Witches’ Broom
My great-grandfather ordered a sprig of the Dr. Van Fleet rambling rose shortly after it was introduced in 1910. When my grandparents married in 1930, my grandmother brought a rooted cutting to her new home a few miles down the road. Years later, when we moved to Birmingham, my mother brought a cutting with us, and later still, I brought one to Nashville.
I don’t grow roses because of all the spraying invariably involved, but the Dr. Van Fleet is an absurdly hardy exception. For almost two decades, ours withstood countless droughts and Nashville cold snaps, needed no chemicals at all, and seemed impervious to insects. Every year it sheltered at least one cardinal’s nest, and those baby birds always made it safely into the world. (A bird’s nest built among the thorny canes of an antique rambling rose is about as predator-proof as a nest can be.)
Then my Dr. Van Fleet contracted rose rosette virus, a fatal and incurable disease. First discovered among wild roses in 1941, it is now widespread in the United States. The virus is carried on the wind by mites, and the popularity of Knock Out roses, which are particularly vulnerable to RRV, seems to have hastened its spread.
The telltale sign of this disease is the witches’ broom—stems of disfigured new growth clustered at the end of a rose cane. With a rambling rose, if you know what you’re looking for, you can sometimes see the beginnings of a classic witches’-broom formation in time to dig the diseased canes out, but I didn’t know what I was looking for the year my rose first got sick. By the next spring, when only a few canes leafed out, there was almost nothing left of the Dr. Van Fleet but thorns.
Having no choice, we cut it down and dug up as many of the roots as possible, heartsick. All my beloved elders were gone, and the rose I had hoped to pass along to my children was gone now too.
Rambling roses are easy to propagate in springtime: to create a new rosebush, you place a pot of dirt beneath a cane and set a brick on top of the cane to hold it against the soil in the pot. Beneath the brick, the rose will put down roots. After a few weeks, you can remove the brick, cut the pot free from the main cane, and carry it to a new place in the yard. A rose propagated in this way is genetically identical to the original rose. In essence, you have only one rose, though it is growing in two different places. My own Dr. Van Fleet was the very same rose my great-grandfather first planted in 1910.
The year before I lost the Dr. Van Fleet, I had started a potted rose and forgotten about it beneath the tangle of canes. When I discovered it again in cutting down the rose, I assumed it too would be afflicted with the witches’ broom. I kept it just in case I was wrong, but I set it far from any other flowers in my yard and never planted it. Still in its pot three years later, at age 107, it bloomed.
You Can’t Go Home Again
LOWER ALABAMA, 2006
My grandfather was tired of being hot in the summertime and cold in the winter. Perhaps he was getting a bit muddled, too, but in 1970 my grandmother didn’t try to stop him when he decided to sell the big house, the homeplace, where he had lived almost every year of his life. It was his house to sell if he wanted to, according to my grandmother, and he wanted to: “I have carried in wood and carried out ashes all my life, and I’m tired of it,” he said. “I’d like to get a place we can heat and cool.”
The man who bought the big house promptly sold the timber off the back acreage for more than he’d paid my grandfather for the whole place, and then he sold the house for yet again more money than he’d paid. My heartbroken mother could hardly bring herself to forgive her father, old though he was and so feeble. He had given away her family home, a safe place for the generations, and all for a cinder-block double-wide with a concrete driveway and central air.
By the time my grandmother died in 2006, she had been with my mother in Birmingham for more than ten years and blind for longer than that, and I hope she never saw the changes in the big house, though they unfolded barely half a mile down the road from the tiny house my grandfather had built for their old age. Her rose border: gone, including the Dr. Van Fleet she’d brought from her childhood home. The floorboards of the front porch: gone, replaced with a concrete slab. The gnarled old tree that grew plums swollen and almost black with juice: gone. And gone, too: all the red wasps drunk on plum juice fermenting in the Alabama sun.
We brought our grandmother back home to Lower Alabama in a box. After the church funeral, my brother and sister and I left our mother at the potluck in the old school-house where our grandmother had once taught and walked over to look at the big house. The first thing we noticed was how small it was.
Ashes, Part One
NASHVILLE, 2012
For a long time, Mom wouldn’t tell us where she kept Dad’s ashes. “That’s between your father and me,” she would say. Given her unconventional taxonomies, we knew she might have stashed them anywhere. And given her tendency toward hoarding, we also knew they would be hard to tell from detritus. Once, trying to restore order on a trip home, I found the urn in a box under the old claw-foot table. It was surrounded by mouse droppings, junk mail, outdated newspapers, and garagesale rolls of fabric that my mother had left on the dining room floor. The next time I went home, the urn was gone.
Years later, after Mom had moved to Nashville and we finally talked her into putting the Birmingham house on the market, it dawned on my sister that she might have accidentally sold the urn at our own garage sale, the one designed to unload all of Mom’s geegaws. I didn’t think it was possible, but how could we be sure? It wasn’t like we could say, “Hey, Mom, we can’t find Dad, and there’s a chance Lori just sold him to a stranger. Thoughts?”
On a road trip to Lower Alabama to bury our aunt, my sister tried again: “Don’t you think it’s time to do something about Dad’s ashes?”
“That’s none of your business,” Mom said. “I have a plan for us both, but it’s just between Daddy and me.”
My sister saw an opening: “But after you die, won’t we need to know where Dad is to make this plan work?”
Mom gave in: “OK, he’s on the bottom shelf of the guest room closet.”
“Great. Now, what’s the plan?”
“The family plot is full, but y’all can take a posthole digger down there in the middle of the night and stick me and Daddy in the ground near Mimi and Granddaddy,” she said. “I want to go home.”
Be Not Afraid
NASHVILLE, 2012
Early in their courtship, my parents knew a little girl who could not pronounce my mother’s given name, Olivia, and called her Wibby instead. Wibby became my father’s pet name for her, the shorthand he used to summon their days of flirtation. Even during hardships, times of deep worry or sorrow, there was always that echo of their early romance passing back and forth between them. Whenever he heard her laughing—even from another room, having no idea of what had amused her—he couldn’t help laughing too. After she started a floral business, he would help with the big orders by copying every move she made: if she added a daisy to the center right of her arrangement, he would add a daisy to the center right of his. When Dad brought home a midlife motorcycle, Mom bought a leather jacket and climbed on back.
During the two and a half years Dad was sick with cancer, Mom left his side only long enough to walk from their room to the kitchen for anything he thought, however fretfully, might settle his churning stomach, and when he died she was lost. Her children, her friends, her church, her flower beds, her sewing projects—none of them offered comfort in the face of cavernous grief.
She had grown up during the Depression on a peanut farm in Lower Alabama, miles from the nearest library. For the first seventy-one years of her life, she had no feeling at all for stories as a source of pleasure or solace, and I never saw her read a book. Then, months after my father died, she went to the library to check out Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice because she’d seen the BBC miniseries a dozen times already and had fallen in love with Mr. Darcy. And that’s how, overnight it seemed, she also fell in love wi
th reading. In Regency England she found an entire absorbing world, a grand love story she recognized, though she had never been to Great Britain—had, in fact, rarely left Alabama.
After that it was Emma, and Sense and Sensibility, and the rest of Austen. Then came other books from the same period and love stories from any era, until finally it was almost anything. During the nine years she lived beyond my father, Mom read comic novels and mysteries, romances and tragedies, and every knockoff Jane Austen novel she could find, no matter how scandalous with twenty-first-century details. (“I couldn’t believe it when Mr. Darcy took Elizabeth on the dining room table!” she once said.) For Mom, alone in a silent house, these characters must at times have seemed more real to her than even family. In her last years, she lived across the street from my family, and I often checked in midmorning to find her still asleep. “My book was getting so good I had to stay up all night to finish,” she would say.
Just before she died, I took her to the emergency room for what was clearly a kidney stone. She had suffered kidney stones before, and the symptoms this time were obvious, but the nurse could give her nothing for the pain until a doctor saw her, and the only doctor there that day was busy with other patients. For more than two hours, the nurse would check in, Mom would ask for pain medicine, and the nurse would apologize: no, narcotics could make certain conditions much worse, or complicate any needed surgery. “I’m not afraid of dying,” Mom told her. “I’m afraid of hurting, but I’m not afraid of dying. My husband died nine years ago, and every night I tell God I’m ready to see him again.”
Four days later, with no warning at all, she got her wish.
Stroke
NASHVILLE, 2012
Earth and air won’t cease their quarrel. Tornadoes take up their form in the Midwest, a writhing cone of soil and breath and bite.
Hurricanes shoulder and churn off the Gulf Coast, each one a gray ferocity, a roaring violence of roiling water.
Volcanic ash rises in the Philippines. Air becomes mass; dust becomes rock; the sky is raining fire, and no hissing rain will come to cool it.
The ocean floor cracks open in the Pacific, heaving waves of nausea across the surface of the sea.
A scar down the middle of the Mississippi River unzips and fills the world with livid water.
In Nashville, a brain breaks open.
In the universe, a star folds in on itself.
And God said, Let there be darkness.
Dust to Dust
NASHVILLE, 2012
She left in a state much larger than herself—two fire trucks, an ambulance, a rolling stretcher pushed by big men. The neighbors waited in their doorways to see which of us would emerge on the stretcher. I texted my friend standing quietly across the street, one arm around her older daughter: “Mom fell. Maybe a stroke. Probably not too bad—she’s still talking, and we’ll be at the hospital in plenty of time.”
Lights swirling, sirens wailing—that is how she left. She came back in a black box marked with her name and the day she died and the day they burned her body. Inside the box was a plastic bag of ashes, closed with a twist tie, like a loaf of bread.
Lexicon
NASHVILLE, 2012
Words my mother permitted me to say in childhood:
Damn.
Shit.
Fuck.
Piss.
Hell.
Words my mother did not permit me to say in childhood:
Snot.
The last words of my father’s favorite joke:
Oh, shit. I stepped in the dog doo-doo.
The first words of my father’s favorite poem:
It was Saturday evening,
The guests were all leaving,
O’Malley was closing the bar,
When he turned and he said
To the lady in red,
“Get out; you can’t stay where you are.”
The last words my mother ever spoke:
Thank you.
The last words my father ever spoke:
Stop it.
The words I spoke in the rooms where my parents were dying:
I love you.
It’s OK.
Don’t worry.
It’s OK.
I love you.
The words I couldn’t say in the rooms where my parents were dying:
Damn. Shit. Fuck. Piss. Oh, hell.
Drought
“Nothing is plumb, level, or square,” Alan Dugan writes in “Love Song: I and Thou,” a meditation on the persecutions of marriage. My own marriage is full of joy, but all day long I walk through this drought-plagued landscape thinking that nothing in the world is plumb, level, or square. Inside, wooden doors hang crooked in their frames; the hot wind blows them open. Outside, the land has tightened and contracted. To the east, forests are on fire.
The earth is cracked, constricted, a bloodless sore. Leaves that should be a hundred different colors are dusty and faded. In the garden, the soil is powder; brown stems lift from it as though they’d never had roots, as though they were formed by heat and air.
For months the land has been pulling away from the edges of the world. A day of rain weeks ago was not enough—hardly more than spit from a parched mouth. Nothing fills the cracks in the dry ground; nothing rises from the roots to hold up a flower.
Everyone is talking about the drought; everyone is worried, even in this town with a deep river running through it and all the water we can pay for only a twist of the faucet away. Every morning I drag the hose out and fill the birdbath with water. The desperate robins hardly wait for me to turn away before they crowd the edges of the shallow dish to drink and drink and drink.
Insomnia
All her tricks have failed, all the gentle seductions: the warm bath, the quiet book, the perfect sex, the cool sheets on the cool side of the bed, even the first unpanicked Benadryl and then the desperate second. She surrenders to it now, hoping only to live with it in peace, side by side, like an animal she has invited into the yard never expecting to tame. After a lifetime spent conjoined with sleep like a twin, like the truest friend, she is bereft, abandoned. So many hours in the night! She had no idea.
She will not think of the unworried man, the rebuke of his tranquil sleeping, or of their children, grown now, the ones who first taught her how to sleep lightly, tuned to the slightest infant sound. She will not think of her parents, who welcomed her between them after dreams she was too young to know were dreams. She will not think of how she misunderstood her mother’s last fall, how she felt so sure it was a simple accident, a broken hip, perhaps a little stroke, wholly reversible in that early window after the ambulance arrived. She will not think of the way she sat in the front seat of the ambulance, obedient, when she ought to have insisted on a place in the back, a place where she could hold a still but still-warm hand.
She will not think of the troubles of the ones she loves, or of her own troubles. The night is long, but the days are rushing by, gone gone surely gone, and she thinks to remember what she might otherwise forget except for the gift of this endless night. She lists to herself the names of flowers that will bring butterflies to her yard next spring, and she tries to name the New World warblers, thirty-seven in all, that rest in her honeysuckle tangles on their migratory journey, and she considers the miracle that happens when afternoon light in summer becomes the afternoon light of early fall.
At last, somewhere between the magnolia warbler and the Tennessee, she feels in the back of her neck the click that sometimes signals the first moving gear in the great machine of sleep, and she turns on her side and settles the covers, just in case.
How to Make a Birthday Cake
NASHVILLE, 2012
Remember that one of your children won’t eat buttercream icing and one won’t eat cream cheese icing and one will eat only the layers and leave every morsel of icing absolutely untouched, a giant F-shaped slice of butter and cream. On his plate it’s the Second Coming, but only the cake is raptured, leavin
g behind a skeleton of powdered sugar sin.
The no-icing kid prefers the brown sugar pound cake, remember, not the cream cheese pound cake or the sour cream pound cake. Remember that your grandmother’s recipe for brown sugar pound cake is on a card labeled “Caramel Pound Cake” though there is not a hint of caramel in it. Remember how your grandmother always said “caramel” as though it rhymed with “carousel.” Remember when your grandmother’s handwriting was sure and strong and she could still see to copy out a receipt, as she sometimes called it, and remember when she was too weak and blind to bake but still knew the receipt for care-a-mel cake by heart.
Remember that the card is tucked into your mother’s recipe box between the card for cranberry Jell-O mold and the card for brandied fruit. Wonder for the first time why she filed a cake recipe between two fruit recipes (or, really, two “fruit” recipes) until it finally comes to you: this must be the Thanksgiving section of the recipe box. There was always some taxonomy behind your mother’s inscrutable systems, and her brown sugar pound cake recipe would of course be grouped with the squash soufflé and the pecan pie, too, because it goes without saying that there will be no pumpkin pie recipe in any Thanksgiving file created by your mother, who spent her childhood harvesting pecans in Lower Alabama.
When you pull out the eggs and the butter and the flour—plain, not self-rising; you will never make that mistake again—and the absurd quantities of sugar, remember to set the recipe card in a safe place. There are things you cannot keep safe, that you have already failed forever to keep safe, but you must remember to protect this one card written in your grandmother’s hand and saved in your mother’s recipe box. There’s a child in your house who won’t eat icing, and today is his birthday, and he will not always be a child, and you will not always keep him safe.
Late Migrations Page 11