“Good girl.” She let her eyes fall shut. “Go bring Karen and Jackie and Jeane now . . . and my baby.”
I stood up to do as she had asked. “I love you, Grandma.”
“I love you too, Katie. You’re a good girl.”
Leaving her there, I hurried to find Dad, Karen, and Aunt Jeane, and sent them and Joshua to Grandma while I went looking for Dell. I wanted her to be able to say good-bye to Grandma while she was awake and could talk. I felt it would make things easier for Dell.
I found her coming in the door, carrying a large willow basket filled with dozens of flowers in every color. I helped her as she struggled to fit through the doorway.
“Grandma asked me to bring in her flowers.” She looked at me with wide dark eyes filled with joy. “She wants to take them to heaven with her.”
The joy in her face lifted my heart, and I threw the door open wide, welcoming in the scent of green grass and roses, maple trees and early-summer sunshine. Carried by the breeze, Dell and I took the basket to Grandma’s room.
Through tear-filled eyes, Karen looked at us from the bedside, and Dad shook his head slowly. Even Joshua was silent in Aunt Jeane’s lap, as if he also knew that something somber was happening. Grandma’s eyes were closed and her breath was coming in rapid, shallow gasps.
Dell came into the room and laid the flowers on the tables, windowsills, and at the corners of the bed. Watching her, Karen covered her face with her hands. When her basket was empty, Dell stood close to the bed, the last few roses still held carefully in her hands. “I brought the flowers like you told me,” she whispered, holding them close to Grandma’s face.
Grandma’s eyes fluttered open, and Dad sat back in surprise. “Good girl.” Grandma Rose looked lovingly at Dell. “You heard me.” And I knew that in those silent moments when they lay together on the bed, thoughts had passed between them as clearly as any words ever spoken.
Grandma’s lips trembled into a peaceful smile as her gaze reached lazily around the room, taking in the colors and the perfect soft shapes of the flowers she had cared for with such devotion. “Oh.” It was little more than a breath exhaled. “They look . . . like . . . heaven.” Closing her eyes, she seemed to drink in the scent of summer and roses, drifting slowly away, skyward, above the house, above the rose garden, above the fields filled with yellow bonnets, until she floated like a dove from the bluffs of the river.
Grandma Rose was buried on the eighteenth of May beneath a blue sky in the plot beside my grandfather. Never before had I noticed the loaf of bread engraved on the headstone between their names. Now I knew what it meant.
Family and neighbors crowded around Grandma’s resting place, as numerous as the roses blooming on the old iron fence. Because the weather was perfect, we set tables outside and held the wake on the hillside by the family graveyard. Below us, Dell and the other children ran in the shallows of the river, forgetting the somber occasion. In my mind, I saw a girl with tawny golden curls and sky-blue eyes, barefoot, running with them, laughing.
A week later, Dad, Aunt Jeane, and Karen had left. Ben was back at work, and for the first time I was alone in the house. It was a strange day, too quiet, too lonesome, but I was comforted by the news that Dad would return to visit in a few months, and Aunt Jeane and Uncle Robert were making plans to build a retirement home on the hundred acres they had inherited down the road. Grandma would have liked that. I wondered if, eventually, she would convince all of the family to come back.
During the cleaning and sorting of Grandma’s belongings, I never found the wildflower book, and I think I was more saddened by that than anything. I wished I had kept it that last night when I read it in the kitchen. I could not imagine how she had managed to put it where I could not find it. I didn’t want to believe that part of her was gone forever, and I held on to the hope that the book would turn up somewhere.
Overwhelmed by the emptiness in the house, I decided to fulfill my last promise to her and dust the roses. While Josh crawled after butterflies in the yard, I opened the storage room off the side of the house and stepped into the dim interior to get the rose dust. Leaning against the can was a brown envelope with my name on it. Chuckling to myself, I picked it up. Instructions, no doubt, on how to care for the flowers.
Bending back the clip, I turned the envelope upside down, and something heavy slid into my hand. I knew the feel of it immediately.
The wildflower book.
My heart soared as I lifted the cover, turning from one story to the next—yellow bonnets, roses, fragile things, breaking horses, broken bread, Joshua at Christmas, snow dancers, fireflies—all of the stories were there, carefully bound between the pressed-flower covers, tied with the blue ribbon. At the end was one last entry: Hymns and Lullabies.
By the time I was a young married woman awaiting my first child, my own mother was gravely ill. It fell to me to return home in those last days to care for her and to help my father set his house in order. How strange it was to come back to that old white house after years away! I felt half woman, half child—half my new self and half who I had been growing up. My feelings for my mother came from those two sides of me—half pity, for she was wasting from tumors, and half anger, for she had given me wounds that still bled inside me.
But I came to know her in those last days and, perhaps, to understand her a little. More than that, I came to understand the cycle in which life moves.
As I sat at her deathbed, she laid her hand on my stomach, round with life soon to be born. This babe, she told me, was the end sum of her existence, the part of her that would go on. The reason she had existed at all.
She smiled as the babe stirred inside me. Then she fell into a sleep, but clung to life. She was waiting for the babe, I knew, and when we whispered news of the birth to her, she left behind the hardness of this world.
I cannot put words to the feelings within me on the day we brought her out for burial. It is an odd thing to stand so close to life’s beginning and life’s end. Birth and death are such strange cousins.
We carried my mother to the graveyard, shed tears and sang hymns, then returned home, stood over the cradle, smiled, and sang lullabies. . . .
Katie, do not be sad.
You must smile at my babies for me.
I love all of you,
Grandma
A sense of peace came over me as I laid the book on the porch and went to care for Grandma’s flowers. The farm wasn’t empty, I thought, watching Joshua on the lawn. It was being filled with new lives, which was as it should be.
Toward evening, Joshua and I drove to the graveyard to tend the flowers there. When the work was finished, I stood by the gate, closed my eyes, and breathed in the scent of coming summer. On my face, I felt the last rays of the descending sun, and in my hand the warm softness of Joshua’s fingers. Inside me, the baby fluttered like a butterfly—my daughter, Rose, waiting to be born. Below I heard the music of the river passing by, and above the hush of new maple leaves rustling against the sky.
The light around me dimmed slowly as another day surrendered its grasp on the land. On the hillside, the roses nodded on the breeze, as if inviting the fireflies to come out and dance.
CONVERSATION GUIDE
Tending Roses
LISA WINGATE
This Conversation Guide is intended to enrich the individual reading experience, as well as encourage us to explore these topics together—because books, and life, are meant for sharing.
FICTION FOR THE WAY WE LIVE
A CONVERSATION WITH LISA WINGATE
Q. Tending Roses has such a wise and universal message. What inspired you to write this book?
A. The seedling for Tending Roses was planted along with a flower bed my grandmother and I tilled in front of my house ten years ago. As we worked, she gave instructions about simple things she had learned through long years of experience—how to wind the roots around an iris bulb, how to prune the branches on a rosebush, how to cut the blooms without harming
the plant.
When my newborn son was fussy, we had to go inside instead of finishing the garden. My grandmother settled into a rocking chair, bundled him on her shoulder, and patted his back lightly—quieting him with a special sort of grandma magic.
Closing her eyes, she rocked slowly back and forth and told me about the time in her life when the roses grew wild. When she finished the last words, a tear fell from beneath her lashes, and she let out a long, slow sigh filled with sadness and longing.
Something profound happened to me then. I understood so much about her and about myself that I had never considered before. I had an almost painful sense of life passing by. I had a sense of life being not just a trip from here to there, but a journey with lots of good stuff, maybe the best stuff, in the middle. I realized that I was so focused on goals down the road, I was missing the value of where I was.
Q. How did this epiphany evolve into a novel?
A. That night, when the baby was asleep and Grandma had gone to bed, I sat down and wrote the story longhand in a notebook. Over the next several days, I added more of her stories. They remained in the notebook for several years, but I never forgot them. I shared them occasionally with other writers and got a powerful response, but beyond that, I had little idea of what to do with them. They weren’t appropriate as stand-alone works, and there were not enough of them to make a book.
So I just left them in a drawer and waited. The idea to use my grandmother’s stories in a novel came at a time when I was beginning to feel a strong sense of meaning in my life, about four years after I wrote them. I was now the mother of a newborn, as well as a four-year-old. Because of my husband’s career, we had moved to a place deep in the countryside. Life was quiet, and there was much less of familiar noises and busy schedules, shopping trips, dates with friends, phones ringing. I had a great deal of time to reflect on what I valued and what gave me joy and peace. Peace, I determined, was centered around my faith in God, my children, my family, and a desire to do something good with my life.
I think Tending Roses grew out of a need to communicate that process of soul-searching. I stumbled upon my notebook of Grandma’s stories while cleaning out a desk drawer, and the idea just came to me. I started writing, and the words flowed so fast, I could hardly keep my hand on the keyboard. When I was finished the first day, I had written two chapters of something that was unlike anything I had ever done. I had never before poured so much of my heart into something or written something that was a combination of my own life and fiction. I had a strong desire to create something that had a sense of goodness to it, where good people do the right thing and wonderful things happen to them.
Q. How long did you spend writing the book?
A. The original manuscript took about four months to write. It was more like catharsis than work. The words just seemed to flow, almost as if I was typing a book that had already been written somewhere in my mind. Of course, then I had to revise it about four times!
Q. How much of the book is from your own experience?
A. Kate’s feelings about motherhood and the struggle between career, a sense of self, and the demands of motherhood were from my own experience. The difficulty of maintaining self-esteem while being “just” a stay-at-home mom was from my own experience. The power of finding faith in God and forgiveness for those around us were from my own experience, and certainly so were the sense of the importance of parenthood and the need for closeness and the support of extended family.
Happily, a lot of the family problems in the book were fictional. The members of my family are an understanding lot, and we have never suffered the pain of being estranged from one another, though we have often lived at opposite corners of the country, which can create some of the same loneliness and longings.
Q. Your book deals with so many important themes. Which ones do you hope will generate the most discussion?
A. I think some of the more nebulous themes are the importance of family, the need for forgiveness, and the value of faith. Some of the more concrete themes include the question of motherhood versus career, the notion of quality time versus quantity time with loved ones, the duty to care for one another, especially the elderly, and the difficulty of deciding how best to care for elderly parents and grandparents. Secondary themes include the importance of active fathers, the materialistic focus of society, the needs of disadvantaged children, and the loss of the family homestead.
Q. What do you see as the most important secondary themes in the book?
A. Dell’s situation is certainly a secondary theme in the book. Thinking about my grandmother’s hardships growing up made me realize that, even in this wealthy, advanced, speed-of-light society, many children still grow up with seemingly insurmountable difficulties and desperately need the kindness of strangers. The materialistic focus of today’s society is also an important secondary theme. These days, we’re convinced we are failures if we don’t have everything. My grandmother had a lot to say about that.
The importance of community is an inescapable theme in the book. Human beings are basically tribal animals, and I think that these days a lot of us are missing a tribe.
Q. Where are you personally at this stage of your life?
A. Well, I am the mother of two young sons who keep me running and keep me laughing. I wanted girls. I got boys. I never dreamed that boys could be so wonderful. But that is another story.
My husband and I live on a small ranch in the Texas hill country—a beautiful area filled with rugged vistas, ancient trees, and a strong sense of the past. We are avid horse people and spend a great deal of our spare time in various equine pursuits. We think we may have watched too many cowboy movies when we were young.
I have always, always, always been a writer, and cannot remember a time when I didn’t write. My older brother, Brandon, taught me how to read and write before I started kindergarten. I wrote and illustrated my first book at five years old and have never stopped writing. I had a very special first-grade teacher, who recognized a little ability and a lot of desire in a small, shy transfer student and started reading my stories to the class. I quickly discovered the joy of having an audience and set out on many, many writing projects, with childhood dreams of one day being published.
Somewhere in between writing projects, I attended Oklahoma State University, received a B.A. in Technical English, and married my husband, Sam, also an OSU grad. After college, I took a job as a technical writer and continued writing and selling freelance projects on the side. Over the years, I have published various fiction and nonfiction titles, and have written more computer manuals than I can count. Fiction has always been my first love, particularly anything with a sense of history and triumph of the human spirit.
Q. What things inspire you?
A. People inspire me. God inspires me. Love inspires me. Life’s everyday miracles inspire me. I think most of us are stronger than we know, capable of more than we have ever imagined. I like to write about people pushing aside life’s confines and roadblocks and setting the spirit free. I like to write about people forgetting the destination and enjoying the journey.
Q. Are you working on another book now?
A. I am working on another novel that combines fiction with true stories and a sense of the past. The main character is very different from Kate, but is also in a rut and searching for her life’s meaning. The themes are in some ways similar to Tending Roses and in some ways different. Just as no two people are the same, no two characters are the same, and no two stories the same.
Which is what makes life interesting, and fiction fun, and keeps writers writing. It’s all just . . . sort of . . . potluck. You never know what’s going to be in the next dish until you open it.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Lynne Hinton, bestselling author of Friendship Cake, a novel that celebrates female friendship, has praised Tending Roses as a “rich story of family and faith that reminds us of the bittersweet seasons of life and our call to care fo
r each other.” What do you think she means by “the bittersweet seasons of life”?
2. How do the various characters in Tending Roses care for each other? Do you agree that we are all called to do so? Are we as obliged to care for people outside our families as we are for immediate family members? In your own life, how are you heeding or not heeding that call?
3. The wildflower journal continues to make mysterious appearances throughout the novel. Do you think Grandma deliberately leaves the book for Kate to read? Why does she choose to convey her advice in this way rather than verbally?
4. After reading Tending Roses and calling upon your own experience, do you think a mother or father can have a demanding career and still be a good parent? Is it naive to think you can “have it all”—both a satisfying career and an active role in raising children?
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