Sand in My Eyes, page 30
After meeting with those beautiful girls of hers, who were there beside her every morning of her brief stint at the nursing home, I returned home, eager to interweave what they told me about their nursing home experiences into my story. But when I sent it out into the world—to agents and publishers nationwide—they rejected it, one terming it the “silly little story about flowers.” It was then that I saw in my mind a tree, a barren tree, for the first time. So I went to work, adding more, layer upon layer of embellishment, starting with those letters from Cora that weren’t really from any Cora. They were from me. I thought up all the things I wanted my own daughter to know about life, and then I did historical research. Adding those letters to my story was like putting leaves on the tree. I added more things, too, like making Fedelina a master gardener. She wasn’t really, but she could have been with all the passion she had for her garden. Suddenly there were flowers in my tree. And because I wanted birds, too, lots of birds so that none would be lonely, I added to my story Fedelina’s trip to the Grand Ole Opry, and her computer class and game night, and anything else I could think of. She never did any of that. But showing her living out her life in a lonely state wasn’t how I wanted my story to go, and I wanted to believe that a person has choices in life, and that when one is lonely there are options, things they can do to pull themselves from the stagnant swamp. I stepped away from my manuscript for several months, but knew from a distance that the branches of my tree never moved and that they needed to move. I went back to work, adding more spirit and the part about prayer. It was the wind that made my story move.
And when I saw in my mind that my tree was as beautiful and full of life as it could be—when I reached the words, “The End”—I was done, and felt both happy and sad, and older, too, for having gone through all of that. A writer doesn’t only pick her themes like apples from a tree; she prepares the ground, plants, grows, harvests, nurtures, and processes those themes, too. It took a long time, and the process of writing it was hard, but I never wanted to look back one day and ask myself, Why didn’t I plant a royal poinciana?
Now, sitting on a stone bench in the yard that once belonged to my main character, and with a view of my own old yard where the children played, I opened the novel once more. Reading it was like biting into an apple from a tree I had grown myself. I had two of my own copies from the publisher somewhere at home, but the day they arrived in the mail I found it hard to open them, and never did. Doing so would only spook me, I had decided, from seeing my heart and soul poured into words. I had questioned for months whether a heart and soul are meant to become words. There was only one thing I felt sure of when the book was released, and that was my adamant opposition to the publisher when he wanted to change the title to Mrs. Aurelio’s Son Knocking at My Door or Knocking at the Door to my Soul or Letters from Cora or The Flower Letters.
If only Fedelina were still up in that old house of hers, or out here pulling all these weeds, I thought as I dropped the book in the grass, leaving it for someone else to read. Then I could walk over and ask the reader what she thought the title should have been.
There had been a subtle breeze all morning. I waited for it to pick back up again, and when it did, I let it carry me over to my old yard, and to the time in my life when I was hardly seeing all the beauty that was there. It was as if I had something in my eyes, clouding my vision. The grounds were full of memories of when my children were small. There were thorns and thistles, too, reminding me of the man who had tried dulling my colors with his betrayal, crumbling my petals with his impurity, wilting me with his forbidden act.
He said he felt remorse, said he wanted to start fresh. So for my sake, and that of my children, I stopped cursing the ground their father walked on and I forgave him for the thing he had done to me. And because my neighbor did indeed tell me one day—whether I liked hearing it or not—that women need to put more care and nurturing into the well-being of their marriages, I went to work. My husband and I went to work. We worked on everything, starting at the roots deep within ourselves, raking through the disturbed soil, fertilizing, nurturing, and caring for the ground around us. We worked until the stench was gone, the impurity raked away, and the water clear. It was when the water was clear that I felt myself loving him again, truly loving him, pure and simple. But then he did it again—pursued his pleasures once more, dulling my colors, crumbling my petals, wilting me for good with his wicked ways—and raining on my parade!
And so I left him. A mother does things for the sake of her children. I left him for my sons. I left him for my daughter. But first I loved him, and they saw this, too. Thanks to the advice from my neighbor, my children saw a mother loving a father, a wife caring for her husband—at least trying! And when he yanked at my roots once more, pulling me from the Earth, tossing me into the dirt, I waited for a breeze and found in it the energy to get back on my knees and crawl away. My children saw that, too. They saw their father, an adult, bearing the consequences of his sin. It was a lesson they needed to see so that one day they will know what not to do, and what not to let someone do to them.
And then they saw more. They saw their mother in her darkest days of dormancy. All I kept thinking while I was down was that, hopefully, my children would see that not everything in life is always going to be a beautiful blast of color. But it was also for them that I knew I would have to reemerge. It was for them that I looked up to the Lord and made sure they saw this. And then my stem emerged from the dirt and grew tall and strong, and to my own surprise my petals opened again, and my colors returned more brilliant than ever before.
I saw the marvel in my children’s eyes, and knew then what a mother is supposed to do, show her children life in all its stages and that not everything is going to be blooming at once. Sometimes it feels as if nothing is blooming or will ever bloom again. A mother can only use words to tell her children so much. It’s how she lives her life that teaches them the most.
I worked hard to support my family—did what I had to do to put food on the table—and in the very little selfish time that I had through the years, I wrote. I wrote for comfort. I wrote for pleasure. I wrote to make sense of it all. This is not the only novel I had tucked away in my drawer. There are more, several more, and it’s time now to pull them out, get them published, and write more. It’s quite common for a mother to put her own passions aside, tuck them in a drawer, but it’s my time now and writing is what I want to do.
My old house was vacant. There was a “For Rent” sign out front and no furniture in the windows. I sat down on the bottom step and pulled the letter I had been writing to Marjorie out of my purse. I was always writing a letter to Marjorie, or Thomas, or Will.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
My dear daughter,
What mother doesn’t want to teach her children everything there is to know about life? I’ve written a book, I’ve written you letters, but deep within me, I know that nothing I say or do is going to prevent or protect you from the infinite problems of life, which like waves from an ocean keep coming at you one mammoth challenge after the next. No sooner do you deal with one than you are hit by another, until one day you find yourself no longer seeing the beauty of it all. It’s as if you’re walking around with sand in your eyes.
But fueled by motherly love, here I go unfurling my most intimate wish for you, that when life does this to you, when it has you no longer seeing beauty or believing in good, that you cry out to the Lord. He is the only one, I have found, who can wash my eyes clean. And because problems are a part of living, as infinite as the grains of sand on the seashore, I find myself crying out to Him almost every day.
What more can I say, just that everything takes a certain amount of work; that if you think getting what you want in life is easy, then you may as well walk over to your neighbor’s yard and steal one of her flowers when she isn’t looking, because life isn’t easy, nor is growing a garden, but once you start recognizing the pests and learning how to control weeds, and all the other basics there are to learn, then the effort you put into your gardening becomes more pleasurable.
But, because not everything will be blooming all the time, it is my prayer for you that each and every morning of your life, and in every season, you wake to birds singing out your window. And when there are no birds, or window, that you wake up singing yourself, and when you have nothing good to sing, that your soul will sing for you, to remind you in some roundabout way that this is the day that the Lord hath made and only He can turn your bad days good, making you feel as if you’re flying above those waves on the wings of a great white heron.
And if nothing else, then, I pray that you will spot the wildflowers hidden within the weeds. Look for the wild petunias and think of them. They bloom for one morning or day, and then die. We don’t know the number of our days so, like the wild petunia, why not make each current day we do have spectacular?
It’s hard being the mother of small children, and harder the mother of teenagers, but the hardest of all is to be the mother of adult children who are no longer seeing the beauty in life. When her children are grown, a mother can only do so much. She can no longer scold or punish them, cradle them in her arms, or sing lullabies to them at bedtime. She hasn’t the power to change her children’s lives. All she can do is try not to judge, but pray and hope that she gave them when they were younger the tools needed to step out into their gardens and do their own work—to become master gardeners for their own lives!
Well, that’s all I have to say about life. It’s all I know. I’m just your mum. I look forward to our next visit, and to hearing about all that you know, too!
Love, me
CHAPTER SIXTY
WHEN I HAD NOTHING else profound to say about life, and no longer felt the need to stare up at my little house on stilts, I walked back over to Fedelina’s old yard, to the magnolia tree her son had planted in the ground twenty years earlier. The tree was now taller than the roof of the house, and as I stepped beneath its shaded canopy I nervously glanced at my watch. Any minute now I would meet up with the planter of this tree.
The thought of seeing him after all these years had me circling the trunk of the tree like a squirrel, and I didn’t know whether I would jump into his arms at the sight of him or run up the tree and hide. My children had asked me countless times since the release of my book if I ever loved anyone other than their father, but I’ve told them only what I want them to know. A mother has that right, to tweak reality, add a fictitious flair, and get creative with the stories she passes on to her children. And an author has the right to declare fiction from fact.
“It was only a week out of my entire life,” I muttered beneath my breath as I reached down and picked a daisy. “I don’t know why I’m feeling as nervous as I am.”
When I stood back up again, there he was—the man I watched through my bathroom window twenty years earlier as he planted this magnolia tree for his mother.
“Oh my goodness,” I said, smiling into his eyes, but he looked right through me as if he didn’t know me at all—and he didn’t. We had only met briefly—that time in the hallway—and then I had watched him through my window, and he had no idea I was up there. The rest was all a product of my imagination, a story I wrote the week my husband was gone, and my children, too. A story I worked on around the clock, morning, noon, and night without rest, attempting through my writing to paint a picture of the love my husband might have had for the other woman when he cheated on me. But I knew, in the end, that my husband never in his wildest dreams had such love for anyone as what I had for Liam, if only in the expectations of my mind and the longings of my heart.
“Congratulations on your book, Anna,” he said formally. “You must be proud.”
“No,” I said, and it was true. When I thought of pride, when I thought about what mattered to me most, it was my children. They were the masterpieces I helped to create, the statues I sculpted, and the gardens I nurtured and grew. “Writing brings me insight and pleasure—along with grief—but I’m not ‘proud’ of my writing, no.”
“I must say, I wiped my eyes when I saw it was dedicated to my mother,” he told me then.
“She really did inspire me,” I said. “Seeing her out there in the garden like that. And she was always so nice.”
“Did she really say all those things about flowers?” he asked me.
“Some of it, she did,” I said, my face turning red with embarrassment. “The rest I came up with on my own. I hope I don’t sound like a total whack-a-doo. But I will say your mother still inspired me. Having lived a short time next to an amazing woman, having watched her at work in her garden, did something to me.”
He looked at me strangely. “It made you want to write a novel?”
“No,” I said. “I always knew I’d write a novel, long before I met your mother. I guess seeing her out there each day got me to thinking about what I want to be doing when I’m her age.”
“And what’s that?” he asked.
“It’s hard to articulate,” I told him shyly.
“I don’t believe that,” he said. “I would think it would be easy for you to articulate. You’re an author.”
I laughed and had to look away, for his blue eyes were making it hard for me to think. But then I spotted specks of blue at my feet, and those specks of blue were as beautiful as his eyes. I felt like blowing a trumpet at the sight of them, for it was spring and there were morning glories everywhere!
“What’s wrong?” he asked me.
“Your mother did tell me something interesting about morning glories,” I said, looking up again, trying not to get distracted by the butterflies, for they, too, were attracted to the morning glories.
“What did she say?”
“She said each flower unfurls only once, has one life to live, then it closes and dies, to be quickly replaced by another.”
“I never heard her say that before,” he said. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”
I laughed, and so did he, and at the same time that I glanced down at his left hand, I think he was looking down at mine. When he saw that I had no ring on my fingers, he said, “I’ve been meaning—after reading your book—to visit the Red Mangrove Overlook. I don’t know if you have plans or not, but if you don’t, I would love some company.”
Like a little girl, I reached down and picked one of the heart-shaped leaves, feeling joy from the flowers and giving praise to the Lord for giving me my life. It didn’t take me long to know what the spirit of God was trying to tell me through those flowers, that like the morning glories, I had one life to live, and that this is my life!
I stood up again, aware that I had forgotten about the morning glories when writing my book, and that I should write another, a sequel to this book about flowers. Then again, what more can one say about flowers that hasn’t been said already? Maybe I should write one about leaves instead, starting it with sea grapes!
“I’d love to see the Red Mangrove Overlook,” I said to Liam. “Would you believe I’ve never been there?”
THE END
P.S. I do know a few things to be true about life. Not everyone is born with a green thumb. It’s why God created wildflowers. And no, I don’t believe life changes with a knock at the door. But rather, one has to open the door, or go out knocking oneself.
SAND
in MY
EYES
READER’S GUIDE
1. LIVING A LIFE ONE LOVES. According to the prologue, there is nothing a mother longs to hear more than her grown daughter living a life she loves. Do mothers hear this today or do they often hear something different from their daughters? The older Anna was worried whether she had taught her daughter “how to soar through life, so her journey is not all demanding, but breathtakingly beautiful, too.” Is this something mothers can teach their daughters? If so, in what ways?
2. PHASES OF LIFE. What stages of life does Anna go through? Do all mothers go through different sorrowful stages of transition? What helps them through these potential turning points?
3. CHALLENGES OF MOTHERHOOD. In the first chapters of the book, does Lemmon exaggerate how hard motherhood can be, or have you at times felt the way she describes? Fedelina says she has no secret to make motherhood easier. Have you heard of anything to make it easier? Do you know of any secrets?
4. THE FIERY FOREST. Anna makes frequent references to a fiery forest in her mind. What might this fiery forest represent? Have you found anything to help you from worrying at night? What suggestions do you have for people who lie awake at night fearing and thinking negative thoughts?
5. ONE WEEK TO YOURSELF. Young Anna gets a whole week to herself. Suppose you’re in the “stage of life” that Anna is in—bombarded by housework and small children. Then you’re granted one week all to yourself in your home. How would you want to spend it? Realistically, how would you spend it? How did Anna’s husband want her spending the week? How did she really spend it? Is the want for such time alone realistic? Why do women feel guilty once they get it?
6. DREAMS ON THE BACK BURNER. Anna thinks of “all the things a mother does in a day—things she doesn’t want to do but must—and walked over to my writing desk instead. It wasn’t that I did writing at the desk—I didn’t have time—but it was a writing desk nonetheless and when I cleared the clutter, a desire to create flooded my mind, and as I dusted the deep mahogany with my finger, I felt an urge from within compelling me to start.” What is something you wish you could fit into your life everyday? Why are you not doing it now? At what age do you feel you will finally start it?
