Story Telling

The truth is, nothing much matters to Rhododendrons.
In the experience of one Waxy Sullivan, the genus tend to have an awful lot to comment on, but truly don't care about much of anything.
Oh, sure, they will let you know if the weather is a bit out of their comfort zone. They shrivel up like over cooked sausage and drop their leaves like dramatic little starlets, heart broken at the end of the scene.
But, as Waxy came to know, they come back every year, with wry new branches needing a cutting!

In fact, a purple star trek Rhodie once gave tell of a 'dendron wide conspiracy when this little show goes on.
People might think the plants need to drop their leaves in order to conserve energy for the cold snap ahead, but oh, they are wrong.
Rhododendrons love being  nude.
Nude Rhododendrons without full, lush leaves and endless clusters of blossoms do not appeal to the human species during the growing season, but secretly indulgent, seemingly struggling nude rhodies in the winter tend to coax about a feeling of tenderness in a gardener. Come spring time, before they know it, Rhododendrons every where are snapped out of their hedonistic slumber with the warm touch of woolen gloves and cold, sharp steel.

Snip, squeak. Snip, snip-squeak, snip.She made note that her pruners needed a good oiling.
The thush of cracking dead wood and cool dry leaves made a new song of percussion each time she brought an armful of clipped Rhododendron to the wheel barrow.
The garden of the day for Waxy was on a property some hundred years civilized, on the bay of a puddle called The Willapa.
Oysterville was the place to be a gardener, it had all the necessities. Developed, mature gardens owned by financially developed, matured individuals. No business license required so long as nobody asks- think freelance with the weather. Think fifteen to thirty bucks an hour, depending on the job and tools required. Oysterville was a Rhodie mecca. Waxy finds the villagers endearing and generous, while the Rhododendrons tend to find them smug and dull.
Ever the Rhodie complaint about the lack of attention they received from their keepers.
"Generations of these movers, and ne'er a skilled or an intrested touch."
The particular Rhododendron she was working on stood so tall and broad that Waxy could crawl under it's lowest branches and be completely out of sight. Such a thing occurred to Sullivan as a daydream might fall upon an imaginative and stubbornly bored twenty some years dumb individual. She went about it in phases, incorporating long days of weeding for when she needed to be more conscious of time or when she had some social performance scheduled, as the dream of being hidden under Rhododendrons or old, droopy Cyprus  seemed to leave her all day with a craving for it. The things she once dreaded like the monotony of gardening, the loneliness of it, were now things which filled a soothing bath of metaphysical time she never wanted to leave once she 'got in'.

The noon hour became antsy to be embodied, and Waxy had to empty her wheel barrow and bit the rhodie fare well.
The cats at home were glad to be revisited by their upright walking friends and greeted Waxy and Ed with yawns and needy purrs. Ed fed them a fresh scoop of kibbles and started hungrily rummaging through the kitchen as Waxy began scrubbing the soil from under her every part, and polishing her eyes, hair and lips.
At seven minutes till noon, the two of them piled back into the old blue truck, one to the coffeeshop, the other back into the garden. With a kiss sometimes said out loud instead of administered, they parted for a time everyday at noon but never fully in thought.
Ed kept her in thoughts of his future; projects, goals, sorrow and joy.
Waxy thought in broad brush strokes, thickly sprinkled with the glitter of thoughts of Ed.

A dream given to Waxy during a slumber of tangled bones and death depicted Ed and his once upona time lover, Rose. They play acted a scene from Waxy's past when her heart's first desire sat in a pick up truck, getting licked and tickled by a flirtatious and eye grabbing young, but older than Waxy, dark mysterious woman. Ed played the part of yesterday, and Rose played the part of the delicious little snack. Ih ner dream, Waxy sat in the passenger's seat, as hidden as if she were camouflaged in shrubbery, too devastated to speak. When the two retreated into the drunken tent of animal love, Waxy's dream self walked from the truck, to the ocean and sobbed with her whole dream body, creating a tsunami of tears and whale shit, waking her to the second day of glorious sun of the whole year.
This dream clouded her cappuccinos with spongy foam, and her house brew with the acridness of over processing. 
Rose was a thing to Waxy, more close to an idea than a person.  A thing, symbolizing the life of the man she unexpectedly fell ass over tea kettle in love with in the summer of her freedom, a time capsule of what once was his life, which is very important to her, but a thing that should be buried except for some far distant predetermined date when it is dug up and remembered in the light of day. It should not be spoken to.
But it is. Rose and Ed pass messages in the darkness of cyberspace, as familiar persons in a familiar way.
When Waxy sneaked a peak at the inbox of Ed's note passing device to reassure herself that he had better things to do than keep up a double romance type-thing, she found a message from Rose so riddled with errors and abbreviated statements, she could not decipher it's meaning.
Ed had responded to it with the letter K.
So today at the coffee shop, the barista was confused, dreamily sad and felt pretty poorly about sneaking a peak at the  personal device of communication as she had. In between drab lattes and bouts of small talk, Waxy wandered the gardening section of the book shop and learned that Rhododendrons are toxic to most plants, and are known to impair the development of young begonias. She tucked the thought into her mind for morning when she would be weeding the beds  in Stanley's garden, around one particularly busy gossip of a rhododendron.