Easter Ivy

It's used as an afterthought, fattening festive arrangements for Mother's Day, Easter, someone's birthday. An underrated vine, enhancing center-stage flowers whose star-power doesn't wear well. It's the "coming attraction" that's there after the clapping dies down, replanted by doorstep or gravestone. "Grow," I say, "Change my life with your traveling beauty, your common denominator, your scrawling signature seldom sought for autographs. Snaking around graves at our family plot, it's an ongoing gift, out-giving the giver with its "overwhelming darkness", reminding us where there is life, there is also death. Surviving, thriving in hanging pots the less hardy exit, it surprises and delights, reaching down from limbs of trees for soil, unchallenged there in pine straw until tender tendrils insinuate their way to daylight through tapestries of needles When the ivy becomes dense, I will know you are there: ivy of my heart, ivy of essence, the graceful way it swings and sways, how it takes to new habitat in the way you, Julie, cut a swath through New York City after lifetimes in the easy South. We are old souls, older than the hedera, cousin to ginseng, reminder of the movement of the heavens, the ability to bring things together. You were shelter, the poets' headpiece, bringing peace to my household. Resurrection and rebirth, Julie, in this Easter of ivy.