Order and Chaos

April showers bring May flowers; at least, that’s what my postman always told me. What he always muttered bitterly as he trekked through rain, snow, and sleet, and sometimes even shine. My elementary school classmates, thinking they’re clever, would always tack “Mayflowers bring pilgrims” to the end. The point is, everything has a set order in nature. In the world. The entire universe.

Just as rain brings flowers, candy leads to cavities, eggs hatch and later grow to lay their own, the four o’ clock news gives way to the five o’ clock news, and collapsing stars bring forth supernovas. Even chaos is known to have an order. A crowd of people dissipates when tear gas is presented, bacteria swarm and grow exponentially around the most able food sources, and even the petals on my flowers I love so much grow in a logically perfect way.

This, of course, brings me to my gardens. Any second I don’t spend at the lab easily predicting results of adding this to that because chemistry follows the perfect order of the universe, I spend in my gardens. Nothing is more beautiful to me than seeing photosynthesis in action. As I take out weeds, prune dead branches, water, harvest, and read in my hammock, I am always sure that my garden is in the same perfect order. My beans always sprout before the cucumbers, and my blackberries and blueberries are always ready to eat before my apricots are.

My flowers are prized far above my vegetable patches and my fruit bushes. Though perhaps less useful, I love them so much more. My tulips are always first to blossom in the spring, and each follows a perfectly predictable order after that.

Today was my day off, so I slept in a few hours before rolling out of bed for a late breakfast for one. I do enjoy living alone; men are the one subject that doesn’t follow any seen order other than puberty, so I avoid them on every romantic stand point. After breakfast, I slipped into my favorite sun dress and my bright pink wellies and walked to my shed to fetch my hat, gloves, and tools, hanging the same place they always do.

I knew it had to be time for my primroses to be in full bloom; and sure enough, when I went to check on my multicolored bundles of primrose, they were all open and beautifully colored, as always. There, too, were my yellow daffodils and tall sprigs of muscari, and lining the front of my front most flowerbed are the dahlias. Everything just as it should…..

Dahlias?

Those aren’t due to come in for months.

After standing in shock for several moments, I ran over to check they were truly my dahlias and not a clever weed or trick of the light. But there they were, in full bloom though it is still early in spring. They weren’t playing by the rules. They chose to rebel against the set order of the universe.

So I did what I had to; I grabbed my flamethrower from its regular place at the back of the shed, and I carefully burned those dahlias down to the dust.

Even though the flames didn’t contain themselves and almost spread from my flowerbed to the neighbor’s doghouse, that, officer, is why I had to murder my dahlias.