Last month, while my friend reminded his dogs how to walk nicely on their leashes on a nearby road, I kicked around a bit in the red dirt of the Presbyterian cemetery in Jemez Springs, N.M. It’s an old place. Not old by the standards of historywhich hints that people have been planting, and have been planted, in the Jemez Range for better than 4,500 years — but old enough to contain remains of many generations past.
Near monuments blurred and rusted by time, the first shoots of iris poked up, the beginnings of tenacious blankets of tribute to long-gone loved ones. I wondered if they would open as tiny wild blue flags, or grow into tall bearded beauties, with golden tongues speaking the truth of memory.
Lupine in a neighbor’s sunny yard does that for me, its bright pink and purple spikes calling up summers with my grandmother. The grape-scented iris brought to my yard from Pennsylvania hark back to my friend Polly’s mom. And red-throated daylilies planted in Katherine’s garden remind me their progenitor made the long trip across the plains in a covered wagon with my Great Uncle Ralph.
Like the iris in the cemetery, these flowers grow where they are planted, rooted hard in history and renewing the legacy of love with every bloom. — Dana Coffield, The Denver Post
