forget-me-nots and cardinals

Crouching, I toss mulch across the beds in swaths of brownish-red. I take care not to cover the baby growth, like seedlings, of what will next year be clouds of tiny blue and white and pink flowers. Twenty-plus years ago, Mom and I scattered my dad's ashes north of San Francisco, the city in which he was born, in a glen shaded by moss-covered trees and a creek running through the hollow, its banks massed with the same flowers. I asked my mom what kind of flowers they were. She told me they were forget-me-nots.

A few weeks ago, I spotted a couple of forget-me-nots sprouting in my neighbor Woody's yard aside his house in the soft earth near where a few years ago I had planted a couple of azaleas for him. He and my dad were similar in some ways—cleaning engines, mowing lawns, keeping things in order.

As I pulled my garden cart beside the burning bush, peering into its center I met the eye of a female cardinal, her orange beak glowing like an ember amongst a forest of green. There she sat as she did this morning and the evening before and the morning before that, her tail a stiff orange pencil poised on the edge of her nest. I saw myself in her, sitting and watching the world go by from her solitary perch. Going nowhere. Intent on her commitment. Captive. Waiting for something—anything—to disrupt or threaten the object of her vigil.