The Flowers in the Square

Sometimes you have something that follows you around for a while, waiting for you to take notice or pay attention to it. Sometimes it’s a word, sometimes it’s an idea, sometimes it’s just a picture. For me, lately, I have been followed around by rivers. Pictures of rivers, maps of rivers, watershed maps on my wall at work. There’s a picture of the Delaware on my desktop now, but this Friday, I dreamed about the Mississippi, that of it I know.

It was a beautiful dream, like a prism made of water. It was light, light on water, during the day, summer, the part of the river with the three steel bridges up by the border with Arkansas. The riverboat casinos even, down on the Mississippi side, in the north Delta. The green. Too powerful to get in the water, always, a mighty, a massive, like a city itself in motion but instead all water. All water. More water. Move down. Move down, water. Move down, city. Move down.

Move down,
Miss
I
Sip
I.

After that dream, I figured that the River that is all rivers was trying to tell me something, and has been for a while, and it was about time I listened. On Saturday I put on cutoffs and flipflops and got on the Orange line and went straight into to the marshes around the Anacostia River here in D.C., a small patch, 77 acres of what used to be 2,000, which they had to reconstruct from the ravages of progress.

There was a grating of cheap apartment buildings all around the park, and I wandered for a good long time, but eventually I got in. I managed to stay a long time there, walking around, looking at turtles and herons, mostly left to myself; I fell asleep on the banks and was awakened by some teenage boys in canoes who I think were slightly disappointed that they hadn’t found a dead body. “Sorry to wake you up,” they said, and paddled away. I yawned and brushed off a bunch of ants, and immediately went back to sleep.

The Anacostia is a brown river swollen with all sorts of nameless sludge, but there are fish in it, some of them quite large. It’s too bad its so polluted, because it has a beautiful name, but it is not powerful enough to be feared, and it’s obvious that people regard it as a dump. Apparently it’s against the law to swim in the river in the District of Columbia! I was very troubled by this but now I have seen the water I understand. At least there is still a forest there. Best of all, I got to ride home on the Metro promiscuously covered in mud.


This year, the two floats that I saw at the Cherry Blossom Festival were the Anacostia Roller Stars, a roller skating troupe that I think survives off of childrens’ birthday parties, and a flotilla of young Maryland women in Scarlett O’Hara dresses, parasols, and bonnets.

The Anacostia Roller Stars were dressed in superhero costumes, including “ObamaMan”, an African American superhero dressed in blazing white and sporting an “O” on his chest. He was a hit. Little kids wanted to be him. Women wanted to photograph him. After ObamaMan left, the Belles of the South were the next in line, and quite the letdown.

The South is on my mind because my grandmother Angelina Josephina Cuicchi Miller is sick now, in Leland, MS, and her spirit is still very strong, more so that her body. Some people are too strong even for their own bodies to hold, and that is a hard thing. She is 78, and my dad bought her an IPod for Christmas this year on which she still listens to the Three Tenors. When I was born, in 1976, she made me a Bicentennial quilt with emblems of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall on it, and I didn’t even know what they were until I moved to Philly in 1999, and then walked by them every day.

Angie Miller ran the Leland Flower Shop for 20 years, and running a flower shop means caring in a small and beautiful way for everyone in town at the most crucial moments of their lives: births, weddings, illness, funerals. There are always divorce flowers too, of course. And Valentine’s Day, the busiest day of the year, which in my family meant the day that everyone had to help Mama at the shop, and work all day, driving all over town and delivering hundreds and hundreds of roses.

It is the place where I learned that some flowers come in humidors flown overnight from Venezuela, and how to strip a rose of its thorns in 2-4 seconds, and other things, as countless as the stars in the Milky Way, the great river of light in the sky.

I still don’t know all that I have been given by this astonishing woman. I am a conduit for it but I don’t even know what it is – I don’t even understand it. It is mostly wordless, and comes and goes without name.

I would be an alchemist with it, all that I have been given; but I hardly know how. All I can do is listen, just listen to the water move.