Obachan

The dirt is red, and it smells as if it has melted before. I heard it has changed since I’ve been there last. I heard that chains froth now in places where I remember small paths where only her feet could pass and the feet of children. She wore cheap flip-flops I might have also, I don’t remember the soles are too thin. The ground is hard and plants are deliberate. They grow in pots. Tubs dry in the sun buckets, sun-bleached, brittle cotton on clotheslines. She wove the floor of her garden from the least austere icon paintings taken from orthodox churches. There are places in Jerusalem less bright now. Jesus’ forehead served as stepping stone his eyes, born mild, bloom occasionally blue but mostly brown in fadeless egg tempera pigments. She could have saved it, her garden, if those saints were to form a wall, something holy, iconostasis, rather than squat fruit trees. But maybe there was a reason her trees only bore inedible fruit. The Filipinos next door grew pineapples. I think she died in her bedroom I don’t know if she ever left the island if she ever left the garden that had never known overgrowth that had never known winter. Beyond the fence, by the shed, piebald cows graze remaining patches of frontier dot the field like dandruff most tourists would call Kaua’i a woman. I don’t know how islands can be so empty.