The Flower Girl

I saw her picking flowers again -- going from yard to yard with a small pair of children’s scissors, looking for just the right mix of colors for her bouquet. Young with a slightly Goth bent to her, she never seems to mind the fact that they don’t belong to her. She just takes her time as if she were shopping at a florist with someone else’s credit card.

She doesn’t live in the trailer park, at least not on a permanent basis. After you’ve been her as long as I have, you start to recognize just about everyone. Sometimes you run into someone you’ve never met at the spaghetti feed Sarah puts on in August, but I’ve never seen her there, nor does anyone I’ve talked to in the park know who she is either.

She seems harmless enough and quiet, though why she’s chosen our park to make these daylight flower raids I can only guess. It’s usually only once or twice a year at the most though you can see how it pisses Heather and Earl off after I tell them she’s been by. They check their little patch of garden to see what’s missing and ask me why I didn’t stop her and tell her to get the hell out of the park.

I don’t know what to say about that really. I guess because it’s more interesting to watch her, then anything else I can think of to do. I don’t think she’s all there mentally, if you know what I mean, and as I watch her do her thing I start thinking about Swearing Man, even though I’ve never heard her make a sound. There are just some days when I pick my battles with care and I wasn’t about to spoil all that sunshine getting yelled at by a crazy person with a hankering for purloined botanical arrangements. Besides, when I sit out on the stoop, she leaves our flowers alone.

In the end, she disappears behind the small stand of cedars that line the edge of the road near the bottom of the hill -- heading off down the highway toward home, or the next park, or who knows, maybe to find her lost mother’s grave and finally make amends.

Through all of this I don’t move. Ike is down for a nap and the older boy’s at a friend’s house and though the wind is a little cold, the sun more than makes up for it. I pick a spot three steps down, where I can put my feet in the grass but keep my head in the shade and spend the hour playing my guitar.

There are worse ways to spend an afternoon, Itellyouwhat…

Confronting a flower thief is just the first of many things that come to mind.

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