The Seasons of Her Grief

A sci-fi story of a woman’s grief and a rare flower as a portal to another world

After Gabriella’s husband died, she tended to her garden through those long drawn out days.

She made sure the tomatoes ripened, and the large purple grapes in their vineyard, known as the Bellissima Vineyard, would be ready to be shipped to their neighbor's vinification mill. A place her husband, Francesco Mancini, had started for her and then later sold to a family friend Giovanni De Palo— an older man whose white hair swayed like cotton in the wind.

Gabriella sat in that garden, thinking of Francesco— what she had lost and, unlike these flowers, that which would never regrow again. A man of tenderness and beauty. A man she loved since they were teenagers. She pictured his chestnut eyes with flecks of green dispersed in the cosmos of his irises. If the eyes were gateways to the soul, Gabriella mused, then he had the most beautiful soul the world had ever seen. She thought of his rough hands and tanned skin from working in the fields all day. He was a lean man, tall, and muscular. He had wrinkles that ran along the edges of his forehead and mouth — his rivers of joy and tree rings of smiles. How he would dance with her, by this garden, saying “la mia, Stella.” She had always been his guiding star. Now, though, there was nobody left to guide. And she felt like driftwood drifting among the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Gabriella only cried when it rained. She did not feel like herself anymore — knowing that a family is more than the individual parts, but a garden itself, blooming and growing in unforeseeable ways. She was mother nature. Tired and alone. And when the dark came, she, too, slept on the floor near the bed. She feared losing his smell within the fabrics of the sheets. In a way, he was mummified in various places.

Was she a ghost now? Gabriella did not know. But she did feel his presence in the garden — a place he worked in so many mornings and afternoons. His beauty and goodness in the maroon lenders. And his aroma in Spring Gentians and Aster Alpinus that swayed with the winds, as if they were — like him — always in…

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