I.
The first words I heard my father speak were the way his hands smelled of plants, and the way plants smelled of his hands. The acrid tang of fertilizer balls and the stinging stains of mulch splinters around cuticle and nail were an original vocabulary like the sound of his voice singing, the way he walked ahead of me on a mountain trail, the way the tendons in his hands moved when he slid a barred F up the neck of the guitar to show me how. I learned those languages long before syllables and phonemes rubbed my mouth raw, popping like cherry tomatoes fresh off their bitter-haired vines.
II.
Scott Pruitt is the head of the EPA, he said over the uncertain connection in my backyard, when I called to ask about a garden pest. I don’t know why I bothered to drive a stick shift all those years. Diatomaceous earth is supposed to work, but I’ve never had any luck with it.
III.
It felt inevitable that The Big Surgery wasn’t his heart but something closer to the heart of him, a whiff of pine lodged between olfactory nerve and brain, a fungus you meet by sitting too long under the pine trees on the mountain trails, sap clinging to your knuckles as you unpuzzle the fallen bark of a Ponderosa. The hospital smelled, as hospitals do, of fake pine, the memory of pine, a description of pine by someone who hated trees.
IV.
I move soil around young plants with gloves on, listening to radio-show echoes of his voice reminding old women who go among their gardenias and roses on soft kneelers that you gotta get your hands down in that dirt, really dig in there, feel that dirt. Mulch splinters work their way past the wrists of my gloves and in, prickling my unfilial hands.