snow on the tulips

It always snows at least once on the tulips
my aunt used to say...

... at least I am told she used to say that.
I'm not sure it was something she said
more than once, and that once was to my mother,
a kind of  "welcome to Utah" moment to help mom
deal with the realities of making a home in a new,
unfamiliar state and climate. The way she remembers
that maxim year to year shows just how much
she must have appreciated having family around
to help her adjust.

What I remember Aunt Denise saying was
"Seeds! Bring me back some seeds!" her eyes
alight in the dim kitchen of her Sandy home,
just weeks before I left for Italy. She wanted
real Italian tomatoes and herbs growing
in her own windowsills, an authentic Mediterranean
garden in the middle of Utah.

It sounds like a simple request, but one
I was wholly unprepared to help with
as a clueless 19-year-old, who probably couldn't
have found out how to get seeds in my hometown,
let alone a foreign country. Her quest weighed on me,
worried me for almost two years; what would she say
when I came home empty-handed?

In the final month of my mission, on a rainy,
quiet day in Livorno, in a dark library near
the cathedral, where I checked my email each week,
I learned she was no longer waiting for them,
no longer waiting for anything, and that she would
never speak to me about the seeds—about tomatoes,
basil, oregano, or even tulips—again.