A gardener’s music brings us back to reality. Yet the area seems
deserted. Prim joins the love- lled ferns which spread their contentment
throughout. A veritable jungle in which one half expects to see a cloud
of parakeets take ight before us. And now the begonias! We stand
in awe before these fragile branches with their yellow owers, as well
as before the almost-extinct hemsleyana.
“That one’s funny, the hairy
one.”
The black-and-purple-caiman aspect of a bremivirosa reminds
me of an Alaïa dress Prim once wanted to borrow from her mother. Prim
makes me open a little glass window containing a begonia, light as
yellow coral, and sighs,
“It’s like a dream.”
I know just what she means.
The music-loving gardener, invisible until now, warns us that it’s closing
time. Just enough time to show Prim a pineapple ower. This is important
to her: she calls her friend Hanna-Anne, “Ananas,” French for “pineapple.”
As we head to home and to the kitchen, she asks me,
“What kind
of cake are you going to make me?” “A many-hued delight! Since we
were little, your mother and I have had a herbarium with all the prettiest
owers we’ve found in greenhouses. Rainbows dance when we open
it. You’ll nd something in there and we’ll dip it in caramel. The owers
will stick together.” “Can we put marshmallows in it, too?” “Yes.”
The herbarium is opened as soon as we arrive. Prim gently extracts
the prettiest owers with her little ngers. A bit of deliciosa for taste,
the petals of a hundred different owers, a few pistils with unlikely
or unknown names. A paintbrush helps to cover each in caramel. A layer
of ower, a layer of marshmallow, and we start again.
“Whew,
it’s done.” “Can we make another one for Mommy?” “We don’t have
enough owers!”
Prim puts her coat back on:
“Can we go get more?”
And we’re off.
I come to nd you once again in this gar-
den where everything began; where we
drank to our love, to your health, to my
follies. In my pocket, war
“
“
