Synthetic Flower Heap
Monday, January 26th, 2009
The syntehtic flowers were woven into the heaped lawn clippings and broken branches. Blooms that were full and in salient color lay in the tangled brush: purples in all different shades, yellows and greens still bright but sun-faded at the edges, and sapphire reds gnarled together and filling a gulley where the land had raised on one side. It was an absurd pile. By the autumn, the grass would decompose with a sour rotting smell with the leaves fitted together in rotted sheets. But the petals on the flowers, manufactured to perfection and shipped to mortuaries by the diesel loads, wouldn’t competely wither but instead rest there littering the gulley for another lifetime.
Each petal was sheeted plastic, made to withstand the weather at windblown backyard cemeteries like this one, but this gulley was made beautiful by surprising accident. The artist was the beaten down groundskeeper who, as far as us neighborhood kids could tell, was the only person left alive that remembered about the cemetery. He tended to it once a year – more out of nagging responsibility than love – on the day after Memorial Day. The rush hour for cemeteries. And every summer, the morning after the crowds had loaded back into their cars, circled back through the gravel lot and beyond the black steel gate, he’d come and cut the grass, empty out all of the vases and clear off the headstones and grass patches. He’d throw all of the decorations over into his big pile beyond the graveyard fence. Lying against a canvas of green or brown (if the spring had been dry and the sun especially warm for the season) would be this phony flowerbed with these vivid colors and, every so often, a grave decoration turned on its side with worlds written across like it the lettering on some unfortunate beauty pageant ribbon: “We’ll never forget you” or “Happy Birthday”. Those brought a somber mood to his creation. He worked in color and plastics, striking a balance between man-mande objects intended to last and the natural – the temporary or fleeting items that grew on the hillside where he made his piece. An art critic might interpret it differently, but to us kids who ran these hills behind the graveyard, most of whom had never stepped foot into a museum at any part of their lives, it was beautiful.
The biggest frequenters to this place were, of course, young lovers. Most would come here for privacy, but also to fulfill a sense of exploration. I always imagined that they had tired of the backseats of cars and wanted to find someplace where kisses could be sneaked without the risk of parents opening the door on them or coming down the stairs. So, inevitably, there would be a couple that would break away from the back – if they were hanging with a larger group – and they’d head off holding hands up the hillside, waist deep in weeds that were the same color and shape as summer wheat.
The treeptops acted as a roof here and a filter of sunlight. In the midafternoon, the ground there could be mistaken to move as the branches swayed in the breeze, the cracks of light dancing on the rocks and dirt. And, the lovers would lie there, on this shifting ocean of dirt, as the waves of sunshine would rock them through from gentle kissing to something much riskier.
The groundskeeper would catch them back there at the beginning of summer, before he lost the will to follow up on the place. He moved quietly, slowly about his business. He was an old man, and except for the occasional bang of trash can lids – which was accidental – he was silent. All his tools were kept in a white shack that was adjacent to a cement porch burial ceremonies were once held. The far corner of his worker’s shack was the nearest to the gulley and the heap of grass and flowers, where the lovers would grind themselves silly into the dirt. He’d catch them there, by accident, while putting some tool away or taking one out. He’d hear the unmistakable sounds of love making. There they’d be, tangled up together in the thickets and in his grumbliest voice he’d holler over the fence. He’d surprise them. Watch them at once try to pull together themselves together and their clothes back on, the whole time trying to figure out exactly what it was that was happening.
He took no pleasure in it. His sense of humor was faded as his uniform that he wore by choice, not out of obligation or a sense of duty. He was who he was and he enjoyed scaring the kids getting laid.
His other tormentors, who like the lovers really weren’t tormenting him at all, were the neighborhood children. The cemetery was built just over the hill from our middle class subdivision, where the money was only enough to pay the mortgage, not swimming pools or childcare. We had nothing better to do went school let out. We descended on the cemetery for the driveway that made a loop perfect for laps and bicycle racing. Other than an occasional speed contest or quick lap, we spent the majority of our time just outside its boundaries, under the treetops that gave them as much privacy as they wanted. Under the goliath trees – maples, oaks and cottonwoods – were hills exceptional for camping out, games of hide and seek, and war.
Camping was somewhat of a chore for a couple of reasons. First, even in the clearings, the land was thick with underbrush or, if not that, rocks. And second, these hills were once a major passageway for coal-burning freight trains, whose burned coal had been discarded along this route and had now mixed in with the topsoil. So the ground was lumpy and polluted by the hollowed shells of burned coal and plastic and lace flowers, which made it an odd, nonsensical place that somehow was so backward, it made perfect sense to its frequenters. It made sense to the lovers for its softness in those first moments spent intimately with another person. And it made sense for us, a group of boys who thought a place radiating so much color was perfect to hide from a world with adults who had forgotten how easy it was to realize the beauty in nature and other accidents.
