Many people call this late-summer wildlflower "blazing star," but I always call it by the bontanical genus name, Liatris. It is the only wildflower that I call by its Latin name, and the reasons have to do with poverty and sadness.
Liatris blooms in late August. It is a perennial, and its energy-storing coms must have gotten a good soaking in our wet early summer, because I have never seen it thicker on the slope behind the house.
Its message is obvious: this is the last blaze of summer — enjoy it while you can. (Meanwhile, some are impatient for summer to be gone, but that is another story.)
I almost hate to see its blossoms, not only because summer is ending, but because they always take me back to the summer when I turned 36 and the bottom fell out.
M. and I had come to Cañon City, Colo., so that I could work on a friend's start-up magazine, but it failed (as most start-up magazines actually did in the pre-Web era). There we were in our 1910 smelter worker's cottage without enough money to leave town, nor any idea where to go if we did.
The mortgage payment was low, but with her working only part-time and me just selling an occasional freelance article, our finances were tighter than tight.
Our friend Hank stepped in. His family were florists in Pueblo. He had earned a master's in agronomy at Colorado State and worked for a seed company in Idaho breeding peas, but he wanted a change, so he came home and started a wholesale flower business on part of his family's little acreage on St. Charles Mesa (SE side of Pueblo).
It was pretty much a one-man operation -- including the long drives to deliver flowers down the Arksansas River and over into the San Luis Valley -- and sometimes when he had a lot of harvest and prep to do, he hired us as casual labor.
He grew commercial varieties of Liatris, taller than our wildflowers, because they made good cut flowers, with the blossoms opening over several days. Good "vase life," you might say. He always called it "Liatris," so I did too.
Things changed. I thought I was done with newspapers, but took a job at the Cañon City Daily Record that fall. It paid the bills, and overlapped partly with our seasonal job censusing owls for the Bureau of Land Management. I finished the overdue thesis and started teaching part-time, then full time, finally saying goodbye for good to journalism. M. did likewise, teaching at a community college and finding she was good at it.
Hank's marriage ended, and so did the flower business, but he too switched to community college teaching, got a doctorate, and ended up on the biology faculty at Merritt College in Oakland, Calif.
I wonder if he sees any Liatris out there, and if so, what its mental associations are. When I see them, I still get a quick gut-flinch: What am I going to do?
