Skyway Flowers (03.01.22)

I live on the skyways of St. Paul, Minnesota, an above-the-street series of enclosed walkways, a habitat which runs through buildings, jumps across the city streets, and permits a certain separation from the bitter weather this time of year. This last week we had a cold snap, with a blustery wind channeled between the buildings, making little snow clouds skitter along. I was crossing the bridge between two industrial brown buildings when two women appeared ahead, in winter drab, chatting amiably and pulling two carts behind them, full of miracles, astonishing to the eye. Garden carts, crowded with color and life, pots of semi-tropical plants in pink and orange and yellow and deep glossy green. Kalanchoe and cyclamen to replenish the planters at one of the downtown banks. I stopped them to exclaim, although my real purpose was to extend my pleasure at this reminder of another climate, another season, and the vivid colors so absent in our northern winter landscape. The colors poured into my eyes. Then the carts rolled on and so, refreshed, did I.

The massed colors (“Widow’s Thrill”, “Fantastic Flaming Katie”) have been diminished since, confined in stainless steel planters in groups of three or four set in a patch of plastic grass, against the interior hallways and the cold marble walls of the bank. I’m glad that I saw them together in their moment of freedom. Passing, I stop at the planters and, glancing over my shoulder, finger my way past the leaves, pushing a finger into the wet soil, feeling deep. It smells like spring.