I wonder, quite often, actually, if I think too much about flowers. The ability to have a little yard where I work and plant (and sometimes sit and dream about bigger and grander gardens in true American style) seems like a way of hiding, a way of slipping unconsciously into a state of ignorance about the world outside of my own yard, which I ought to resist.

But the fact is that from the moment when the first green starts to show through the dead grass of the previous year, all thinking, pondering, reasoning, and connecting of any kind takes place through the filter of the outdoors.

I track mud everywhere.

And so I defend my decision to bring the hibiscus into this text, because it is there, whether or not it is supposed to be. The Gardener's Encyclopedia and that clump of purple crocus flowers that comes up under the maple tree are as present in this text as the events at Columbine High School and the texts of Patricia Williams and Ruth Frankenberg.

Much later in the summer than the original idea for this text, some of my neighbors said to me, "Oh, we've enjoyed looking at your flowers this summer, especially the big pink-and-white ones."

As all of these things fire through my synapses in their recursive way, they are bound to bump up against one another continually, so that I am forced to ask myself, "what do these things have in common?" I am both pained and refreshed by my ability to turn serious matters into garden fodder.

An attempt at connection:

Gardens of any kind work as a metaphor for me. Not as a representational space of safety and hiding, but as a space of potential. Things are happening in the garden, whether you see them or not.

The hibiscus grows and blooms. The Japanese beetles have to be considered. (Their claim on the plant as food may usurp those of the neighbors for something nice to look at.) My efforts to discourage the beetles may effect the larger environment. There is the potential of disease here, as well as cycles of decay and renewal. The leaf blight that has infected my roses since I first put them in the ground returns every year to yellow the leaves. The bacteria causing the leaf blight has been integrated.

In this, as in other places there are no easy answers.
Yet I like being here.

My Question: Could I possibly take this feeling and displace it, move it onto my interactions in a larger social framework?

It seems worthwhile to try to build things both beautiful and useful ( as nasturtium leaves and flowers can be used for making salads) in this larger social framework. What I would like to build are relationships which seek to both accept and change.

Carolyn Guyer, in her text, "Into the Next Room," puts it this way: " It may be that the most useful and beneficial way of really knowing what the differences are is to pass through them. Not take them down, imagine they don't exist, but to experience them, which is to say, to be committed to change even as I commit change" (328).

My goal for this text, and for my larger interactions in the world outside of this text, is not to transcend issues of race but to experience them in ways that are complicated and provide multiple spaces for perspective, but also provide moments for sitting on the front steps (or watching cartoons on t.v.)