The Heirloom Garden, page 20
“Yes,” everyone says as one.
“They hold droplets of water after a rain, which glisten like diamonds against their skin, and they gather the morning dew and hold it in their leaves all day. They’re crafty creatures, but also quite elegant. I love how they bloom happy sprays of dainty yellow flowers that just shoot up and spill over like champagne.”
I continue. “Alchemilla comes from the word alchemy. In medieval times, alchemists believed that the water droplets that formed on the Lady’s Mantle leaves could turn base metals to gold. They also believed that these drops had magical powers to regain youth.”
“Let me at it!” Abby says with a laugh.
“Actually,” I start, “and I know this sounds crazy, but I sometimes drink water from its leaves.”
“Ewww,” Lily says, scrunching her face as she dries her hair. “It’s dirty water.”
“No,” I say. “It’s magical. Lady’s Mantle is known to bring peace to your heart.”
“How?” Abby asks.
I smile. “Always the engineer. I understand. I was once always the botanist. But there is a healing power to our flowers and plants, medicinally and spiritually. Do you believe that? Science is more than science?”
Abby nods. “I do.”
“I use the essence of Lady’s Mantle when I feel anxious, or helpless in this world,” I say. “Lady’s Mantle is a balm if you have difficulty loving yourself or loving others because you are wounded and hurt.”
Cory jerks his head upright and looks at me.
I pluck a leaf of Lady’s Mantle, tilt the soft, velvety leaf toward my mouth and sip its healing waters.
“Any takers?” I ask, holding up the leaf.
“Me,” Cory says.
I hand it to him, and he lifts the leaf. Golden drops of water fall into his mouth.
“You’re drinking diamonds, Daddy,” Lily says.
I smile as the sun shines directly on this man—this husband, father, soldier, child—and, indeed, he is lit in a golden light, as if illuminated from within.
“Back to work, Iris?” Cory asks.
“Back to work,” I say.
ABBY
JULY 2003
“Hello?” I call. “Where is everyone?”
“Out here!”
“Sorry I’m late,” I say, following the voices of Cory and Lily. I head toward the backyard, my work shoes clomping loudly down the wooden stairs. “Meeting went late.”
I take two steps into the backyard, and my heels sink into the wet earth. I step out of them, abandoning them there like a truck that is stuck in the mud.
Cory laughs.
“Long day?”
I walk over to him and pretend to step on the shovel sitting next to him. “Even that wouldn’t compare to the pain I’ve endured.”
Cory stands and hugs me.
“Thank you,” I say. “I needed that.
“What are you two doing?” I ask, turning my attention to Lily.
Lily has yet to turn around to greet me. She resembles one of those concrete statuaries my grandmother used to have in her front yard, a woman bent over in her garden, rear pointing straight up in the air. She has a small spade in her hands, and dirt is flying straight back from her body, like a dog happily digging a hole.
“We’re gardening, Mommy,” Lily says. “Just like Iris taught us.”
“I can see,” I say with a chuckle.
“Look at what she gave us, Mommy,” Lily says, still not bothering to turn around.
That’s when I finally see what is literally right in front of me: endless starts of plants—in pots, trays, wet clumps in paper towels, root balls with bushes attached.
“Iris?” I ask.
“Iris,” Cory says. “And look what else she gave us.”
Cory bends down and pulls an envelope from one of the cardboard boxes containing plants. “It’s a photo of what her grandmother’s garden used to look like.”
“That’s our house?” I ask, my voice rising enough for Lily to finally turn around and look at me. I look at the picture for a long time and then around our moribund yard.
“Doesn’t even look like the same place, does it?”
I shake my head.
“Iris gave us starts from her garden that actually started here, in her grandma’s garden,” Cory continues. “I’m going to try and plant each one in the exact same spot as the original. Everything’s coming full circle.”
“That’s a lot of work,” I say. “I knew you enjoyed gardening back in the day, but what spurred all this enthusiasm?”
Cory looks at the photo again and then at me. His gaze is so intense that it makes me shift my feet.
“Gardening makes me feel—” Cory stops, searching for the right word “—better.” He puts the photo back in the envelope, sets it in the cardboard box and stands again, holding a clump of Lady’s Mantle. He stares at the plant as he continues. “Better husband, better father, better person, better man...” He looks at me. “Better.
“Remember when Dr. Trafman asked if there was something I could do to keep my mind and body sharp?” he continues. “This is immediately what came to me. As if I already knew. I am feeling better, Abby.”
Without warning, my heart rises into my throat. “I can see that,” I say. “And that makes all of us better.”
“Lady’s Mantle,” Cory says as if to himself, looking at the clump he’s holding. “Men are outwardly strong. We speak loudly. We pound our chests. We feel we are the warriors of the world. But women are truly the strong ones.” He looks at me. “The ones who stand in the rain and never complain.”
“Cory,” I start.
“Women are just like this plant,” he says. “Look at the leaves still holding the dew they collected in the morning.”
“When did you become such a poet?” I ask.
“Always have been,” he says. “I just never showed it. Didn’t think I was supposed to. But that’s why you fell in love with me, isn’t it? You always knew it was there.”
This time tears well in my eyes. “I did,” I say. “And it always has been. It just got hidden for a while.”
“Women have reserves of strength,” Cory says, tipping the Lady’s Mantle so the drops of water fall into the center of its leaves. “They hold on to them until they’re needed.” He looks at the plant again. “Such a perfect name. Lady’s Mantle.” He looks at me. “Women are queens. They deserve to wear the mantle.”
Cory leans in and kisses me, so intensely that I can feel my legs tremble.
“I love you so much, Abby,” he says. “Thank you for holding this family together without me.”
“I held this family together for you,” I say.
Cory smiles.
“I have something to tell you,” he says.
“I knew it,” I say. “You set me up for the big reveal.”
“No,” Cory says. “It’s nothing like that. It’s just...well...it’s just that I followed Iris today.”
“You what?” I ask.
“After she gave me all these plants at dawn, right after you left for work this morning, I didn’t hear her gate close. I peeked out and saw that she was walking along the edge of her fence, almost like a cat burglar. I grabbed Lily and told her we were going on a secret spy mission. We followed Iris all the way down to a little plot of land at the end of the association. It’s surrounded by a fence. We looked through the slats, and it was just this overgrown mess.”
“Mess,” Lily says, still digging in the garden.
“We were about to leave,” Cory continues, “and then we heard Iris talking.”
“To whom?”
“No one,” Cory says. “Well, someone. Her husband and daughter.”
“What?”
“I think that must have been a place of importance in her life, and still is,” Cory says. “And...”
“Oh, no,” I say. “What next?”
“She told me when we were with her yesterday that her husband’s body was never recovered,” he says. “His body is still in France...or Germany...somewhere. It was never recovered. I reached out to a friend I know in the military, and he said this was more common than imagined. Bodies were deemed nonrecoverable, and many families just wanted to move on, so the bodies remained buried overseas. But,” Cory continues, his voice rising, “they have new technology now. If we can send DNA of her husband, or anything else, then the military will keep it on file. They have a database of every soldier who never came home. Every so often, they still find bones from gravesites or from places where there was conflict.”
“Cory—” I start.
“I know, I know,” he rushes. “This sounds like a long shot or a movie, but...” Cory stops, and his eyes are filled with emotion. “She needs closure, Abby. She’s an old woman. She deserves to know what happened.” Cory looks at the Lady’s Mantle and at Lily digging in the dirt. “She’s helping me have a little closure, and I feel I need to help her have a little. I couldn’t save Todd...”
“You can’t save her, either, Cory.”
“I know. I don’t think she needs saving. I just want her family to be with her. Like mine is with me.”
My hulk of a husband dissolves into tears, and I hold him.
“You’re a good man, Cory.”
“You’re a good woman, Abby.”
“This is starting to sound like an episode of The Waltons,” I laugh.
Cory laughs, too, his body shaking mine as he does. “You are an old soul, Abby Peterson.”
I take the plant from my husband’s hands and look at it. As I do, one of his tears falls directly into the cupped leaf of the Lady’s Mantle. It looks like a magical crystal.
“So are you,” I say. “So are you.”
PART NINE
SURPRISE LILIES
“In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.”
—Alice Walker
IRIS
AUGUST 2003
“Hold on, hold on. Just be patient.”
Hummingbirds dive around me like fighter pilots. I dangle a feeder off a shepherd’s hook hanging from a gable on my screened porch, and then return with another, which I hang from my redbud tree. I watch the glorious creatures zip and zoom around the feeders, most waiting patiently for each other, although one iridescent green creature hides in the branches and chases off the others as they approach. I turn to the feeder on the screened porch and watch as the tiny birds hover around the feeder and insert their long beaks deep into the faux flowers that encircle it.
“My father’s recipe,” I tell them. “Enjoy.”
I was—how old?—when my dad taught me to whisk together a half cup of sugar with two cups of warm water. So simple yet so magical.
“Drink up,” I say. “You’ll need the energy today.”
It is hot today, the temperature supposed to reach ninety degrees. The sun doesn’t really shine on days like this; it blares in the sky like a searchlight, its rays seeming to melt into the hazy sky like a cracked egg.
The dog days of summer, my grandma always called August days like this, when Midnight would crawl under the front porch or sneak deep into the hydrangeas and dig a cool hole in the earth.
I return to the kitchen and head back outside again, this time holding a jar of jelly and a halved orange. I’ve been getting orioles of late—Oh, and what a sight to see with their flaming orange bellies!—and I want them to remember me for next year. I scoop some grape jelly into my jelly feeders and push orange halves into nails over the sweet jelly.
“Everyone likes sugar,” I say.
Despite the heat, the world smells sweet, and I lift my nose and sniff the air just like Midnight used to do. I cannot discern if it’s the jelly and oranges I’m smelling or if a neighbor is baking a sweet treat for summer guests this morning, but it’s a familiar, comforting scent.
I turn and yelp with excitement when I finally realize what’s scattered before me.
“Surprise!” I cry.
Surprise lilies have sprung up overnight, as they always do, without any warning. Six to eight blush-pink funnels of flowers spring from the ends of completely naked green stems that rise two feet from the earth. In my very orderly gardens and tidy greenhouse, my surprise lilies are true surprises.
Mother Nature’s version of a whoopee cushion.
They spring up randomly throughout my yard and gardens, and I forget every single year about them and their whereabouts until they jump from the earth in late summer to yell “Surprise!” like hidden guests at a birthday party.
Gardeners have a lot of names for surprise lilies, all of which seem perfectly well suited: magic lily, pink flamingo flower, resurrection lily and Shirley’s favorite, “nekkid” lady. “Looks just like me when I get out of the shower,” she used to say. “An unsightly body holding up quite a pretty face.”
Surprise lilies are, indeed, odd creatures. Their leaves appear in fall, live throughout the winter, die in early summer when everything else has come alive before flowering—surprise!—in August.
My grandma compared the annual growth of surprise lilies to cantankerous relatives at the holidays who would show up at different times to avoid one another. And they lived that way, too, almost refusing to be anywhere near the other.
Most gardeners move their surprise lilies to their gardens so they grow together in prettier clumps rather than sporadic blooms scattered randomly throughout their yard, but I refuse to move mine.
Too many memories.
I walk over to a surprise lily growing in the middle of my yard.
“Hi, Blanche,” I say.
Blanche was my great-aunt—my grandma’s sister—and she was as bright and unpredictable as these lilies. She painted bright red rouge on her cheeks, dyed her hair chestnut brown, wore bright scarves and palazzo pants and was once a showgirl in Las Vegas. She would breeze into town every August—to escape the Vegas summers—with stories about Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin that would send shivers down my spine. She would drink Manhattans and watch my grandma garden, and every time she was in town, the surprise lilies would bloom overnight as if they were waiting for her arrival.
“Be just like these lilies,” she would tell me. “Be different, unexpected, a surprise to folks.”
I walk to another surprise lily. “Hi, Cousin Doris,” I say.
Doris hybridized her own surprise lilies—she was the first person to teach me that you could cross flowers—and we would plant them all over our yards, much to my mom and grandma’s chagrin. They still remind me of her generosity.
I walk to the front yard and am suddenly overwhelmed by emotion at the surprise lilies popping up like moles in various spots throughout the grass.
“Hi, Daddy,” I say.
My dad did not garden. In fact, if he had his preference, the yard would have been only grass so he could easily push the mower back and forth in straight lines, rather than zigzagging around trees and flowers, and trimming around endless borders.
But he loved surprise lilies, even though they took even more effort to mow around. My dad’s parents were farmers in Illinois. Long after they passed, he took us on a summer vacation to Chicago, first driving into central Illinois to visit the old homestead where he grew up. When he pulled up, there was no longer a barn, a farmhouse or cornfield. Everything had been demolished, and a gas station with a restaurant attached to it had been built in its place. He was devastated.
“Let’s go, Bill,” my mom said.
He was about to get back in the sedan, when he stopped to look one last time as if to set a memory in his head.
“Look,” he said. “They’re still here.”
My father rarely got emotional, but his voice sounded like that of a little boy’s.
“What is it, Bill?” my mom asked.
He pointed to a field adjoining that gas station. Surprise lilies popped up everywhere.
The sight of those lilies caused my father to bend over and sob. “My mom’s resurrection lilies,” he said. “Still standing. Still pointing to heaven.”
That day in Illinois, we dug up as many surprise lilies from that field as we could, plopped them in big cups we got from the restaurant and kept them alive until we got home, where my dad planted them in various spots around the yard. They survived storms and construction.
I kneel down and touch a surprise lily that my father planted, which came from his homestead. I hold it to my nose. A flower filled with history.
I actually hated surprise lilies as a girl as they were the first tangible sign that summer was ending and school would soon be starting.
A hummingbird zips over my head, reminding me in a not-so-subtle way that I have yet to fill the feeders in the front yard. I stand, grab two more feeders and head around to the screened porch. As the door bangs shut, the bell tinkling, I stop and turn.
I wonder, I think.
I look into Abby and Cory’s yard from my porch, which is angled so I can see a slice of their lawn over my fence and shrubs.
“Surprise!” I yell, tickled that the lilies are still there, my voice so high and excited that it, too, surprises me.
I turn toward the kitchen when I hear, “How did you know?”
What in the world?
“How did you know today was Lily’s birthday?” Abby yells. “Are you a mind reader?”
For a moment I am too stunned to speak. And then I realize I just yelled, “Surprise!” It’s a sign, Iris, you old fool.
At that moment a hummingbird—a male with a ruby-red throat—zips in front of the porch and stops. The bird is perfectly still, save for its wings, which are moving at the speed of light. The hummingbird looks me directly in the eye. I tilt my head. It tilts its head. I know it does not want food because the feeders are full. I know why my visitor is here.
