The Persistence of Flowers

At the end of the semester, I snipped an iris at its base, the luminous purple petals reminding me of our history as resilient people in diverse places. During my closing online class, I showed the students a vase of flowers, which my daughter and I had arranged on the wrought-iron table on my deck. Maybe I was subconsciously using perennials that return each year as some obvious metaphor for persistence as they peered at me from their childhood homes in California, Texas, South Carolina, and Maine.