Geranium
Grandpa Isabel’s geranium survived thirty years in the coffee can. It was balanced outside on a too shallow, improvised garden bed made of collected bricks and rocks. The rocks, smoothed by the colored water, the heavy metal mining seepage.
This geranium emerged in Delicias, Chihuahua, México. Once, groundcover. It grew wider than the field of pumpkin—thick, velveteen eiderdown, with saucer-shaped soft peach blossoms and succulent, hairy leaves, spreading greener with age.
When Grandpa Isabel was recruited by the mining company on the other side, he did one last thing before leaving. He pinched the Mexicano front-yard geranium with his cracked parchment thumbnail. It did not accomplish a clean cut—the piece was torn, veiny.
As he rode north, he wet the plant in his mouth. Bitter. When he remembered to. His mouth then was still pre-alcoholic pure. He kept this straw-thin stem, kept it upward-facing, tenderly in his shirt pocket. He stood in the cattle car on this unchosen ride north, a two days’ journey.
On the train across, they were packed like livestock, never stopping for water, for food, to empty bowels. But still he changed his posture to protect it. He changed his posture to not crush this pedazito.
The geranium is taprooted here now. In the norte, in the sharp sand and the jagged Maxwell House thirty years later. The once creeping perennial is now spindly; its thin leaves from woody umbilical stems, branching one-sided.
Forced out of the cyclical divine, Grandpa’s geranium forgets the seasons. It goes dormant early spring to midsummer. And near winter it blooms conspicuous, shy, spiked flowers with black centers and black radial veins, and shallow, grey, toothy leaves. Survival’s new colors.
