0036 Hanging Garden

The pink geraniums hanging in their plastic terracotta bowl twist gently to and fro in the slight breeze as if they’re quietly impatient for my attention. It’s their third year up there – I never expected them to last more than a year, but half exposed, half sheltering under what’s less a porch than an architectural feature, they’ve decided to make a go of it this week in late July moving into August, they’re into their later style of flowering – not the profundity of early summer when they decide exactly when to burst upon the world petal to petal in a huge bouquet but delicately, translucent, both flower and small leaves, letting the sky pass through as if they know all about colour slides and simply, do it better. after their first burst of flower, they retired into themselves as if they were exhausted – although I never asked that of them; while my respect for them grows year by year sometimes I think I ought to feed them like proper gardeners do, since they don’t have much soil up there and that’s fed them for three years now but then I think, no, that’s asking more of them than they, abundantly, do so I’ll settle for what they want to offer me we seem to know each other’s there, but sometimes they call unexpectedly like today, when I’m not busy with something else, and when I give them full attention as if I’m asking them deep questions which I’ve never formulated for myself yet which they’re prepared to answer, they pour out information about what I’d call God’s glorious Creation (what they call it, if they need to call it anything, gives the mind pause) in a list which, as they speak it, quality by quality, gift after gift, invention after invention, seems no is, as endless as humility