Late summer provides Asian pears sliced, walnuts, a blueberry vinegar drizzle; you add teardrop
tomatoes and nasturtium petals, fresh picked, to bowtie pasta, salad elevated to entree. There’s
French Durango when September enters October, when miniature sunflowers, before being
found by squirrels, stoop with the weight of seed. On a January Sunday, cauliflower soup,
seasoned with saffron, bubbles after a snowy walk; there’s the beeswax candles lit, the phone
tree message that school’s already been cancelled. Then the finches return, rejoicing over
coneflowers left to overwinter: perickory; potato chip, Lay’s classic. It’s the realization the
neighbors like dandelions, detest RoundUp. It’s the fading bruise on the temple when you just
missed your eye. The seed packets promising crooknecks curving unto themselves. Always, it’s
Grandma’s checkered napkins now used as dust cloths, the sun becoming sand on a Beach Boys
album.
CJ Giroux teaches English at the college level and is a lifelong resident of Michigan. His most recent chapbook is Sheltered in Place.