May
Day
We
had our own day, ours alone.
When
I was small, a childish game. A paper basket, pasted together, filled with
pansies (my neighbor’s), left on the doorstep.
I rang the bell and ran, peeking through the fence at my mother’s
delight. “From a secret friend,” she
read aloud. “Who could it be?”
Forever,
on May Day, I sent her flowers, without fail, from New York, Paris, Orlando,
wherever work took me. Always, from a
secret friend. Then one year, she found
me. May Day. A basket full of
pansies. From California. Full circle, our love, went on and on.
Hollow,
earthbound, I watch the careless mushrooming clouds floating freely above. All
week, tears have eluded me. Eat. Work.
Sleep. Repeat. A perfectly functioning
shell of me. The doorbell chimes. A box, a spray of white orchids, with a note
in her shaky handwriting, “Happy May Day.
Love, a secret friend.” Sent the
day before she died.
Barbara
Boyle
Barbara
Boyle, after a long and colorful career creating advertising around the world,
now resides in a 300-year-old stone farmhouse in Northern Italy. She’s surrounded by orchards, vineyards and
barking deer. Her fiction has appeared
or is forthcoming in Star Island Journal and Star 82 Review.
