I grew up with them in the yard. No real garden, they were just always there. Got mowed over, bloomed, mowed, bloomed, all through my youth. When my older brother passed, we put purple iris on his baby blue casket. I remember the day, what I wore. The surreal distance engulfing a soon to be sixteen-year marriage. The minutest things. But I can’t recall his age, He was thirty— and I was thirty—. It’s been nineteen years and twenty-one days.
Out the window I see purple iris in my yard, abundant.
