I’m sure you have noticed this Sunday post coming at you live on a Wednesday. I have been recovering from COVID so I had to pull from the archives :) Interludes are supposed to be works of fiction, this is a little bit of a mashup…I have also opened it up for everyone, though these are usually subscriber only (so subscribe for more!!)
Mamaw hunches over the Mound, a little manmade knob set about ten yards from the front of the house, and scoops cupfuls of water from a bucket. My dahlia came up! At first I don’t recognize the name; she pronounces it dale-yuh. She points out a few spiky growths that have clawed up from the mulch. Boy it looks like a weed doesn’t it. I respect the objectivity—her flower, well tended, looks like an invasive species. Someone might pull it thinking they were doing her a service. Maybe if I stick this by them. She takes a metal lawn decoration and stabs it in by the baby dahlia. The visual effect is an impromptu game of charades. Point to red and yellow wire sculpture. Point to green stubby plant. Crouch down and then slowly rise up, extending arms as you go. Smile at the top. Denote becoming.
We are an hour and a half out from the hustle of “the city,” Louisville, Kentucky. We’re in Wax County, Cub Run. We are up at the lake, or down at camp. My mother does not come with us. She doesn’t like bugs. She is the logical, practical blueprint of the family, fastidious without fuss. Mamaw, like all grandmothers, can veer into the ridiculous. She is easy to make laugh or cry. She is adept at the silent treatment. I often think it a shame that my mother rarely sees her in this environment, where she is serene and masterful, heralding in spring with the tender study of a midwife.
Unlike the tidy suburban plot, here the rosebush is stunted from an unseasonal lack of rain. The blackberry bush is finally recovered and should drop fruit in July. The viburnum is tall but bare, blooms cut short by frost. The lilac preens purple and wafts its unmistakable scent in a haze around the property. Mamaw prunes here, introduces a new bulb there, and recognizes defeat where she must. Isn’t that the strawberry patch? I ask. Weed garden now. She answers. Something got my poor hemlock. It was dying from the inside out, so I didn’t know until it got so sparse. She caresses the ends of bald branches. She tells me she did all she could to treat it—scouring the internet for diagnoses, adding nutrients, spraying for pests. I see an enormous tree, three of me stacked, that looks a little patchy in the middle but is otherwise green. She concedes that there is new growth, but the way she shakes her head and trails her hand along the buds while walking away, it’s as if the hemlock is a child she has raised only to watch fail.
What’s this one? I ask. Bridal Veil. She answers. It is a giant bush with bouquets of little white blossoms weighing down each branch until they bow towards the ground. Good name for it. There are so many verdant women to be: are you a Bridal Veil or a Creeping Jenny, slithering in tight yellow-green coils across the ground. Are you a Burning Bush, inauspicious most of the year until bursting incarnadine in the fall, or a Bleeding Heart, small and delicate, blossoming and bleeding-out all at once in May.
The same woman who, in the city, carelessly plunges her hand into the gray waters of a clogged kitchen sink pulling up chunks of egg and gnawed cherry pits, now thrusts her hand into bird-boxes, patting the pinball heads of baby bluebirds, laughing as they nip at her fingers expecting food. Won’t the mom not come back if we touch them? I ask. That’s not true. She answers. In this moment I am so acutely aware that this is her domain—why couldn’t she change the laws of nature if she so wished.
Seventeen years ago, I planted every towering bush on the Mound with Mamaw. Even when I am away for years, I remember that there is a patient steward keeping watch, finishing what we started.
I loved this post. I've missed the last few due to the business of the dance world. I hope your feeling better. I look forward to the next one.