the garden grown, the garden remembered
There are so many things I wish I’d shared from the garden this summer. In a summer garden, each day is its own painting, the colors and forms shifting as one bloom falls away and a new one takes its place, as new leaves and tendrils emerge overnight.
In early June, my hollyhocks were beautiful, splendid even - I had nearly every color I’ve ever wanted this year - - but the rain that helped them along was ultimately their downfall, too, as they developed such bad fungal rust that I just couldn’t keep them and by July I had torn them all out and replaced them with cosmos which I transplanted from the lower garden. And so the focus shifted from the towering hollyhocks to the more subtle and delicate sweetpeas and morning glories, winding their way up the teepee trellises. By mid summer, the sweetpeas were waning, and the snapdragons and zinnias and four-o-clocks were in their element, taking the heat in stride, and attracting swarms of pollinators and grasshoppers. Nettie spent hours watching striped caterpillars slowly inch along the dill stalks, determined to discover how they made their crysallis.
I take flowers to my grandma in the nursing home every week. The first bouquets of the season were small and humble, flowers that Nettie and I had to scrounge for, and could only fill a spice jar. They grew a little each week, and now, at the height of the zinnias, she receives a very large bunch, mixed with cosmos and snapdragons and great seedheads of fennel and fragrant white phlox.
“I used to raise lots of flowers,” she always says, vaguely. She can’t remember, anymore, exactly which flowers she raised. She often asks the names of each flower I’ve brought. I show her photos of my gardens, which she has never visited. “Ohhh, isn’t that pretty?” she says. She has Nettie get out the envelope of photographs she keeps in her nightstand. In a stack of photos that spans nearly 90 years, are a few over-exposed pictures of one of her gardens, perhaps from the ‘70s or ‘80s. I can recognize zinnias, and marigolds, and if I squint and use my imagination, four-o-clocks.
There is something that I’m trying to say, but can’t articulate, and so I keep hoping that if I bring all the pieces together, I will make the connection. It has to do with the garden, with flowers, with growing and sharing flowers, with the memory of flowers. It has to do with my grandmother. And with my mom, and my daughter. But also with my neighbor down the road, who doesn’t dare step out on her back steps, for fear of falling and having to be moved to a nursing home. She raised flowers, she gave me the German iris which grow along my fence, the same irises I can remember on the altar of my childhood church. I take her flowers every few weeks, and she, too, lightly touches the blooms and asks what some of them are, and I try to tell her in a voice that is loud enough for her to hear. And it has to do with my other grandma who has been gone for almost 15 years, and who I never really knew that well, who used to fuss over a few rose plants which seemed scraggly to me, and who once brought me a single pink rose bloom in a juice glass to the house where I lived as a newlywed, and I didn’t appreciate it at the time. Didn’t understand the joy that bloom had brought her, or that she had wanted to share that joy and beauty with me.
These are the pieces - I can feel what I want to say, what I want to communicate - but I can’t write it. All I can say is that the garden, the flowers, they link us, through time and place. They are part of a collective memory - of color, of scent, of the feel of a petal on our fingertips or pressed to our lips. Like a humming moth that lights and darts from one trumpet of the four-o-clock to the next, showing itself only in motion, in shadow - I can only gesture at what it all means, how it all fits. All I know is that there were flowers once, and I grew them - you grew them - she grew them - we all did, once.
Postscript
In college, I took a poetry class. It was life-changing, in a way, because it was the first time I thought of myself as creative. It would be several years before I tried any visual art, but writing those poems opened up something for me. I realized I had stories to tell, and I’ve been trying to tell them ever since, though not so often in poetry, these days. This was the first poem I wrote for that class, our assignment was a sonnet. My sonnet is modified, with an added fifteenth line.
Mirabilis
“When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered….. the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls….. bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.” — Marcel Proust
First flower she learns to name, four o’clocks
form the border of her mother’s garden. Strange
blooms stay shut all day, finally unlock
funnel-shaped flowers as sun sinks low, change
erupting with dew in the grass. Sweetness sweeps
deep on cool breeze, flutters curtains, hovers heady,
draws from drowsy dishes hushed house half-asleep
mother and child, chattering into the blue night, giddy
trips to the garden where humming moths sink,
spin in nectar-kissed kinesis between rows.
Four o’clocks ogle the moon, gold and pink
blossoms-turned-blue that the child plucks, twirls, throws
away, silk corpses crushed underfoot. Spent
petals, perfume linger when they wake, glint
like memory of dreams, lost at the moment
of waking.
Rememory
How could we know
the blessings
which illuminated our days?
The joy too strong to feel
until it was
no longer there to disturb us.
- David Whyte
from "Letting Go," Everything is Waiting for You
Humans aren't much good at living in the present, and though I know doing so would make me a happier, more content person, most of the time, I fail. Oddly, sometimes viewing an image in retrospect gives me more joy than I remember experiencing the moment it was taken.
My Christmas gift to myself this past year was to go through all our photos taken since Nettie was born and order prints for albums and framing. Outside of ordering a few prints for the grandparents here and there, we had not taken the time to print any for ourselves, and didn't even have any framed photos of Nettie around the house. I knew it was going to be a big task. There were over 5000 photos on our hard drive (which I recognize is not a huge number by today's standards), and I wasn't sure how long it would take me. I started in June, and really got serious in October.
Unfortunately, the process was slowed by the fact that we chose to use a popular photo processing service that did not end up functioning well with our sometimes spotty Wi-Fi connection. So often a naptime's worth of work (that's the common currency for stay-at-home parents, right?) was lost to a few seconds of internet interruption. Seriously. As if I need MORE reasons in my life to cry during naptime.
I stayed with it, though, weeding through months and months worth of images, and in early December I placed an order for over 1200 prints. I was so relieved. About a week later they arrived, and I excitedly opened the first envelope. Hmmm. I opened the next envelope. Mmmmm. And the next. Huh-uhh. The fourth and fifth and twelfth. Noooooo. I had chronologically uploaded the photos, and in the cart, they appeared that way, but in the printing process, presumably because our camera re-uses photo numbers each time we delete the old photos, the prints had been re-ordered, all the months mixed. Disappointed is not a big enough word, but then again, I realize this isn't an actual tragedy. So let's stick with disappointment and I'll keep trying to be big about this.
I had pictured myself leisurely spread out on the rug, watching Pride and Prejudice or Little Women, something familiar and comforting, as I brainlessly slipped photos into pockets and wrote cute little captions. Oh mama, bury that idea. Along with the dreams of 7:30 bedtime and "mommy and me" yoga sessions and "fun and easy" toddler art projects. So I shut the photos up in a cupboard and didn't look at them for a month.
I pulled them out a few days ago. Net was safely out of the house for a few hours so I dug in. Photos were spread across and stacked in piles covering the 8 by 10 rug, where I hunched over them with burning eyes, trying to make sense of things. I did not have the heart to start a movie. I just sat in the semi-dark, frantically sifting through the mess. Sadly, I discovered that along with being completely scrambled, I was missing many photos from the first six months, which must not have uploaded completely during one of my interrupted sessions. Back into the cupboard went the photos.
The fun part of this story is that I DID get some photos in frames, and put them up in our upstairs hall, where I've long wanted to create a family photo wall. I'm so pleased with it and Nettie really enjoys seeing and talking about all the pictures. And the photo saga has given me a lot of incentive to keep up with our images as we empty the camera so that I NEVER HAVE TO DO THIS AGAIN.
It also got me thinking about memory. I heard a while back that many of our memories, especially childhood memories, are invented through photos. As in, we don't actually have an independent memory of some events; instead, we invent a memory to correspond to a photograph. Usually we don't do this knowingly. It's just something our brains do. You can read more about this "fake memory" here. In the same vein, seeing photos reinforces our (actual) memories because it triggers the same neurons that were involved in creating the experience captured in the photo. So photos are so valuable in preserving memories.
The last two years have often felt very hard. But the photos we have say differently. They show me that nearly every day since Nettie was born, we have documented smiles and laughter, and countless times, pure joy. I can't change the past two years, but I can shape my memory of them. I can choose to revisit some of the best moments. I see them every morning as soon as I get up and before I go to bed at night, and they remind me to be grateful for what I've been given.
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