The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: All Hat, No Cattle by Mariah Rigg

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BLESSING

The green onions on the sill above my window are sprouting again. I’m sorry for eating you, I tell them. I’m sorry for not planting you in soil. Sometimes I think they understand me better than anyone in Knoxville—how it feels to be rootless without C, what it means to grow happy only when the sun is out.

The green onions on the sill above my sink are more resilient than I am. I’ve been cutting them at the base now for the past six months. Each time their roots get a little more tangled. The tips of their green stems curl like fingernails. I change their water every day so they don’t rot.

The last time I visited C in Lubbock, we made fried rice with green onions. We cut the whites first, sautéed them with red peppers and shallots. We fried shrimp, added eggs, stirred in rice and basil, sprinkled the green onions’ tips. After we’d eaten, C took me to the backyard, where we stuck the green onions’ roots in an old coffee can. I told C how, in the evenings after she left Dad, Mom used coffee grinds to fertilize our gardenias. She hoped for blooms. She never got them. We hung the can of green onions on your fence. Three days later, I went back to Knoxville, and C promised to keep our green onions alive. For a few weeks, he did.

The last green onions above my sink died because I didn’t tend to them. That was eight months ago, in my first Knoxville house. I had just moved from Oregon and was flattened by the Southern humidity. I bought those green onions to make noodles, but without C, I couldn’t. One day I came out of my bedroom and found them soft, smelling like the food that, years ago, got stuck in the holes where my wisdom teeth had once been. For weeks, I couldn’t get rid of the smell, even though I threw those green onions out.

If I leave Knoxville, which I must—the weight of this place, so far from Hawai‘i, is drowning me—the green onions on my windowsill now will have to be thrown out like the last. This is what keeps me holding on to this city: the thought of my green onions curled like a baby in their recycled jam jar. The thought of them with broken shells and drying peels at the top of some trash pile, baking in the sun.

Because me and the green onions, we’ve been through so much now. They’ve been in so much—fried with eggs in the morning, mixed into the oil-splat noodles I roll out by hand. You’re the reason I get by, I tell them. You’re my only constant. I tell them I love them because without C around, they’re the only ones that can hear me. I tell them I love them because I do. Because I can.

The green onions on the sill above my sink have given me their blessing. Be free, they tell me. Go forth, somewhere far. But when I leave—which I will—I won’t toss them. I’ll plant them outside, beside lilies and violets. Without me to cut them, they will flower, white balls of blooms that invite bees to dance. In my new city, I will buy another bunch of green onions. And when I cut them, I will think of the green onions that grew on my windowsill in Knoxville. I will spread my fingers, feel their nutrients reach through my limbs. The green onions above my windowsill have become part of me through how they’ve nourished me. And though we will no longer be together, I will be grateful for that.

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