Sand in My Eyes, page 29
You’re probably wondering, Anna, what that has to do with your children going off to school. Well, like the walking iris, as children step out into the world, so does their mother. A mother stays attached to her children by way of her heart, soul, and mind, as they go off, rooting lives of their own.
I thought I’d leave this for you, because I forgot when I saw you yesterday at the post office that I had some appointments in town today. If I’m not too tired when I get home, I’ll stop by with a copy of one of the letters from my mother. Hope you enjoy your first day all to yourself, no kids.
I went into my house, made myself a cup of tea, and sat down at the kitchen table, but there was a silence to my house that made me nervous, the kind one hears at a circus during the trapeze act, and I found it hard to focus. My own voice was coming through loud and clear, and I found it disturbing that all it was telling me was that I should be cleaning, washing floors, folding laundry, and finding a new job. Because I didn’t feel like hearing all of that, I got up from the kitchen table and went over to my neighbor’s yard with my cup of tea. And, because I knew she wouldn’t mind, I sat down on the stone bench amidst all the flowers. There I sat, doing nothing, thinking hardly anything, but looking with my eyes and smelling with my nose and getting up every so often to touch with my fingers the beauty of her flowers, the beauty of my life.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
BELVEDERE
I KEPT WATCHING OUT my window the rest of that day, hoping to see you in your garden,” I told Fedelina when I came to the end of all I had written in my novel so far and closed its pages. “I wanted to thank you for the plant.”
“I know,” she said.
“I knocked and knocked at your door the next day. I swear, I even looked in your windows,” I went on. “I figured you left, went on a trip.”
“It’s okay, Anna, forgive yourself.”
I turned my face from her and tried focusing on all the butterflies, but I was crying now and couldn’t hide it. “Forgive me. I’m sorry I didn’t help you. I didn’t think, didn’t know! I didn’t know until weeks later, when your daughters came to pack your boxes. That’s when I found out what happened.”
“Diabetic shock,” she said. “A stroke, too.”
“I would have come to see you,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I would have come to the hospital, had I known.”
“I know,” she said. “But I was in poor condition, and before I knew it my children had me transferred up north.”
“You didn’t want to go back north.”
“No, but the best time to move an established rose is when the rose is dormant,” she said. “And it was more convenient to have me in their neck of the woods. They were busy with jobs, had their own lives. It was best for them.”
“But you loved your life, your garden.”
“Yes,” she said, “which only proved what I already knew, what you and I talked about, that no stage of life lasts forever. It’s all a big metamorphosis.”
“I see what you mean. The best stage for me was when my children were little. At least then I knew they were coming home from school each day. Back to what we were talking about before, I’m lucky now if they come home for spring break!” I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. “I know I need to start doing things for myself, but it’s hard. I’m not crazy about the stage I’m currently in.”
“You’re in a transition stage, like a pupa, suspended under a branch, hidden in leaves or buried underground,” she said.
“That’s exactly how I feel, and I’m ready to get out, move on to a new phase,” I confessed.
“And you will.”
“I hope,” I said.
“You will!”
“I don’t know. I’ve been stuck in this rut since Marjorie left for college.”
“Oh, it can last a few weeks, months, even longer, but keep in mind, if you’ve ever watched a butterfly work its way out of a cocoon, you’d know it’s a real struggle. It has to be. It’s the struggle that pumps blood into its wings so it can fly. Did I tell you what I did the first morning alone in my house after my youngest left home?”
“No.”
“I sat in my pajamas at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and reading the paper, drinking coffee, and wondering, is this it? Is this all that is left to life? And then,” she said, “I became a certified master gardener!”
“You became a master gardener? Just like that?”
“Well, nothing is as easy as it sounds. I took an intensive training program. I learned everything about botany, soils, vegetable gardening, annual and perennial flowers, insects, diseases, and weed control. Whoever thought, after raising seven children, that I’d then spend several years planting and maintaining public gardens?”
“How rewarding.”
“Oh, it was. I made horticulture presentations to civic and garden clubs, and helped with community beautification projects.”
“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. “I did not know you were a master gardener.”
She laughed. “So when, Anna, are you going to start doing what a mother of grown children does?”
“I don’t know. What does she do?”
“She looks around at the garden she is in, which, by the way, is usually overgrown. Then she goes about creating a master plan for a new garden, something more suitable to her liking.”
“I don’t know for sure what I like,” I said.
“You’ve got to ask yourself a simple question.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Not, who am I?”
“No,” she laughed. “But what do you want?”
“What do I want?”
She nodded.
“And then what?”
“Then you put your gardening gloves on, and get down in that dirt and dig.”
“Dig?”
“For the dreams you once had, the ones you buried.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“Nothing is easy,” she said. “And let me warn you. Once you start, you’ll probably find yourself pulling weeds—all those things keeping you down, hindering your joy. And you might come across worms and pests and layers of memories, as well as dried-up stuff that you never intended to let dry up.”
“Nice,” I said. “And then what?”
“Then you pray,” she said. “Don’t forget to pray.”
If she weren’t so frail-looking, if her eyes weren’t starting to close like she were falling asleep, I would have jumped into her arms and given her a hug, for her tidbits on life—hers and her mother’s—had been what helped me through, before and now. That was the reason, one of the reasons, I had come all this way to see her.
“I want to find closure,” I said then. “I’ve been working on this same doggone manuscript all these years, tweaking here, adding layers there, and voilà, this is it—all I’ve got to show after all these years of toiling.”
“Yes, there comes a time when you must declare yourself done.”
“You have no idea,” I told her.
She looked at me oddly. “But it’s inspired by real-life events, like your knowing me.”
“That’s true,” I said, worried by her reply. Her not liking it, opposing it, would have me crawling out of here on my knees.
“What are your intentions for this book?”
“Well, I was thinking it might be a book others would like to read, so I was going to send it out into the world, find an agent.”
“And what will you do if it’s wildly accepted?”
“I don’t know, build a mansion by the sea and live in it, then write another.”
“And what if it gets rejected?”
“Burn it,” I said, “and spread its ashes out over the Gulf of Mexico, vowing never to write again. But don’t worry—after a period of mourning, I’ll move on. There’s got to be other things I could try, like painting, or learning the piano. I’ve always wanted to play the piano. I could move into a town house and buy one of those ten-dollar battery-operated pianos for children that I see all the time at the drugstores.” I stopped there.
“Anna,” she said, “will you ask the nurses to bring me back to my room now?”
“Of course,” I told her. When we got back, I went to her window with nothing but cornfields outside and closed the blinds, thinking to myself how gloomy it all looked.
“Open them,” she insisted.
“You like them open?”
“I love them open. I love that view,” she said.
“What do you like about it?”
“I look out at all that land,” she said, “and think of the stages of growth, the cycles of life. Fall, even winter, serves its vital purpose.”
I opened the blinds and looked back out, trying to see things differently, the way she saw them. And when I came back to my chair and sat down, she said to me, “I see the vulnerable state you’re in, Anna. You’ve toiled, you’ve sweated, you moved onward with this story despite your fatigue and insecurities, and you did all this because you were led by blind faith. You are a writer. You wrote a story,” she went on. “But it’s a story about me! At least, a large chunk of it is about me!”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“I don’t mind that it’s about me, but nowhere in the story do you mention what I think is the most powerful thing a mother can do for her children—and I remember saying it to you when you asked one day whether I had any secrets regarding motherhood and marriage.”
“In my book, I said you claimed you didn’t have secrets or advice, but you did.”
“Yes,” she said. “And if you’re going to use me as a character, I hope you’ll include it somewhere.”
“Okay,” I said, reaching for my pen, touching it to the paper. “I’m ready. What is the one thing a mother, a woman, can do?”
“Pray,” she said. “I prayed and prayed, and still pray today, for each and every one of my children. Why do you think I spent so much time in my garden? It was the place that brought me closer to God. And it made me want to pray!”
“I see what you’re saying,” I told her. “But I didn’t mean for it to be a book on spirituality. It’s supposed to be about the stages of life.”
“It’s your book,” she said. “You do what you like. But if you use my name, put it in! I think adding a spiritual side will only make it better—breathe life into it—but you’re the writer, not me. What do I know? All I know is there’s a butterfly on your head—a monarch.”
“Is there?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there’s one on your stomach,” I said, pointing. We watched it until it flew away, and then she said, “Are you ready for the other thing I see missing from your story?”
“There’s more?”
“Yes,” she said, pulling a piece of paper from the side of her bed. “This is the other letter from my mother, the one I was going to share with you the day of my stroke. Read it to me, will you?”
“I would love to!”
“Read it to me, then catch your flight. Go home and get your story published.”
“You mean that?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Dearest Fedelina,
I look in the mirror and wonder who the old woman is staring back at me. But I know that yellowing leaves are part of the normal aging process. Days like this, when I’m mourning the vibrant colors that once were, I force myself to look up. And then I spot a cardinal sitting in a branch above me. I listen closely to its chirp. It sounds like this: “Pretty, chirp, chirp, chirp. Pretty, chirp, chirp, chirp.”
The birds sound lovely, but to tell you the truth, I miss those days when the parade came down my street, filling my yard with the sounds of bands and the clapping of hands, of children laughing and of babies not napping. Older women standing on the sidelines, watching us go by, used to yell out to me, “Those were the best years of my life! They go by fast! Enjoy,” but I was too busy keeping children in line, marching this way, heading that way, mending costumes, tidying the streets, picking up confetti and candy wrappers, to think about my children marching on ahead of me one day.
But children grow up and yards become quiet. And it’s sad when there are no reasons to roller skate, or floats to decorate, or candy to hand out, or little girls dancing about, and there is nowhere I can think of to march to, no routes to pursue, no band I can join or clap to.
I take my pen and paper and go down to the garden, where I sit like a flower stripped of her petals. How quickly it all happened, as though driven by a gust of wind—you were off and married and moved away. It’s hard going about my days with the most precious part of me—you, my daughter—off and into the world, and I see now why it is wise for a woman to have a few things going on in her life so that when petals blow off she still has other things surrounding her.
For months now, my thoughts have been going round and round like dust devils in my mind—swooshing up memories of when you were small. Not big moments, but little ones, like the morning I filled a pan with soap and water, and watched as you twirled through the yard after your first bubbles, kicking your heels in temper as they popped.
Life’s sweetest moments do pop quickly, but I have to believe, Fedelina, that there are always more waiting to be had, for us to breathe life into. My problem lately has been that I see no more bubbles heading my way, and no children to blow them toward me. Everyone tells me, “Just wait for the grandchildren to come running your way!”
Until then, I’ll force a hyacinth bulb into a glass of water and keep it by my bed. Hyacinth means “remembrance,” and they are poisonous (wear gloves when working with them). At the sight of it each morning, I’ll know that reminiscing is okay, but that living in the past can be poisonous. It’s hard not to worry, to think of you every day, and so I ask myself, what is a mother to do? I tell myself, all she can do now is pray, and so I will each and every day—it’s what a mother who loves her grown children can do.
I’ve filled every white nook and cranny of this book, written over pictures of flowers, folded and tucked stationery notes throughout. What more do I have to write or say about flowers, or life, that hasn’t already been said? I only hope one day you open this book, How to Grow Roses, and discover it is more than a book on roses, because in it your mother wrote all her crazy little inspirations about womanhood. It doesn’t contain everything about life, as I once wanted it to, but I have a hunch that one day, if you don’t already, you’ll know more than me. They say that’s what happens when daughters grow up and have little girls of their own.
Mums
P. S. Just as you fear your mother is about to rot into nothing, here I am now, out in my yard looking at the ground around me, at all the work to be done. It has been a frigid fall, and I feel winter life approaching. But there is always work to be done in one’s garden, no matter the season, and we shouldn’t let a frost line stop us. So I’ve decided to pick up my rake and clear the ground. Then plant new things. I think I’ll grow some roses. Roses grow everywhere in America.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
WHEN MY BUTTOCKS WERE sore from the stone bench I was sitting on, and I no longer felt like reading about that stage of my life—the brief and passing whirlwind I had experienced when my children were small—I closed my recently published first novel, wiped my eyes, and looked around to be sure no one was looking. I didn’t want to be one of those authors caught reading and crying over their own book. It’s why I didn’t tell them my name when I bought it earlier this morning at the island bookstore, or that I was the author, and that I was returning for a visit after all these years, to visit the stomping grounds of both the best and toughest days of my life—those days when my children were sprouting and my marriage crumbling.
Everyone has their own story to write, sing, or paint, but it had been a while since I had read mine. Now, as I fingered through the pages of my book—one I started long ago and kept tucked away all those years in my desk drawer—I was finding it hard to believe that this was the yard in which it all began, the inspiration for this story, this silly little story about flowers and an overwhelmed mother and the master gardener living next door. There was no champagne, no release party, when it first came out. I wasn’t publicity-crazed and didn’t go about setting up book signings. No one sent me flowers. And so I bought my own—roses, of course. But I had no desire for hoopla and craved neither fame nor praise, nor discussion of this book. Unless I was a Hemingway, or a Stein, or a Tolstoy, I would never be proud. Writing it brought me insight and pleasure, along with grief. Reading it would do me no good, but leave me cringing at the parts in which I could have done better—the things I could have done differently in my life. Once a book is released into the world there is no going back, no changing the things you wish you could change, no spending more time with the chapters you knew you should have spent more time with.
It’s the same as when a loved one dies. There are no last kisses to be kissed, hugs to be hugged, words to be spoken—no going back, apologizing for what once was or wasn’t. It’s why I found it hard to talk about this book, why my mind went blank when people asked me what it was about. It is hard for me to tell, even to my own children, that which is fact from that which is fiction, and hard for me to accept the truth, that Fedelina Aurelio never lived to be so old—only in my book! In real life, she had a stroke that morning, the morning I took my children to school, and shortly afterward her children moved her to Indiana, to a nursing home. I never had the opportunity to visit her the way my book describes because she died shortly thereafter.
The news of her death hit me hard and left me sad for the longest time. I did take a trip to Indiana, to visit with her daughters and tell them about the way in which their mother had inspired me. They were surprised, saying she always claimed she had no secrets with regard to raising children, marriage, or living life. Maybe she didn’t, but we agreed that she did have experience, which is where the secrets hide, waiting to be uncovered in a conversation or set free from the rubble of memories.
