Crushed Petals

I saw the lavender creeping phlox today and remembered my wild writer friend, Beth. The first time I met her, she asked me for a ride home from a party. It was about 1:00 in the morning, the misty cool streets silent as only small town streets are at that hour. When Beth suddenly screamed, "Stop!", the obedient girl I am hit the brakes, downshifted, and stopped. Seems she wanted to pick some of the phlox in the turnaround flower bed because she loved how it smelled. But she overestimated her strength (she was a wee drunk!) and pulled up the whole plant, leaving a tremendous gap in the elegant border. She jumped back into the car, now screaming, "Drive! DRIVE!". I was laughing so hard I could barely shift gears, but I somehow managed to get us out of there. The whole car smelled of fresh dirt and injured phlox.

I never looked back.

With Beth, anything and everything happened. When she moved out of town, she called me at Thanksgiving, asking me to go to her old house and see if the present residents would let me go into the basement and get her box of Christmas ornaments. This is the kind of friendship she inspired in me, because walking up to a stranger's door and making such a request is possibly one of my inner circles of hell. But I did it, and I still remember every crease and crack in the well worn cowboy boots of the young man who answered the door. (I had a hard time meeting his eyes; wouldn't you?) But he was kind, and helped me load up a huge shambles of a box that held Beth's traditions and memories. I often wonder if he remembers that encounter. How many times does a stranger show up at your door, asking for a box of Christmas ornaments left by the last tenant?

But Beth was too much for the small western Kansas school where she'd landed, and soon she'd moved back to Tallahassee to be near her sister. She called often, making me laugh with her tales of working in an office. Once I laughed so hard at a story about her adventures with a condom that I fell out of my hammock.

Beth fell ill shortly thereafter. I made plans to go see her, hoping that there was enough time. She passed 3 days before I got there, but her sister wanted me to come anyway and bring Beth's ashes back to Missouri to her children. I remember being in the rental car, driving from Tallahassee to Santa Rosa Beach to see other friends, and stopping for a rest. All at once, I was sobbing on the steering wheel, finally aware that my friend, my writing buddy, my editor, and encourager, was gone. It must have looked like a major meltdown, because for the one and only time in my life, a stranger walked up and asked me if I was all right, did I need help? I'm not even sure how I got rid of him, but he went, and I stopped crying and got back on the road.

In Santa Rosa, my friends left me on the beach to say goodbye to Beth. I wrote poems in the sand for her; I cried over the shortness of her life; I mourned over her writing that I'm sure her sister threw away. Beth taught me so much about living life; I didn't think it was fair she didn't get to live a long, long time, writing and loving and making people fall out of hammocks with her humor.

There's much more to this story (ask about the adventure of taking cremains on a plane); but the gist of it is that I came home and wrote. And wrote some more. It was the only way I knew how to remember her always, in poetry, in every pen or key stroke. There's a little bit of Beth in everything I write; if you lean in closely, you can almost smell the crushed flower petals.