The calendar says September, but October is already washing the green off the trees, revealing the golden, internal fire they’ve absorbed from the nearest star.  Marigold colored ash leaves carpet our rainy street, carried against the curb like pools of petals. The maples have just begun to turn – and there are weeks to go before they stand bare for winter.

You don’t need me to tell you the farmer’s market was full of winter squash and pumpkins, straggling corn and the last flush of tomatoes and raspberries.  The stems on the late dahlias are thick as branches, trimmed week after week of their crop of neon pompoms.  The sunflowers stand on thin, reedy stems that will nod down over the next day or two, dusting the table with hopeful pollen.

I loved the cheery pictures I took of my mismatched dahlias, clashing like polka dots and checkered slacks.*  Their crayon-box colors radiated in the low, rainy light – lemon yellow, red-orange, carnation pink and white.  Maybe it was the Bob Wills, or – God Help Me – the George Strait – but we were sincerely swinging.

But the melancholy sky needed its voice today, as well.  Sometimes you just have to see things for what they are.  Sometimes you know with all your heart you can’t do something.  No matter how much you feel you should.  No matter what it will mean to follow that inner voice saying, “Not this.”  Those feelings are elemental.  You can work with them, re-combine them – but you can’t ignore the places they illuminate in your heart.

(*”I face the music, I face the facts, even when we walk in polka dots and checkered slacks.” – Two Little Hitlers, Elvis Costello.)

I love the dahlias.  The lipstick colors, gratuitous petals and thick, expressive stems – it’s like God gave their blossoms a boob job.  I mean, you can’t help but stare.  And wonder what they’d look like in your little green vase.

Buying flowers on Sunday isn’t an indulgence – although I’m not proud of that.  It’s been a blessing I sorely needed, a reminder that it takes no work at all to fall in love.  Fresh from the buckets crammed into the flat-bed of the farmer’s truck, their beauty is so urgent.  Flowers won’t tolerate your procrastination.  The curl of that lip-tender petal can’t wait until you’ve been a good citizen and vacuumed something dusty.  Their light is only here so long.  Tomorrow morning, the petals will already be just a little bored with putting on their show, no matter how dutifully you give them fresh water to drink.

I wish I was more useful for the people I love just now.  Life has taken them deeper into her labyrinth – to places I was too scared and too self-centered to go.  And their current troubles don’t have answers that can fit into a coffee cup, or a rocks glass.  Even listening seems too meager a response – but I don’t know what else I can do.

This picture isn’t much help, I guess.  It’s all about me and my patchwork life, scrapped together from wrong choices I’ve found a way to live with.  I guess me and the flowers are looking for the same thing.  Just to find our light in the late afternoon, and trust that if we miss it today, it will come around again on Sunday.

Any excuse to drive around aimlessly has always been good enough for me, but Saturday was especially good.  From noon ’til 2, the student radio host on WSUM shuffled through the Springsteen song book from the late 90s and early 2000s – Tunnel of Love, Magic, Human Touch.  By the time I was done at the bank, I figured I might as well drive around in the rain, listening to Bruce, as go home.  I really don’t have enough responsibilities for someone my age.  There’s nothing to stop me from deciding to stay gone, just so I can sing along with the radio for an hour or two.

So I escaped for a while to drive through the prairie that winds behind the Farm and Fleet in Verona.  This prairie is an old friend.  I went there for the sunrise, the morning after my mother died.  I aired out my mind and heart many depressed days, climbing its mowed paths.  After every visit, I left with more.

Still, I can’t remember any time it was more beautiful than Saturday.  I felt I had never seen the clearings and the groves before.  Saturated with rain, vivid green branches and golden flowers shimmered against the murky grey sky.  I had to pull onto the shoulder – and just watch.  Butterflies and birds came and went between the tall grass and the tree tops.  With the windows open, I stared at the horizon, memorizing the curve of the hill, the space between the branches against the sky.  No camera, just eyes.   And all the while, Bruce.  Is that you, baby – or just some brill-iant dis-gueye-eye-eyes?

I lost track of time, and the songs.  Finally, I was ready to go.  I had to make myself keep rolling past the further vistas of more and more sunflowers and rudbeckia, leaning toward the road, heavy with rain.  I could have stopped every few car lengths.

Then, at the bottom of the hill by the huge, white equipment barn, I had to turn around and wind back up the road again.  To re-absorb the plentiful sky and take in another scrap of wild prairie – just to have room to breath my heart back into my body.  Because this song – Hello Sunshine (Won’t You Stay).  Because this song – I got out my phone to text you, and I shouldn’t.  Because this song – knows something so tender that I am not brave enough to say again.  Because this song – I feel I can forgive Bruce now for “Nebraska.”

“There’s too many flowers,” said no one, ever. – Sherri Shockler

I’ve never bought myself this many flowers before – and it makes me so happy.  The sunflowers and lisianthus, the larkspur and celosia, each adds a different voice to my solitary room, making their compelling argument for being yourself.  “Here’s what was meant to be, and look – I’ve unfolded as planned, except even more beautifully than you’d hoped.”

I do feel a little proud of introducing these particular flowers to each other, because they didn’t come this way.  I bought them from different farmers, along with purple-black plums and sweet white corn.  One farmer improvises bouquets of long, twisting prairie blossoms, the other cuts an orderly production line of incandescent dahlias, punctuated with high purple spires.  Today, I decided I didn’t have to choose.

This has been a year of so many non-trivial losses.  I couldn’t keep spending Sundays without you, and squeeze my heart back into the bud, to hope for a safer, better season.  It’s too late for that.  But I think these surrogate petals have carried on for me – finishing the work I thought we’d started.  Undaunted, they open up, and relish the unfurling, despite its inevitable end. Because that is what hearts need to do.