Cornershot

Railroad lilies. They’re everywhere I look.

They’re those wild orange lilies we see growing riotous in the ditches beside the highway. At least that’s where we see them now if the highway department’s spraying schedule or mowers haven’t done away with them.

My 92-year-old friend who grew up in the mountains around Endicott saw them grow in the ditches along the railroad tracks. No highways in those mountains to walk on, and that’s a good thing, too, as “highway lilies” doesn’t have quite the same ring.

She liked the c osmos she saw in a garden we passed, calling them a name I had to ask her to repeat: very clearly, this toe-the-line Baptist spoke the word “frisky” and then “widows” — the second coming out closer to “Widders.” I swear I think she blushed.

Every time I see the Cosmos flowers dancing in the breeze now I see those multi-colored women turning round and round, wild in their grief. The world was smaller then, but the imagination somehow larger, more full of color and motion and connected directly to the absolute center of a thing.

I’m going to walk down my country road today and listen to my heart’s pulse as it sings me the names of all the world I see at my feet.

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