Stories. Where the Flowers Bloom Forever

My grandmother's house is still there, but it isn't the same.
A plain wooden cottage,
a patch of brown lawn,
and a fence that hangs, standing and sighing,
in the Seattle rain.
Judy Collins, Secret Gardens

I went walking this morning in a gap between rainstorms. On Ash Street I swung out in an arc to avoid getting drenched by a big swath of lilac hanging, dripping, over the sidewalk and then swung myself back to smell the flowers. Pale purple, the ones most common in the places I have lived. As long as I don't put Texas or California on the list of places I have lived. So, these were the pale, softly purple lilacs that seem of all the lilacs to have best thrived where the Utah pioneers planted them. I had to approach them carefully; each tiny quatrefoil was brimming with rain. Wanton sniffing might drown me. Lilac is my favorite flower for smelling, I think, and polite, too, the bushes hold out arms filled with blossoms at just the height for most any nose. Grape hyacinth, too, mock orange, stocks and certain roses. But none of those are evocative the way lilac is evocative. And you have to pick grape hyacinth, or lie down in the grass, to smell it.

Spring time in Kanosh smells like newly turned fields and the sun on lilac bushes. And dust.

When my parents fled from San Diego to Kanosh we lived at first in a house my grandparents owned. My grandpa, born in Kanosh, planned to retire there so when Ida Cummings' house came for sale, he bought it and my parents moved into it while they looked around and decided what to do next. Ida's garden was right outside my California city child's experience, complicated and mysterious in design, lovely but hiding its beauty in overgrowth, a gardener's garden neglected after years of careful tending and running to stealthy abandon as the gardener aged. And died. Ida died and we went to live in her house till it was time for my grandparents to come there. It was summer when we came and I had no friends so I moved straight into the garden.

I hadn't read, much, yet, so I had no storybook gardens in my interior world with which to compare this new old garden. I hadn't been to Europe or looked at picture books of English cottage and kitchen gardens. In California people had a front yard and a back yard. My mom worked hard on both, I'm sure, though I only remember the back yard with any clarity. In time her yard would have become a garden, but the housing development still had a recently-scraped feel to it. This Kanosh house didn't sit in a yard; a yard is either shell-shocked land around a too-new house, or, a yard is a place in which to contain or corral stuff, not a place you nurture, nourish, and fill with intent. A yard is for cows, for lumber, for useful things like gravel and scrap metal. A yard is for a slavishly even, unnaturally green, severely domesticated grass plot and two identical bushes, one on either side of the front door. We name such a yard after the most important thing in it, the entrance to the house. Front Yard. No yards at Ida's house. Ida's baby was a garden, big and multitasking, as Utah pioneer gardens are. And it was wick. Aye, that it was.

I think, once, it might have been a masterpiece.

I drive by with strangers and wish they could see what I see,
a tangle of summer birds, flying in sunlight,
a forest of lilies,
an orchard of apricot trees.

Given such an amazing early influence some people might have felt desire stirring within them to learn about gardens of this period, which plants were readily available and which were exotic and hard won. They might have wondered how Ida kept it all watered, weeded and going while raising lots of children, acting as a pillar of both the church and community, bottling all the fruit from the orchard just west of the house, growing a vegetable garden for all of them as well as the necessary pigs, chickens, cows and horses. Without electricity or indoor plumbing. They might have at least asked Ida's descendants, still living in Kanosh, about these things. I could have talked to them at church. Sigh. Acquiring knowledge is the calling of a scholar, not a slacker, reader and dreamer, a stroller and sniffer of other people's lilacs. It may be too late for me. I just like to look at things and wonder about them in my head and then make stuff up. I don't want to look at your historical documents, thanks. Actually, I do want to look at them, but it won't occur to me to wonder if you have them and even if I knew you did, I would never, never ask out of respect for privacy. Mine.

Even slackers have their inly guarded, painfully secret passions, and I confess I lost myself completely to that garden. I will truly never love that way again.

The house was a large one, by the Kanosh standards of its time, a Gothic farmhouse with three gables across the front and porch that was also a balcony made of white painted wood which I thought very fancy, when I was little and first living there. Actually, the wood was no longer white but it once had been and enough paint chips clung to the grey wood for me to fill in the whole picture. I wondered if the family had some pretensions. I don't know, you could ask around in Kanosh. People would remember. Next door, west of Ida's and on the other side of the orchard, was a red brick house, not nearly as old, with a basement and with ceilings of normal height so it was closer to the ground and humble. I assume the Cummings owned both lots and one of their sons built his house just the next lot over. In that house was Leila.

Great-grandfather's farm is still there, but it isn't the same.
The barn is torn down and the fences are gone.
The Idaho wind blows the topsoil away every spring.

I don't know if that's how she spelled her name; that's how I spelled it in my childmind and that's the way it will be here. If you wish to have a more accurate description of Kanosh, its denizens and environs, I can direct you to a history written by my grandfather, whose favorite grandchild I was not. She lived in the little red brick house alone because her husband had died and her children were gone, so you can see how fearfully old she was, even then. Everybody was fearfully old then, especially everybody in Kanosh. I don't know where they stored all the old people in San Diego but I never saw any. In California you had to drive miles and hours to get to your grandma's house but in Kanosh you could knock on any door in town and a fair approximation of your grandma would bounce right up and open it. Leila seemed tiny and frail to me, too thin and somehow wispy. She was very small and I was going to be very big and it was as if that scale was set between the two of us when I was seven and we first met. She was pale; I could see the veins under her skin. She was pretty, I thought, with large eyes. She was gentle, so gentle, and loving and kind and quiet. These are things I never have been and I wondered mightily how she managed them. She laughed easily; it's possible she was not entirely sure of herself, but that's a very adult thing to think about. She used to laugh, no matter what you asked her, and say "Well. I don't know." Which was not true as she was old and good and knew everything. I thought her hair was long for such an old lady, down to or past her shoulders, and it was dark and stayed dark. I don't know if I touched it up with my memory or if it was touched up in some other way or if she simply retained the power of hair-colored hair, but this long dark hair made her look younger to me than I thought she could possibly be. Young and old, like Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Past, and with strong, strong hands, too, like the Ghost's, because she was also a gardener.

The garden I lived in was distracting and brambly, it had huge trees as tall as the tall old house, it kept secrets and memories to itself, it was dark with shade and oldness, while across the white (same sort of white as that front porch and balcony) picket fence at the edge of the orchard, Leila's garden was sunny, busy, wildly colored and factually magical. Birds shot briefly through the air in my garden and sat around on branches and roofs singing and tweeting; I know bees must have come in droves because the trees poured out fruit. In Leila's garden they lingered, reveled. Leila's garden hummed, twitched and spun with birds, butterflies and bees. She had all of her own and a chunk of everyone else's share. I would sit in the tree house or in an apple tree on my side of the pickets and watch her working and talking to herself in her garden (like a vulture child I was, yes, very like). She wore a shady sun hat (which, if you viewed her from above, covered the top parts of her face) and flowered gloves. Those were delightful to me. I admired and coveted them chastely. I wondered where on earth she had gotten them as I had never seen anything like that for sale. I made her a possessor of subtle and arcane knowledge and wished myself to someday be such a garden shopper, able to sally forth and purchase flowered cloth gloves casually, with off-hand (no pun) elegance as though to me it were a thing of every day. Such were to me the hard won secrets of the master gardener. (I still believe in the esoterism of shopping. Gnostic shopping. I await enlightenment.) Leila in her garden was an American flower fairy, insubstantial and eternal, working the craft with clippers and a trowel and I wanted to be her. My mom was the gardener who gave me my foundation, nearly all my practical understanding, but she couldn't initiate me into The Mysteries. She was already my mom so she couldn't become my fairy gardenmother. Those are the rules. You can look them up.

I still see the ghosts of the people I knew long ago.
Inside the old kitchen they bend and they sigh.
My life passed them up and the world in its way passed them by.

I visited Leila in her kitchen as often as she was in there when the fit took me. She had made us free of her house from the beginning, so long as we knocked at the door and she answered. The broad, deep bottom drawer in her kitchen she kept filled with toys that had belonged to her boys but were now for her grandchildren. My mom protested our numerous visits at first out of politeness and then against Leila's inevitable loss of privacy and freedom as we encroached and conquered but Leila protested back that she liked having us around and that we were good children. This was true. Being made welcome in people's houses is one of many honors afforded the well-behaved. There are drawbacks too, of course, but I can never remember what they are. The worn toys in her drawer were utterly unlike ours. A strange double wire handle with two arcing prongs and a red wheel on a silver spoke that rolled magically along first the bottom of the wires, then, with a flip of the wrist, along the top. One thing Leila named Slinky (I had honestly never yet seen one) and another she called Hoppy Taw. (That one I understood as soon as she started to explain and was disoriented to realize true hopscotch required equipment. Hoppy Taw went into the imaginary basket of wonders that held those flowered gloves.) I first played jacks on Leila's kitchen floor. (I think my mom felt bad about some of this, she got me my own jacks right after I came home stricken with awe at Leila's Tour of Mystical Toys of the Ancient World. Or perhaps she hoped similar toys of my own might fill my longings and afford Leila some peace. Right.) The most numinous antique toy of all Leila's kid's stuff was a rectangular box, not deep, red plastic frame, smooth white screen of sorts, stylus hanging from the side with a small metal tip. Etch-a-Sketch was written on it in a font my bones told me had been popular before my great-grandfather was born. I loved it. It seemed the sort of instrument of diversion and illusion Columbus might have smuggled onto the Santa Maria to pull out, presto and behold, when the cabin boys and crew muled and pined, fearing they would die without ever standing firm on dirt again, enclosed and enmeshed in that bottomless desert of ocean. Look, men, not out across the water but here at this box, this window. Here I can read the words of your fate, wondrous enough, but, see, now they vvvvvanish! Shazam. I used to hunch over Etch-a-Sketch on Leila's kitchen linoleum, wondering what would happen if one day it began to write on its own, message bubbling up from beneath the plastic, what I would do, what the words would say, whether I would be able to read them, what Leila would think of that. "Well. I don't know. Land, that hasn't happened for years. Hand it here."

Does Columbus seem a world away from a Kanosh garden? He wasn't. His toy, his device of enchantment and quite possibly navigational orienteering was sitting in Leila's deep drawer waiting for her grand kids, and her garden was right outside the kitchen door, probably six feet south of that drawer. A dense, deeply developed strip of mature perennials, five or six feet deep, ran between her driveway and the picket fence that bounded Ida's orchard. Another similar bed across the front of Leila's lot behind another picket fence. Vegetable garden (I little cared, then, for that) on the west. Grass, berries and fruit trees in the back sheltering between the house and a fence bisecting the lot, separating Leila's bits from what would have been her husband's part for animals and for outbuildings and pasture and just for having. Acre and a quarter. Small, densely plotted feminine garden near the house; largely and loosely masculine back lot. Mormon pioneer town.
And that was it. Not like Ida's big and imposing ruin of a place. Very small garden, really, all that riot of color and growing, that continuous bloom ("Bachelor's buttons and those are snaps. That's columbine and peony. Mother's roses. A start from that lovely dark lilac"), all Leila's art, knowledge and craft contained primarily in two small strips. How can I measure a garden from memory? How big is the world? How big does it need to be?

But most of all, it is me that has changed, and yet, still I'm the same.
That's me at the weddings, that's me at the graves,
dressed like the people who once looked so grown up and brave.

Some friends of mine who cared deeply in a very different way about gardens bought Leila's house and didn't want those flowers. They told me and my sisters we could take all we wanted. Sweet william, pinks, lady's slippers, fernleaf peony and a start of the lovely dark lilac and another, not as dark but so richly scented, growing now in the garden at Zella Allen's house which we bought, the painter and I, where the painter lives while he's painting. One day I was at another house, Dorothy Paxton's house, waiting with someone, looking at Dorothy's flower garden with a new person who had bought that old house. I saw fernleaf peony growing near the walk, not blooming yet, buds still tightly closed dark green fists, but unmistakable. "Oh," I said, "I grew up with that flower. It was in the garden when we came."
"Yes, all the flowers in here are so old fashioned. Those would be from Ida's house. All the family has the same starts in their gardens, from her. Maureen and Leila, all of them..."

I'm not listening anymore because behind my eyes I'm seeing something new, a genealogy of flowers traceable through mothers and sisters and in-laws and gardendaughters. Once you knew to look you could see where the connections, the lore and love, were carried from plot to plot, invisible ley lines, gardening paths meandering from peony to pink to peony. I'm not trying to decipher it, just watching it flow from home plot to home plot on the map of Kanosh I have carried inside my head since the summer of my eighth year. I remember on Memorial Day at the cemetary a pile of dark red rose petals on a pioneer grave, matriarch and patriarch, and ribbons of dark red petals spreading out across the grass to the graves of daughters and sons, from those graves to others further removed. Blood red streams of petals in a flower web reaching out and out from the first planting in that family's first garden in this tiny frontier town. Roses bloom almost indestructable, grape hyacinth spreads out and out, lilacs twist and thicken in their wood and hold out sprays of soft, richly scented purple to gladden and sadden passersby. I cut Leila's flowers in my garden and leave them on her grave.

I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.
I see willows bending,
the season is spring
and the silver blue sailing birds fly
with the sun on their wings.

Secret gardens of the heart
where the old stay young forever.



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