The Exact Same Moon
Page 26
I think back now on how driven I was to rescue my mother’s flowers. Her garden, her passion. Her lime-green explosion of hope every spring and her wilted brown exercise in faith each fall.
These plants held my mother’s wisdom, that’s how I looked at it. Wasn’t it my responsibility to care for them and it? My mother is, after all, the reason I turned into a gardener. Oh, she’s directly responsible for my addiction to dirt and indirectly, I suppose, to my turn finally to become the tiller of one giant fifty-acre garden. But she knows she did this. She says she turned me into a gardener by doing precisely nothing. She never pushed, never made me garden as a kid, never allowed hoeing or tilling to be categorized as chores. She would just quietly go about it all, a shadowy figure in the background of my summers, weeding and singing. “I never wanted you to resent flowers” is the way she says it now.
Nowadays my parents are the only people at Riddle Village who actually have a garden. Well, it’s really just lots of pots they put out. They’d made sure to get one of the apartments that opened onto the courtyard, and even though everything at Riddle Village is regulation this and regulation that—with a team of groundskeepers responsible for keeping the place in constant bloom six months of the year—my mom befriended one of the bulb-digger guys, and he quietly let her put out pots of impatiens, and then more pots, and more, and pretty soon people got used to seeing that one corner of the courtyard blooming its own special blooms.
So they have a little garden. My dad waters, my mom pinches and prunes. The two of them are doing beautifully, easing into old age with a kind of dignity I can only hope to one day earn.
About a month or so ago my mom got bothered by something. It occurred to her that she had, over the years, painted pictures of all of her grandchildren. And now there was a new one. Anna. A girl with no picture.
That was her inspiration. That’s what sent her charging to her paints. That’s what catapulted her through the blank-canvas fear. “I have to do a portrait of her before I kick off!” she said. “She musn’t feel left out!”
So she began painting a picture of Anna sitting on the grass, examining a daisy. “And you know what,” she said to me on the phone last night, reporting that it’s nearly finished, “it’s not bad. I am really not too bad at this, sweetie.”
“No, you are not,” I said. I didn’t want to get into it with her. I didn’t want to jinx the whole thing by saying “Duh, you’re an artist!” I reminded her that I had a barn full of her practice canvases, should she ever want to see them.
“Oh, throw those old things away,” she said.
“We’ll see,” I said, even though I already saw. Then I told her that my garden had finally gotten around to letting me know where her daylilies belong: down by the barn, on a bank leaning into the afternoon sun. I told her I was going to go out in the morning and start digging them out of the vegetable garden and transplant them there.
“That sounds lovely,” she said.
And so this is what I’m doing.
“As you know, we are running out of transplant weather,” I say to Anna as I lift this one plant out of the earth and drop it onto the ground nearby. Thud. This thing has more than quadrupled in size since I planted it. “Talk about Happy Returns,” I say to her. “We’ll have to divide.” She sees me aiming the shovel and cracks up before the joke is even told.
Ready, aim, hop, stomp!
“Again!” she says. All right, then. Because I do need to divide my divisions.
Ready, aim, hop, stomp!
“Again!”
Okay, now she’s applauding, the show has gotten so good.
I don’t remember laughing at the sight of my mother dividing daylilies. Is this the sort of gardening wisdom I’m going to pass on to Anna? Gardening is … funny? I was hoping for something more. I was hoping to be the kind of mother who knew botanical names or at least the kind who could inspire a gardening obsession in her kid.
“Someday maybe you’ll take some of these daylilies to your garden,” I tell Anna. What a testament to a mother, to want to bring a chunk of her hope, her faith, into your own garden. How do you get to be that kind of mother?
I look at the daylilies, dry and tired and ready to curl up for winter, and wonder how my mother would answer. She would probably tell me to not bother getting all twisted up trying to be the kind of mother she was, but to let loose and be the kind of mother I am. Talk about Uncommon Love.
Ready, aim, hop, stomp!
“Again!”
Oh, we are having a wonderful time. We are dividing the past. We are preparing the future. We are rooted in the here and now.
And we are working up a sweat. Whew. Each of these whopper daylilies is yielding about eight plants. And I’ve got nine, ten, eleven, I’ve got twelve rows of these things. Why did I take so many? Did I really need that much of my mother’s wisdom? Twelve times ten is one hundred and twenty. If I get eight plants out of each clump, that’s almost a thousand daylilies I have to plant. This is exhausting, horrible news.
I wipe my brow, look at Anna. “Never, ever do math while you’re gardening,” I tell her. “Remember that.”
Ready, aim, hop, stomp!
“AH, AH, AH!”
And so we spend the next few hours like this, hopping and stomping and laughing into Hyperion, or Happy Returns, or Uncommon Love, our perfectly complete unknown.
For Anna and Sasha
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my mother, who has lovingly endured my use of her life and wisdom as material for my stories.
Portions of this book first appeared in different form in The Washington Post Magazine and Esquire. My thanks to the editors of those magazines for helping to bring this project to life.
I am grateful to my agent, Andrew Blauner, for his continued support and friendship; to my devoted reader and friend, Robin Michaelson, who conceived of this book and rallied behind it; and to Kate Miciak, my spirited editor at Bantam, for the infectious enthusiasm she brought to the project.
My thanks to the people of Scenery Hill, for passing on their wondrous stories. To the babes and my family, for sticking around while I locked myself away in the attic at the farm to write this.
To Anna, for the dream and the dancing. To her new sister, Sasha, whose promise motivated me once again to the moon and back.
And to Alex, who by joining me on this journey, made it happen.
ALSO BY JEANNE MARIE LASKAS
The Balloon Lady and Other People I Know
We Remember:
Women Born at the Turn of the Century
Tell the Stories of Their Lives
in Words and Pictures
Fifty Acres and a Poodle:
A Story of Love, Livestock,
and Finding Myself on a Farm
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeanne Marie Laskas is a columnist for The Washington Post Magazine, where her “Significant Others” essays appear weekly. A “writer at large” at GQ, she writes for numerous national magazines, and her work has been selected for Best American Sports Writing and other anthologies. She is the author of The Balloon Lady and Other People I Know; We Remember: Women Born at the Turn of the Century Tell Their Lives in Words and Pictures, and Fifty Acres and a Poodle, available in trade paperback from Bantam Books and featured on Animal Planet’s “A Pet Story.”
A professor in the creative nonfiction program at the University of Pittsburgh, she lives and farms with her husband and daughters, along with their animals, at Sweetwater Farm in Scenery Hill, Pennsylvania.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
* * *
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
on Archive.