Joshua St. Claire
Where You’re Planted
It seems like every farm in the county has the same plants that we do. A line of impossibly tall spruces. Sometimes two or three lines. Mother calls them a windbreak. Lilacs. Every house has the standard lilac color. We also have white. Once or twice my mother and I spot dark purple ones. King Alfred daffodils. We also grow white ones and poet’s narcissi (of course, at the time, I call them narcissuses). Hyacinths—not the over-bred densely flowered type but, instead, the taller, airier, and closer-to-wild ones. Reliable, ant-filled peonies, fully double, white, pink, and magenta—no singles, no yellows. Every few years, if the winter is particularly mild, we have peonies to decorate the graves on Memorial Day. This is a constant source of speculation in the house and on the phone as soon as those deep red leaves start sprouting. Ostrich ferns. We never eat the fiddleheads because we need the ferns to take to the cemetery with the peonies. Privet hedges underplanted with English ivy. Hybrid chestnuts planted after the blight came through. Black walnuts. Peach trees more for the blossoms than the fruit. Four-o’clocks. Daylilies. A grape arbor with sweet, flavorful Concord grapes and luscious, fragrant green ones that my mother says are good for wine. Wild and wily white rambler roses that grow and multiply year after year, flowering spectacularly every May. A handful of reliable hybrid roses that flower all summer, but never with the same force and fervor as the wild ramblers. Each has one thing in common—they spring from the rich red soil under my fingernails.
filling the darkness
of our root cellar
Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka
About the Author
Joshua St. Claire is an accountant who works as a finance executive in rural Pennsylvania. His work has been published in several journals, including contemporary haibun online, Mayfly, The Heron’s Nest, and hedgerow.