, optimizing information so efficiently, that scientists are studying them in connection with research on transport systems. All that from the tiniest of entities, something that one can confuse with “dust, dog barf or insect eggs.”

And they can be mercenary, too. Take the Badhamia utricularis, for example, a slime mold predator that “feeds on the poor fungi unable to make a run for it.” It may in fact be the slime mold’s superiority to the fungi (at least in this case) that is partly behind Lauren’s fascination with the creature. Not that she’s abandoned her first love—fungi, in all their wondrous glory, will always hold a place in her heart. But slime mold may lead us to more answers about our own existence. And that, for someone like my cousin, is head turning.

See, Lauren is an atheist, who believes that while there’s currently a limit to scientific explanation, it’s ultimately science, not a god, that’s more likely to tell us who we are. So slime mold, being part animal as well as plant, is a closer model. According to nature writer Adele Conover, even though in some ways slime molds are “like aliens from another planet,” they can help us understand our bodies as “great aggregations of once separate and independent organisms,” metaphorically as “communes.” (Smithsonian Magazine, March 2001, Hunting Slime Molds.) In other words, we might have more in common with slime mold than with fungi, and thus the knowledge acquired from them is  more relevant.

But what can slime mold do for me? I’m non-committal, indecisive, one of those pesky agnostics. Science is science. The earth is round, climate change is real, vaccinations work. Yet somewhere in me is a space all that data can’t fill, a space I cherish. Call it the fancy, the supernatural, the shadows. It’s where mystery lives, a space that lets me believe that my deceased grandmother helps find my constantly missing eyeglasses. It’s where I go to hope the things I hope for are true, to create worlds of my own making, to counter despair.

“What do you do to escape the madness?” Lauren recently asked me. She meant politics, madness being the code word for the person whose name we refuse to utter. What do I do? I’m a writer so I tell her I wait for rejection notices. “What do you do?” I said, already knowing the (slimy) answer by her adoring tone.

But maybe I’ve been too hasty. Maybe slime mold is more than its name, more than the sum of its parts. Maybe in its ability to thrive in chaos, to transcend temporal concerns, it exceeds its classification, becoming part of the mystery I hold as sacred.

Maybe. But it could be that I’m just jealous. Like back in the day when my cousin got the cute guy. It could be that I’ll never be into slime mold because it’s just not that into me. At the very least, I wonder if she’s thought this relationship through . I warn her that she might get hurt, that the slime might overtake  her, like the Blob. But she waves me off, heading straight for the woods, certain that the romance will last.

Ona Russell is the author of three award-winning historical mysteries and has been published in a variety of other venues, including previously in Philadelphia Stories. Ona holds a PhD in literature from UC San Diego, where she also taught for many years. She considers herself a Philadelphian once removed—her mother was born there, her brother lives in Narberth, and her great uncle, architect Louis I. Kahn, had a little something to do with the city. For more info, please visit onarussell.com.

Music to read by: “A Flower is a Lovesome Thing,” Shelly Berg Trio

When John Thompson Morris of Philadelphia turned forty-four, he took early retirement from the presidency of his father’s Iron Works to pursue other interests. Morris, unlike his father and uncles, preferred the role of benefactor, one who reaches into the past and buys up rare objects, then donates them for public edification. While still in his thirties, Morris took on this role by embarking on three significant tasks: amass an impressive quantity of objects of antiquity from around the world, create the most excellent pleasure gardens in Philadelphia, and serve—with tenacity and candor—on boards of civic organizations. After retiring in 1891, he was able to give unlimited time to these interests. Morris was no different from other benefactors of the Gilded Age. They too set for themselves similar tasks, those prosperous, ambitious Philadelphians with famous surnames . . . Wharton, Pennypacker, Stotesbury, Wanamaker.

When it came time to draft his will in 1909, Morris was fully aware that much depended on him—he was the last male in his immediate family. All his life, Morris had been a good steward and it was up to him to ensure the future of many things. Through trust funds, Morris provided a gracious plenty for his household servants, for charitable organizations, like the Philadelphia Home for Incurables, and for cousins (he being unmarried, his siblings being without heirs). After taking care of all these, he bequeathed his family’s ancestral home, Cedar Grove, which he considered a colonial treasure, to the Society of Colonial Dames of America.

But Morris’s will makes it clear that he had one more task in mind, an ambitious task that required all of his residuary estate and depended on close cooperation of several organizations. He wanted to start a school.

In a 12-page treatise in the middle of his will, Morris designed his school and its two supporting auxillaries. He named it “The Morris Botanical Garden, School and Museum.” And, in typical founder-itis fashion, Morris didn’t leave any aspect to the notions of others. He outlined the major goals and defined the complex administrative and fiduciary relationship between the garden, the school and the museum. He specified a corporate-type Board of Managers, to be composed of representatives from three institutions, Haverford College, The Academy of National Sciences of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania. He then launched into the curriculum, a program to suit the hybrid institution he envisioned—a trade school with a scientific foundation.

Morris set parameters for entering students (16 years of age, proficient in basic school subjects, male, possibly some females), for methods of instruction he deemed most appropriate, housing, and rules of decorum. He went so far as to state how students should spend their weekends, adamant that they attend church on Sundays. As for tuition—it was free. Room and board—free. Clothing—free. Students only needed to render service on the grounds while attending school. Plus they would receive a $100 honorarium at the end of their four-year course of study to help them launch their career.

This school/garden/museum was no pipe dream. In fact, a few years later, Morris plucked his dream out of his will and decided to carry it out during his lifetime. He had done this before, when he jumped ahead of his will by commissioning the Morris Infirmary for Haverford College, and afterwards changed his will, canceling the bequest. He sensed a pent-up demand—there were so many country estates in the region and so few practical gardeners.

All Morris needed was the perfect property for situating his school. And he found it within waving distance of Compton, his country home in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia. Morris purchased Bloomfield Farm in 1914 for just this purpose. Located on the Wissahickon Creek across the road from his estate, Bloomfield came with a couple of houses, a mill and history traceable to the 1740s.

With property in hand, the dream could be turned into bricks and mortar. Morris did his homework, coached by a consultant who traveled anywhere there was a training program attached to renown gardens—England, Scotland, Germany, Holland. A highly qualified consultant whose surname was Bartram (as in descendent of John Bartram, Father of American botany). Frank Bartram’s task was to scope out what other gardening schools were doing and return to Philadelphia with a plan for something even better; something that grafted the practical onto the academic.

Morris most certainly took to heart the words of President James A. Garfield, promoter of all things agricultural, whose memorial monument had been unveiled in Morris’s beloved Fairmount Park a dozen years earlier, “At the head of all sciences and arts, at the head of civilization and progress, stands—not militarism, the science that kills, not commerce, the art that accumulates wealth—but agriculture, the mother of all industry, and the maintainer of human life.” But to Morris, although farming may be necessary, it was not the raison d’être of his school.

It mattered a lot to Morris that a horticulturalist was proficient in plowing and cultivating. And that a greenhouse manager knew about plumbing and steamfitting. And that a gardener understood accounting procedures. It all mattered to Morris because his goal was to produce “competent and useful gardeners” who gained most of their experience outdoors, not in classrooms, and whose credential was a diploma, not a degree. He believed he was onto something very few were doing except at a handful of U.S. schools and at botanic gardens on the Continent, like Edinburgh, Glasnevin, Frederiksoord and Kew Royal Botanic Gardens (the ne plus ultra of the day).

A call for practical training had grown out of the 1889 national convention of florists, landscapers and horticulturists. It was a vociferous call that named names and laid blame: “Let us have a great horticultural training school, where the professors are not afraid to stain their fingers in laboratory and garden nor ashamed to don a blue apron and lead a class with skilled fingers in any line of practical work . . . one such school, well endowed and properly manned will do more for American horticulture than all our agricultural schools will ever do . . . to correct much that is now erroneous and ridiculous.” It was time to end the “great farce” of teaching horticulture without getting dirt under the fingernails.

In all likelihood, Morris paid close attention to this dispute. And when it came time to plan his own school, he could probably name all the practical work schools on the East Coast. But as with all Morris’s prior projects, he was aiming for the very best—a distinctive school with its roots firmly in the past and its hope in a new profession of practical gardening.

Now that he had a charter and a location, Morris turned to physical facilities. He favored the functionality of the I-shaped Pennsylvania Hospital. Could something smaller be designed for the north corner of Bloomfield Farm, leaving the center open for greenhouses and fields, he asked Bartram?  Regardless of architecture, he knew exactly how the school should operate—just as it had during his school days at Haverford College. He informed Bartram of this, more than once.

In early July, 1915, Morris told Bartram to start on the next project—designs for practice greenhouses with plenty of space for plant propagation. Together, they reviewed sketches and Bartram took notes as Morris approved this, nixed that. Though news of the war in Europe was taking up more and more space in Gardeners’ Chronicle from London, Bartram drew Morris’s attention to reports of a new professional diploma in horticulture. Could this program be refashioned for Philadelphia? How quickly could they get the course of study designed and the first class enrolled? Several well-respected horticulturalists had already offered to leave their positions and come to Philadelphia. Morris debated whether to go ahead and engage them.

The U.S. Commissioner of Education was ready with names for the Board of Managers; an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture was scouting potential faculty. Morris told Bartram he was willing to open the program with a small group of day students, even before buildings were constructed. Yet despite the approval of virtually all the leading agencies and institutions akin to the project, Morris reversed his decision: “Mr. Morris feels the school cannot open before 1916,” Bartram noted in February of 1915. Apparently, Morris felt a school wasn’t a school without dormitories and classrooms.

In August, John Morris and his sister Lydia vacationed at their usual place—the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire. And Morris continued working on a myriad of design details, sending Bartram sketches and comments on student accommodations, dining hall, lecture hall, labs. On August 10^th, Morris had a better idea about fixtures for the dormitory bathrooms, so he wrote another “long epistle” jammed with his latest thoughts on the administration building, auditorium, seed collection room and dormitory bathrooms. And why, he queried Bartram, hadn’t he received a response to his previous letter about the bath sinks. Time was marching on. He had a lot to attend to—permissions, contracts. “I am ready to go ahead at once if data is presented to me for consideration,” he wrote. That was Morris’s final letter. He died of acute kidney failure August 15, 1915.

Morris’s determination to start a school did not die with him. Lydia Thompson Morris picked up where her brother left off by commissioning Edgar V. Seeler to design the educational buildings and greenhouses at Bloomfield, and to draft a plan for converting the Compton mansion into a museum. Seeler began work with a trip to Boston to meet Arnold Arboretum staff, who provided positive feedback—the location was ideal, the demand for gardeners was high, the time was right.

Many in the world of horticulture were eager to see what would become of this “interesting proposition” of a school: “Its development will be watched with peculiar interest by all in the horticultural and floricultural business,” proclaimed the editor of The Florists’ Exchange. But as harvest season came and went, there was no further word of progress on John Morris’s vision. No press releases, no interviews, no small-scale models.

Frank Bartram finished up his journals and turned them over to Miss Morris’s staff. Then in the spring of 1917, as young men began leaving farms to enlist in the military, Bartram took on the resulting farmer shortage by joining a regional committee. The following spring, Edgar Seeler submitted drawings of Bloomfield buildings and Compton renovations then he, too, turned to war-related tasks. His next commission was to create a new community of 500 homes in Ridley Park to alleviate the housing shortage near war-related industries.

Miss Morris had her own tasks to attend to. Once the U.S. entered the war, she gave liberally of her time and money to the social welfare of thousands of sailors and marines stationed at the Navy Yard.

For these necessary and laudable reasons, the Morris Botanical Garden, School and Museum, as envisioned in the pages of a will, remained a vision . . . until 1929. That was the year Miss Morris updated her will and by then much had changed, economically, culturally and institutionally. Several attempts had been made in the early 1920s to establish cooperative gardener education programs, including the Massachusetts Agricultural College’s arrangement with the National Association of Gardeners. But the American system of gardener education has always leaned toward the scientific and theoretical. And most practical work programs did not survive long.

In 1929, when Lydia Morris was faced with how best to carry out her brother’s vision, she understood that his approach to gardener education was not in keeping with current trends. At the dawn of the 1930s, it was more important to conduct botanical research and disseminate that knowledge to the world than to prepare head gardeners for country estates; to offer advanced courses for students whose preliminary education was done elsewhere; to build offices and research labs rather than dormitories. And thus, under these terms as specified in Lydia Morris’s will, Compton and Bloomfield became the responsibility of the Botanical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, hereafter known as The Morris Arboretum.

~

This essay was made possible by original sources at the Morris Arboretum Archives.

Joyce Munro’s work can be found in Broad Street Review, Hippocampus, Minding Nature, Poor Yorick, The Copperfield Review, WHYY Speak Easy and elsewhere. She writes about the people who kept a Philadelphia estate running during the Gilded Age in “Untold Stories of Compton” on the Morris Arboretum blogsite. 

When I was a junior in high school, I got a job at a flower shop. I worked there for almost five years, scraping money together for SATs and prom dresses. On the weekends I roamed South Jersey roadways and highways in the shop vans. Both vans, big or little, had filthy cupholders full of pennies, center consoles stuffed with fast food trash and business cards, broken starters, funky brakes, and were my chosen form of escaping home.

Being on the road was addictive. The vans were high above the pavement, where the echoes of my father’s death, the debt he left my family, and its strain on my mother, couldn’t reach me. I was secure in the way roller coasters feel secure when you’re strapped in, just before the drop.

Big Bertha was my favorite van. From its height, I could see down into any car below. Maybe it was the feeling of control or maybe it was the feeling of breathlessness, that as high as I was, as far as I was from my problems below, I was still moving. As a restless teenager, this was a peaceful feeling.

The first time I drove Bertha was a few weeks after I got my license. I was 17. I grabbed the key from the shop and trekked across the street towards the parking lot. I didn’t think I could handle a vehicle of her size, even if only to drive her across the street to the shop-front. I was used to smaller vehicles, and looking into other drivers’ eyes, not the tops of their heads. Climbing upwards to reach the driver’s seat was new territory for me. The seat was so far from the pedals I had to sit on the edge of the cushion to reach both gas and brakes. It would be months before I learned to move the seat forward.

The next time I drove her was also my first time delivering funeral flowers. I knew the location well. It was where my father’s funeral was held ten or so years prior. My boss did the flowers for my father’s service too, which meant they were delivered in the same van, Big Bertha.

I pulled into the driveway, set far back from the road by a hill jutting awkwardly above the street below. I braced myself for the flashbacks to come: four vases with a blue flower to represent my brothers, one vase with a pink flower for me. My mother crying. Sitting in the front row, the cremated remains of a former half of me resting in a box at the front of the room.

Before I entered the funeral home, I sat in the van, counting off arrangements, matching flowers to delivery slips, making sure none were forgotten.

I opened the side door, arms full with a funeral basket so large I couldn’t see over it. I watched my feet, making sure to avoid tripping on any steps and destroying the flowers of mourning. After setting the arrangement down, I stood up to find myself facing the casket.

It was open and the corpse inside looked puffy and waxen. I averted my eyes though they kept gravitating towards his body. I couldn’t look at him, yet I couldn’t look away. His gray hair was slicked back perfectly atop his balding head. Years of living well had carved smile lines deep into his skin. His mouth had permanently set into a smirk.

I shifted my focus and found the carpet and wallpaper matched that of my memories. Dark floral patterns on the walls clashed, or perhaps meshed, with the deep green of the carpet. Behind me, the rows of chairs matched my memory too. I turned to see the chair I sat in the last time I was in the room, fifth from the left, front row.

My mother had been seated closest to the wall, first in line to receive guests, my brothers and I following her, positioned chronologically. Before us, instead of a coffin stood a table bearing the box of my father’s ashes, and the five tiny vases.

Everyone had worn black as they huddled around pictures of a man no one would see again. I had smiled at them, awkwardly attempting to offer joy, failing entirely in that attempt.

That day ushered in an era of silence, of quiet tears spilt alone late at night. I don’t remember much of what happened immediately afterwards. My mom finally finished the kitchen renovation they’d begun long ago. We went to Florida for our first vacation without our father. Eventually, money became tighter. My brothers and I became closer, conscious then of the ease at which a person goes from being there, to never being anywhere other than in the past tense. We were deeply connected to my mom too. As a unit, we spent no time looking back.

Maybe it had been too easy to walk out of that room. Maybe I had never really left it.

I left and came back with more flowers. Trip after trip, van to funeral home and back again, until finally it was over. I brought the final arrangement in and set it gently on the carpet  in front of the casket. I looked at the silent and peaceful man and wondered how he would feel if he knew I was looking at him. I imagined his laughter and his hugs during the stories he would tell his grandchildren during the holidays.

I ran from the room without shutting the door. Bertha started on the first turn in the ignition, a rare feat, and I drove off so quickly I almost tipped her on her side.

Away from the room and the man and the memories, I wanted to go back to sit with him for a while but I had other deliveries to make. Birthday balloons, bridal flowers, “I’m Sorry” bouquets awaited.

Soon, I would learn how common it is to see corpses in the flower industry, how often it is not the flowers of the living, but rather casket decorations and peace lilies. How, more often than not, I would carry flowers whose recipients are in the process of being forgotten: silent arrangements, ones no one calls the sender about, as opposed to the flowers of the living.

In the hours before the services would begin, funeral home directors accepted the flower deliveries. After a while, these deliveries became quiet, peaceful places for me to be with the dead. Knowing I was one of the last people to share their private time with them, I began reading the obituaries, not just glancing at delivery dates and times, to glimpse who they were: veterans, nurses, teachers, students. I could learn how they died based on the wording, Passed Suddenly usually meant overdose or suicide, while Is Now At Peace usually translated into cancer or some other illness.

They were sometimes young, oftentimes old, and their loved ones were always listed at the end of the obituary. There, I learned how these people lived and who they left behind. People who were losing life partners, children, grandparents, mothers, and fathers. Then I would bring in the flowers ordered by those loved ones, and set them at the base of the caskets.

Quick and clean, in and out, bouncing around South Jersey, leaving a trail of ghosts behind, I’d strap myself into the safety of the van after each delivery. I’d blast NPR, or music, or both as I drove.

At the end of the night, I would park the van at the shop, hang the keys on the wall, then lock the door and leave, forgetting the names of the bodies I’d seen that day. I would trade their faces for those of the living and abandon the dead until my next shift.

I still notice when I’m near one of the funeral homes I used to deliver to. The familiarity of the routes have ingrained into my subconscious, next to the wallpaper patterns and obituaries, and ghosts of those whose funerals I’d crashed.

Devon James is pursuing an accelerated BA/MA in Writing Arts and Writing respectively from Rowan University in Glassboro New Jersey. She grew up in Southern New Jersey where she spent time exploring the surrounding area’s diverse landscape. From forests to farms to Philadelphia, she is grateful to have grown up in an area with such unique offerings. When she is not writing, she enjoys hiking, needlework, and tending to her many plants.