My Boat Is So Small by Ruta Sevo

Author:Ruta Sevo [Sevo, Ruta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kindle Press
Published: 2017-08-07T22:00:00+00:00

Part IV: DAYLILIES

11 FLOWER MAN

On a sunny day in early June, I borrowed one of Ayda’s backpacks and her bike. The backpack was bright yellow with white piping and turquoise streamers. It almost glowed against my forest-green fleece jacket. The bike was undersize for me, but not entirely comical. I needed to ride ten miles downhill into town and the return trip would require pedaling up to an elevation of about five hundred feet. When I got to the nearest garden center in Norrtalje, the parking area for bikes was crowded. No one locked their bikes, of course. I parked and started my adventure. I was feeling like a native, if you allowed for my auburn hair instead of the typical, Swedish blonde. If I didn’t speak, I could almost pass as a freewheeling Swede.

The summer annuals were laid out in hundreds of feet of waist-high trays. The labels were universally understandable, with Latin names and photos.

While driving around with Inge, I had seen the passion for flower gardens that tourist brochures claimed were a feature of Sweden. It was just past the blooming season for tulips, crocuses and narcissi, heading toward the season for poppies, peonies, daylilies, and irises. People in Norrtalje were voracious gardeners, as if to make up for the long, cold winters and short summers. Around the city I had seen fields full of tiny one-room wooden sheds surrounded by garden patches, clustered like city parks in the midst of neighborhoods. Inge said there were long waiting lists to sign up for a shed. Once you had one, it was an orgy of planting, watering, weeding, and nurturing. People sat beside their sheds on summer nights, contentedly watching things grow. When the cold came back in the fall, they would instead have to look at wallpaper with botanical prints, a Swedish tradition, and maybe a collection of pressed flowers.

I was on a mission and finally found the tables of perennials. I paced slowly, not aware of any pattern to the layout. At a loss, I waved at one of the women in the shop who was wearing a gray canvas apron and pink rubber gloves covered with mud. “A lily?” I asked. “Drooping tulip?” I made one arm a stem and dropped my fingers from the end of the stem.

The Swedish woman shook her head and smiled. She didn’t speak English.

I tried again, “Lily?” I said slowly. I stopped making the bizarre hand gesture.

The woman shook her head again and smiled.

“Maybe I can help?” I heard behind me. In the next aisle, I saw a tall, burly man with tousled, graying hair, in a rustic coat that was too warm for the day.

While I turned around in the narrow aisle, he went to the end of the display table and around it. “What are you looking for?” He spoke with an American, not English, accent.

“A drooping tulip,” I said, looking into his weathered face. He had blue eyes like nearly everybody else, and they looked icy against his gray hair.

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