The Ephemerals

Plants known as ephemerals respond readily to spring's early warmth and fade back into the earth during the heat of summer. So I've read anyway. I bought my house in December. The yard, as far as I could tell, was grass bordered by curving beds of gravel. How Zen, I thought. Maybe I'll make hypertufa garden orbs, grow some herbs and vegetables in some big pots and call it a day. It's been a cold spring in here Minnesota, but in the last couple of weeks green things are rocketing out of the ground. There will be no room for garden orbs. I'm trying to make sense of it all, using an app on my phone to ID things and marveling at the fortitude of the plants pushing their way through a thick layer of black garden cloth and gravel. I'm also trying to make sense of the death of my friend Shanna, who left this Earth by her own hand not quite two weeks ago. As another friend put it, depression is a murderer and a liar. Shanna pushed her way through a layer of darkness, and I was in a writing group with her as she blossomed. I never shared a meal with her--or even a drink or a cup of coffee--our common ground was writing and struggle. Her own rough life gave her a nose for the sadness and pain of others.Shanna emailed me more than once when I was at the bottom to tell me to see her therapist. As I remember it she followed up with a phonecall. I went to the therapist. I made it out of the bottomless hole I was in. Shanna made it out too. She wrote a novel,Oh!You Pretty Things a few years ago that got all around fine reviews. She moved. I moved. We weren't ever see each other/talk regularly friends--and time and distance, well,you know how that goes. Things happened that I don't know about. Then Shanna got Covid in November and shared her struggle on Facebook. She was super sick. I posted on her wall like a zillion other friends. I PM-ed her now and then to not clutter up her wall of well-wishes, so numererous were the messages from friends and fellow writers. But she didn't get well and became a long-hauler. And overwhelmed by Covid and god knows what all, she took her life. Muffin and cupcake, she'd call me and the other writers in our group. Sweet cakes and sparkle pie. Shanna was a secret sauce of heart-aching empathy cut with wicked wit and profanity. Honestly, there was no one fucking like her. Not even close. I haven't felt like doing much this past ten days. I pull weeds and put comments from my fellow writers into the appropriate folders for the essays I'm trying to finish. I cut out images for collages, but don't make anything. I look at the Virgina bluebells in my gardern and think the word ephemeral. They'll be gone soon, I guess. But you wouldn't know it to look at them right now. Ephemeral.