The Snowflake Gardener’s Zinnia Dreams

 

NOTE:  In Spanish, “Mal de Ojos” literally means “sickness of the eyes.”  The following new poem is a follow-up to my poem “The Snowflake Garden,” which earlier appeared on my WORDWALK blog and then in my book, The Christmas Carriage and Other Writings of the Holiday Season  (available from Amazon and also as DBC 08305 from Braille and Audio Reading Download, BARD).

 

Happily, I dedicate this poem to my writer friend Deon, whose favorite flower is the zinnia.

 

 

The Snowflake Gardener’s Zinnia Dreams

 

by Alice Jane-Marie Massa

 

 

So many, many people

ask about my Snowflake Garden.

In this Wisconsin winter of 2019,

my Snowflake Garden is quite prodigious.

However, please do not be jealous.

Working on this Wednesday

in the abundance of my Snowflake Garden,

my frozen dreams drift

to my grandmother’s summer garden,

lined with bricks set at an unusual diagonal

and filled with two varieties

of red, yellow, maroon, and orange

stalwart, precisioned zinnias–

zinnias to the east and the west of the water pump,

to the north of our family bakery,

parallel with the grocery store building of a tall two stories,

flanked by an iron fire escape.

 

Like a photograph

that never escapes my mind,

I see my Italian grandmother,

clad in her typical black and white dress,

bending her back to tend her brightly-colored flowers–

the zinnias nurtured by the Aztecs

since 1520.

 

The “Eye Sore” flower of the Aztecas,

the “Mal de Ojos” of the Spanish–

used for treating eyes–

became a treat for the eyes

as these flower seeds  traveled to Europe in 1753.

 

Thanks to Doctor Johann Gottfried Zinn,

for whom the eye’s Zinn’s membrane is named,

zinnias spread to Germany, Holland, and Italy

in the 19th century.

 

The seeds then traveled back

to North America,

in the early 1900s,

around the time

when Domenica Allice Lanzone

immigrated to America,

to my Indiana.

 

After all of these years,

Do I now know–

thanks to reading the history

of the zinnia–

why my maternal grandmother

cultivated and cared for

her garden of zinnias?

 

As I continue

to tend to my Snowflake Garden,

I wonder,

“Did she ever think of my eyes

as she treated her zinnias

with such loving care?”

 

 

Happy Gardening Dreams!

Alice and Leader Dog Willow

 

February 27, 2019, Wednesday

 

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