Dahlias

It’s slightly October, the most believable of months. October always tells the truth and the truth is either slightly happy or slightly sad, nothing radical, only a series of small, private quiet beginnings and ends.

October now bends toward the end. I feel the flowers starting to turn away from me, not to let me down but to tell me that they’re taking a little break. All summer the flowers have been so good to me, especially the dahlia’s, each dahlia expressing its individual brilliance, completely natural in the singular personal way of a flower, making it known that it will never been seen before and will never be again.

I don’t know if flowers really know how much I love them; I only hope they know I love them! Not that they really accomplish that much. Flowers never sit down to write something for instance, never try to do something that really needn’t be done. You won’t catch a flower being self-conscious, no matter how beautiful a flower is, or thinking about appearing in a magazine, or promoting itself, or going on TV for a sit-down interview with a talk show host. A flower never has to try and make a painting like many artists seem to have to try to make paintings or other objects of art. Flowers live and die with such quiet elegance—when a flower blooms it’s most often a thing of beauty and when a flower has reached the end of the road you can be assured it’s given up on life and there’s no need for some great fanfare.

I just now walked around the garden. I see the flowers have drunk up most everything in the wine cellar. It looks to me the flowers have had a great time all summer. Soon they’ll take a drunken little nap and sleep through the winter—I sure hope so, they deserve all the happiness in the world.