returning home on Christmas day, it is cold and tonight it will freeze. The garden is barren except for the okra that juts up like punji sticks, leafless and yet continuing to produce, miraculously, okra, inedible and alien in shape.
this day extraordinary blossoms emerge. overnight a hard freeze, and I wake to check on them. they are vibrant in the morning sun bathing fragile petals in warmth. tonight another, harder, freeze. I am not sure they will make it, these hot summer plants that delight me with their insistence upon bringing forth beauty into the gray cold day.
