GONE TOMORROW

Flowers of all kinds are farmed and readily available where my wife and I once lived in the Andean Highlands. They liberally adorn the graves of the prosperous and poor alike. It is written in an Ecuadorian folk song, in fact, that when someone dies, roses fall like tears from the sky.

In this, my latest portfolio, rooted in Ecuador, are fourteen photographs of floral tributes placed in the portals of crypts, after which the flowers arranged in them have inevitably begun to wilt and fade. 

Here today, as they say, gone tomorrow.

I am writing this introduction in the United States a few days before the 2020 Presidential Election here. No matter the outcome, I fear that this country of my birth, haunted by the ghosts of history, must endure even more consternation and disruption as it struggles to reconcile its past and move forward into an uncertain future.

I have always been more curious than wise and regret that, at my age, I will, most likely, not live long enough to learn how my country’s journey ends. I take comfort, however, from the Ecuadorian Quechua, who, in their own way of dealing with similar regrets, believe that in our hearts there is a secret garden, one whose soil is made of hope. Plant a flower there, they tell us, and it will grow forever.

pbl 2020