The Last Flowers

It has been snowing for five hundred and forty seven days now. I have been keeping a tally using a counting stick I made out of an old piece of palm tree wood. Everyday I make a notch in the stick, and it secures this ritual of mine. It has become a holy rite. All of the flowers are gone, and in their place there are children; new babies everywhere you look. Skinny, malnourished looking creatures, who will never know what it's like to open their windows on the first day of spring, or what it's like to drift lazily on their boogie boards in the ocean during the summertime. They will never experience the royal coming of autumn with all of the brilliant coolness it brings. Their world is a blank slate. Tabula Rasa-a theory that has become prophecy. Who would have thought? In the early days when it started snowing, we treated it like it was a miracle, like manna being poured out from the sky. After months passed and it was still snowing, how traditional and in touch with mother nature we thought we were, when we slapped on layers of clothes from wardrobes full of pieces more suited to a warm, dry day in the desert, and then trudged through the snow in small familial units to find palm trees to cut down for firewood. It turns out palm tree wood is crap for firewood, and even more so if it's wet and unseasoned. Pipes froze over, roads were blocked, people were snowed in, and some even froze to death. The crops failed, first in one place, and then spreading throughout the entire country like the flu pandemic of 1918. People lost their hope, and then their sanity. When I feel like I am on the brink of losing my mind, I make lists of what I have. 1. Five cans of expired garbanzo beans 2. One 2.5 lb bag of lentils (government rations) 3. Two books by Sylvia Browne (One of them titled "End of Days: Predictions & Prophecies About the End of the World"-none of them mentioning 2 years of non-stop snow ) 4. One book by Amy Tan (who, 6 months ago, was found frozen to death in her tree house in San Francisco) 5. One tattered paperback by Louisa May Alcott 6. Eight huge bundles of imported firewood (government rations) 7. A collection of pots I use to melt snow for water and to eat and drink out of 8. My Imagination 9. A coffee pot I will never be able to use again, but which I hang onto for sentimental purposes 10. A photograph of me and my late husband 11. A quilt made up of all of my old name brand clothes (desperate times call for desperate measures) 12. A body pillow I managed to keep from the looters 13. Two bars of soap (government rations) 14. One bamboo toothbrush ( I don't know any looters from the valley that would want to use someone else's toothbrush) 15. Two tubes of toothpaste (government rations) 16. A little green copy of the new testament 17. One bottle of expired aspirin 18. One beach towel (I managed to keep this one from the looters as well) 19. One stack of magazines I substitute for toilet paper 20. One small red pocket knife (I bartered with some kid in search of canned food on El Paseo) 21. One set of nail clippers, and 22. My sanity. I tell myself if I lose #22 on the list, I can't appreciate the other things that are there, and that gets me grounded pretty quickly. Some days, I stare out the windows of my gutted Spanish style home, and I wonder what my husband would say about all of this if he were still alive. In movies and books about the end of the world, the characters are never static; they change. Would Henry have been my hero or my downfall? I like to remember him how he was that day in the picture I have. We were on our honeymoon in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. All of our friends thought it was strange we had picked such a random place to travel to, to celebrate our new life together. In truth, it was random. We both took 20 blank strips of paper, and wrote down whatever place popped into our heads ( That was the rule; We couldn't think too much into it.). We both put our ideas together into a mason jar, and Henry randomly drew a piece of paper from the Jar. Eureka Springs turned out to be the perfect place to spend our honeymoon, and we ended up taking a photograph with this psychic lady in a trench coat that we met at the park in front of the haunted Crescent Hotel. She came up in our conversations over the years a lot. I wonder if she foresaw our future, and if that is why she is only smiling with her mouth and not her eyes in the photograph. I often wonder if the town is still there, or if it has been buried beneath an avalanche of snow. Henry gave me a snow globe once, several months before he passed away. When I got the official autopsy report, I smashed the globe into smithereens on our kitchen floor, and ran to the backyard and wailed. It felt like my heart had been ripped from my chest, and the world had dropped away beneath me. I blacked out and my mom came over and found me, and then pleaded with me to come home with her and sleep on her pull-out couch that week. He had a rare form of cancer that he kept from me. I loved him so much, I was angry with him for not telling me, and for not getting the treatment he needed. We could have had children together. We could have grown old together. We could have set the world on fire. Well maybe then. How ironic, the snow-globe, now smashed to smithereens; My husband, a still frame in a photograph, and my life-a world frozen over. The past, the present, and the future all look the same. I'm farsighted, but if I sit down cross-legged on my quilt, and hold the photograph of my husband and I on our honeymoon at arms-length, I see flowers in the background; There are daffodils mostly, but tulips, yellow zinnias, and snow drops too. There is a paragraph in my tattered copy of Louisa May Alcott's 'Work' that talks about snow drops; the main protagonist, Christie, is tenderly arranging snow drops into a floral arrangement for a mother that is grieving the loss of her child. I don't miss the way things used to be in the world; the snow has a way of lighting up the places that need to be swept up, and the corners that need clearing. I do miss my husband though. Sometimes he's all I think about. I also miss those flowers in the picture, and I do believe that they are the last flowers I will ever see. I should have kept the snow globe.