Meditations. The Glory of a Woman

Brian Kershisnik, Sisters

I'm needing a hair cut.
My middle child answered a question, sent an email; consequentially, photographs of us (yet to be taken) will be part of an upcoming show, a show of Thirty Strangers. You can Google that, if you like, when you leave here. Photographs. I don't like having my picture taken, I usually climb under the table when I feel threatened in that way. I'm very quick and clever at it. (Climbing under tables is a useful method for escaping a wide array of fraught or confusing situations. I recently scooted with commendable speed under a table to avoid being kissed. That moment was doubly fraught and confusing as, while the would-be kisser was a man (which you'd have no doubt expected), at the moment of the attempt, for purposes of a play, so was I, also, a man (which no one should have expected). I'd have gone under that table in any case, but, things being what they were, I was really moving. I bring up this incident of attempted man-on-sorta-man-kissing only for obvious reasons; I am talking here about my short hair. You see the connection.)
I'm going to need a haircut before I submit to having my picture taken. That's the trouble with having short hair, it needs cutting. Long hair pretends it meant to be this way. Short hair is all about history, recent history, as in, you just washed or you just styled or you just cut it--or you didn't and you just should have.
All this short hair is new to me.
Until maybe a year ago (?), from the time I ever had any hair at all it was on its way to becoming long hair. Past my shoulders, past my waist. A lifetime of long hair.
I cut it, had it cut off, to see if I could, if I could wear short hair. No, I wasn't even that brave. I already knew I could wear it. My sisters all had cropped their locks at one time or another and it was great on every one of them; since we resemble each other, I assumed. I wanted to see if I had it in me to chop it right off, if I were made of that stern sort of stuff. After the chopping a lady at church stopped me, took me by both shoulders and looked me over carefully. "Well," she said. "Now that you've done this, you can do anything." Anything sounding like she was thinking of maybe arson. Or skinny dipping. But in a happy way, at least in an it-looks-good-on-you sort of way. In a maybe envious way. An I-wish-I'd-thought of-that sort of way.
Her hair was (is) shorter than mine.


My friend had brain surgery and of course they shaved her head. I went with the painter to visit her when she came home from the hospital. It was Halloween time and she had all these closely set staples forming one half of a deeply arched widow's peak rising just above her ear and descending in the middle of her forehead. Sweetest, hardest Halloween look EVER. Road Warrior. Steam punk vampire. She was fragile and tired and drugged and so, so unbearably lovely. I felt as if I'd never before been able to see her and now suddenly I could, could really see her with all that long hair shorn away. She had long hair always, said she loved it, but I'd never believed it was a deeply considered position. More of a false tradition. A way around the curly hair she was born with and a way out of really having hair at all. I know about that (not the curls). There's nothing in the world easier than long hair you wear in a pony tail. It's far simpler than no hair at all because no hair has to be explained, defended, carried off. My friend with her hair cut like a man's and her head full of staples (I was trying to imagine getting through airport security) has a sister-in-law who shaved her head but for rock star reasons and wore her close-cut hair with ripped jeans and hauteur, with rhinestones and stacked heels and a glamor of low cut evening wear in the grocery store.
My friend will never again, I think, grow her hair long; it would be too hard, too messy and time consuming. Too silly. A waste. What on earth would she do with those awful curls in the in-between stages, the troublesome lengths between past-the-ears and pony-tail-tamed? Shudder. Anyway, she's beautiful just as she is, beautiful like a fragile shell, as if, should you hold her up to the hard sun, you would see through her the shadows of your own fingers. Her sister-in-law will yet, I believe, do all sorts of things that are hard and impossible and messy and beautiful, including growing her hair right into and then on through troublesome lengths. I cannot imagine, if you held the crop-haired, jazz singing, rocker sister-in-law in any sort of light, you'd see yourself through her.
When enough time goes by that my friend has lost her staples (modern methods of staple removal, it turns out, are not a topic for polite dinner table conversation. By the way. In case you wondered) we talk at my house after dinner about our lost long hair. My niece is with us, a short-hair evangelist (now, about that aforementioned sister-in-law? The singer? I've never met her, you know, only seen videos on youtube (and how, from those, could you ever determine?) but I'll tell you, she really reminds me of my niece, this short-hair evangelist who does much that is hard and messy and beautiful). My niece speaks passionately, sings from the heart, of the tribe, her soul mate sisters who have short hair. She claims she can tell by looking at a woman coming toward her with a slamming short hair cut that they would be great companions. My friend (her arcing scar still very, very cool and clearly visible to me from where I sit) and I are careful with our glances. We are not convinced. Perhaps we are too old. Perhaps we miss our hair.


In my grandmother's house was a wonderful picture, a wedding picture. My aunt with her short curly blond hair. I never knew her any other way, never imagined her other than the sassy aunt with a soft sort of 1930's look. Grandma told me one day, out of the blue and apropos of nothing, that my aunt's hair was short in the photo because she had had a terrible fever and all her long hair had to be cut off. Shorn off, close to the scalp. "Long hair," she told me, looking carefully, not at mine falling below my waist but at the short hair in the picture, "draws off all of your strength." "It does?" I squeaked, awed and disbelieving. "Oh, yes," Grandma sighed, assuring me, "it weakens you dreadfully." My aunt's hair had been cut off while she was so sick in order that she could get better, recover. Grandma said it as if she would add finally. Finally cut off and gone. Finally. All that hair. Said with something not altogether unlike admiration and not altogether unlike disgust.
All. that. hair.


Sheer self preservation drove my momma to keep me in tight braids whenever she could, but she also sent me to school all on my own and once there I became a champion of repressed hair everywhere, a freedom fighter. I loved to let it fly, set it loose from its twistings and moorings. I was romantic in that way. I thought lots of unrestrained hair made me beautiful. Like a lion. The school bus windows were nearly always down on the way home unless we were in the bleak midwinter. There was wind from those open windows and that wind whipped us about. This string of events (wind, lots of long hair, vanished braids) led, what with one thing and another, to snarls. To lies. And to fights with my momma. Threats. She was going to cut it all off if I didn't and didn't right now. Didn't be good. Didn't behave. Didn't stop being a lion and start being a lady.
I remember the shiver of deciding to learn braiding it myself, of teaching myself ponytail and pigtails. Taking back my hair. For the first time. Soppy, fat, loose braids that did not survive even a bike ride to the store, a paltry three and a half country blocks from home, those awkwardly crafted early plaits growing steadily softer, sticking out hairy arms and legs all down their length. Pigtails that were never of an even thickness (and the part? Who even knew? Think I've got eyes in the back of my head?). A ponytail always slipping away from me. Fixing it, doing it again. And again. Drawing a definite power from doing my own hair. By myself.
I watch my girls reach for that power. Watch them carefully craft funny, crooked braids and tails to wear to school because these are talismans, amulets woven from their own selves. Power. Becoming. Silly, unbalanced hair that says, Hey! Get outta the way! I did this all by myself and MY MOMMA WANTED ME TO. Watch me stand up , people, look at me go. Hair that gets a fond and pained and loving and conspiratorial look from every woman with eyes to see it.
One day, after a while, they get good at it and then they look just like everyone else.


It keeps you warm, long hair, like a scarf, like a shawl. Keeps you warm winter and summer. Also, people step on it and sit on it and lie on it if you don't prevent them by cutting it off. Once, when I was a freshman at Snow, a man hooked, snagged and dragged me with him for about twenty feet in the hall of the Administration building. By my hair. He used only a simple suit coat button, the most effective hair-hook God ever invented (it had to be God, it's that good). I was immediately hopelessly snarled, my route altered instantly and I was hopping along, backwards, at his side as he strode in a direction I had not intended to travel. He was irritated. As if I had thrust my hair at his button with malice aforethought.
All. that. hair.


I resisted letting my girls cut their hair. Once it's gone, it's gone. I didn't absolutely prevent them, but I did absolutely require they either leave it long enough to go into a pony tail or cut it to chin length. Out of self preservation. To insure that they (I) could get it out of their (my) way. There's a family portrait, the painter's family, and the three of us look like we're growing hair for a cause, like we're trying to make a point or keep a vow or observe a hair-covenant. It was shocking to me when I saw the photo. Within a month or so we all of us had significantly shorter tresses.
All that hair.
My sister cuts my hair. I don't know what I want, I only see other people with hair I covet. She explains to me I can never have that hair, mine's too thick or too straight or has too much wave. One day we miscommunicate and by the time the dust has settled I have nearly nothing left. I find myself in a strange spot, looking into the mirror and seeing there my son. Only, he's wearing my clothes. Now, this was all an accident. Within a short time there is another accident and I am cast in a man's role in a play. This is a favor for a friend; he says he will make the character a woman. But it just won't work that way and now I am playing a man. I have the hair for it, you see? Inevitable. I get this very weird attention. From men and from women. Pretend you're a girl and you're told you're "disturbingly handsome."
Wait, what? So I'm...is that... a compliment?
Hey.
I do have a handsome son.
My hair's longer now, lots longer. In fact, since I began writing here, I have cut it all up. It was too long and I have to be photographed, remember? My sister hates it when I cut my own hair, I make it all weird. But I think it looks good, better, anyway, and she can fix it and I can submit to the upcoming photos. And it will grow back.
It always does.


Even now, a year or more after the cutting, when I am facing a difficult day, having a hard time, I catch myself thinking, ok, get all this hair out of the way and then let's get going! I even move to put it up, to twist it out of my way so I can set the day spinning. That was always the signal I gave myself that things needed to get serious.
High, tight ponytail and away!
When it was long I played with it all the time when I thought hard or talked to people, twisting it up onto the top of my head over and again. I had a set of twists I did without thinking that always landed me in the same complicated, knotted mass, and I'd catch myself with it in a state of completion, having accomplished it without noticing. If I tried to do it, if I thought, I couldn't for the life of me make that knot. I had to be focused somewhere else and my hands just knitted my hair up and up. I wondered if I would lose the hair-playing action when I lost the long hair but I find I mess with it constantly, more even than I did before. My hair grows across the back of my head from right to left (widdershins) and I stroke it and stroke it. Twist a lock on one side or the other in front, where I (try to) keep it longer. When I write or think hard I pull it up in big handfuls and sit like that, fists full of hair, or I twist and rub it around and around on the top of my head.
Fortunately, I do not work when other people are around.


My little sister cut her hair off all the time when she was small. It was awful and complete. Jagged and strange, there was no fixing it, no softening it, we had to wait around for it to grow while people wondered, politely, why we had perpetrated this savage hairdo on our little boy. When it did grow out at all she cut it again. And again.
Now she's a momma and her own little blond girl just committed upon herself a serious and terrible haircut.
For the second time.
Karma.
All that hair.


Mary Ingalls got sick, became blind and her long golden hair was all cut off. Laura's hair grew and grew, it passed her knees, her daughter wrote of the terrible headaches her mother suffered wearing her hair up.
Maybe the real Lady really rode her horse through the streets clothed only in her hair, and if she did, I'm sure that act really caught her husband's attention. But he had asked for it. What could he have been thinking? Maybe she really did just have a ton of hair. Maybe she just really needed to make that point. (Under a specific set of circumstances my momma used to call me Godiva when I was small. Very small. Minute.)
I read a story, long ago, a ghost story by Guy de Maupassant, a specter beseeching, begging a man to comb and to braid her long black hair to save her, to cure her. I never forgot that description of the ghost hair falling to the ground over the back of the ghost's chair as she sat in the bedroom the man had unlocked in her empty, haunted house, while he combed and combed with the comb she carried, him all shuddering and horrified. Her hair icy, like black snakes. And in another of Maupassant's stories, a man maddened by love and desire for a long-dead woman whose beautiful, golden braid he found hidden in a secret drawer in a wonderful antique cabinet. Driven to obsession, driven past sanity by a braid tied with a golden cord.
Bernice bobs her hair--heck, Bernice bobs everybody's hair--for proof. To prove she will, she can. As it turns out, she really can't and her successes all fall down around her, piled with her long dark locks on the barbershop floor, so much detritus, so much waste, so much loss. Clunky with her dark hair in "blocks", not awarded a husband by the story-gods, not honored for her social sacrifice as her classical namesake was honored who traded the goddess golden braids for a safe returned husband. I never admired Bernice's desecration of her cousin, the rape of those locks, but she really does bob her hair, she does it and she escapes into the night on her own two feet. She'll drive into her future behind the wheel of her own car. Sign of things to come.
Jo Marsh cuts off her one beauty for money, for the honorable woman's way to quick cash.
A wonderful Christmas present bought with money from lost hair, hair weighed, chopped and sold in a festive, wild act of seasonal and abandoned loving. He holds her to him tightly, loving her so hard, tells her all that hair will grow back so she can wear the combs-- and it will, of course it will. By the time it can have grown out to its full length, no one but no one will be wearing their hair long anymore and those wonderful, unaffordable combs will still lie pristine, awaiting their big break on The Antiques Roadshow. Lucky the people in the story don't know that, huh? Perhaps the view I'm taking here is too dim. Let's see, this is 1906...yeah. Well, maybe her hair grows super, super fast. Anyway, that is certainly not what this story is about. Merry Christmas.
If you were in a tower and a prince came along and said, hey, let me climb up there the same way your jailer climbs up, let me come up there to you, well, you'd let him up, wouldn't you? Even if it meant a man were climbing your hair? I mean, wouldn't you?


When I think of myself, when in my mind I see myself moving through the world, my inner construct has long hair.
The I'm the tall one with long hair.
I don't even know who that is, that dark-haired woman in photographs, the one with no hair.
Am I just hair?
Am I anyone without it?


You know what makes me crazy?
So, she lets him climb the braids to the tower because, who wouldn't? I mean, for all she knows, that's the only way people go visiting. It's not like she's got any other experience. It's not like she lives in a normal house built normally for normal people. The thing's got no door and only the one window, so right off the bat, in the very structure of her world, she's in trouble. Only one person comes and goes so, as far as she can see, as far as she knows, the whole world makes all their entrances and exits up and down her hair. This prince is her Jacob and she's his ladder. He's an angel coming and going from heaven on a golden cord strung out of a person. Sounds like love, doesn't it?
So far, so good.
But this story is going to get crazy.
Long strong braids are one thing. I've had those myself. And so are witches who think they've got it locked, got set it up tight and strong so nothing can change, nothing can go wrong. No snarls. People close enough to be like family, baby, we've all got those. But there's a question of responsible behavior here, of a badly botched rescue.
He wants her to go away with him and so he should. He's got to see that her situation is unsustainable, that she's in terrible danger. This would not be a stable family life for anybody, even for someone protected by absolute naivete, sheltered in utter ignorance,who knows nothing whatever of anything else.
Maybe he asked her to do the obvious thing. I'm telling myself he did. "See, baby, if we just cut off these braids we can tack them to the window here and we can both go the next time." He's got a fast horse. They'd have a shot, anyway. Maybe he tried to get her to see.
And maybe she was terrified because she'd never climbed anything but up onto a chair or into her bed. Or maybe she was worried about the window fastening (always the weak link); maybe she had nightmares of braids unwinding, coming from together, separating, untwisting, and she's falling and falling with her prince into the hungry, menacing thorn bushes growing around the base of the tower (abusive landscaping); thorn bushes reaching up to catch them, to snatch them. Maybe she just didn't believe him when he solemnly swore to her it hurts not at all to cut your hair. Maybe she worried about who she'd be if she ran with this guy and left behind all that hair.
She came up with a different plan, all on her own.
It was a dumb plan, but then, she'd have had no idea about danger, about time slipping away, about peril that grows with every risked exposure, every stolen kiss. So her prince brought her the silks she asked him for because, well, he loved her (when I was small I thought it was such an odd material, silk, but seeing as she thinks ladders are made out of hair, really it's an obvious choice) and she squirreled them away telling herself, soon, soon it will be enough, soon it will be safe all the way to the bottom. And he came to her and came to her even though he must have known it was folly. What was he going to do? He loved her so. Anyway, he was young, too, and he'd never died before.
He still had that to look forward to.
That's right, kids, let Tower-Girl formulate the escape plan. Her super power is not getting it.
It broke upon them like thunder, like the dead of winter, like the fall of a tower.
But how could she have known?
But wouldn't he have warned her?
Maybe it never occurred to him how many things would never occur to her. Maybe he couldn't wrap his mind around what it would mean to have no experience of anything. Maybe he got lost in all that hair.
It makes me crazy because it was all going anyway.
He climbed so confidentially, set his feet in the places he trusted, his passage woven of the woman he loved.
The last thing he saw would be her severed braids tacked to the window (hey! good idea) and another woman altogether (her crazy not-a-family), not his girl, not the one he loved at all, before the thorns had him.
But she.
She was out there, hair swinging in a low-maintenance bob, free! She got thrown away and it made her free. And she does better than you might expect. Maybe all that hair was drawing off her strength, all along. She must have hung on, hung on so tightly to the idea of him and it took her years, but she found him, found him wandering in an bottomless night. She cried his sight back into him even though his eyes were scratched right away and even though, on the face of it, I know, that seems completely impossible. Remember, though, this is a story about hair. This is a story where lost things grow back and our passage into the whole wide world comes right out of our own heads.


It's who we are.
We cut our hair, it all grows back.
I needed my hair cut and I cut it.
Maybe one day I'll show you the photo.

Elizabeth, Wales
Noah's photo

Stories. Make your bed; Lie in it.

I love thee not; therefore pursue me not.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Sc. 1

Thinking about beds again. Still. Perhaps because, as I sleep so poorly, I experience for much of any given night the bed as a bed. Perhaps because remembering stories has brought back someone I hadn't looked at closely for a ton of time. Perhaps because in a letter a friend talked about important people, past and present.
So, a tiny story about an unmade bed and a friend.
And the necessary backstory.
Because I want us to understand him.

I watch the western sky, the sun is sinking.
The geese are flying south, it sets me thinking.
I did not miss you much, I did not suffer,
What did not kill me just made me tougher.
Sting

Rick was a debater and, lacking a harsher, brighter, sharper term, I'll call him my friend. Debaters are, in my experience, pushy, bossy people who never for a moment question whether they might be wrong or mistaken, regardless of which side of a question they argue, and Rick was born debating. I was not a debater but at the time this tiny story takes place I was on the speech team, in fact, I had a speech and debate scholarship, because of Rick. Because he bossed and pushed me onto the team, dragged me (I'm not exaggerating here, pulled and pushed and manhandled me) into Dr. Parnell's office (I love you still, Dr. Parnell) where, after recomposing himself (our journey had left us both a bit...mussed), he informed the good doctor that I desired to try for the team and would now recite a poem.
A tense, slightly surreal moment followed.
Dr. Parnell was very surprised and very polite (and a good, good person, not at all bossy or pushy and consequently hurting for talent on his team. The next year Richard Wheeler would be the coach and he would be marvelous and wonderful and bossy and pushy and have a big, successful team and I love him still, too). He put down his pen, turned a bit from his desk, steepled his fingers, smiled encouragingly and gave me his full attention. Like this was all very normal.
While I do admire a man who awards me his undivided focus, at that moment I was busy with my own focus, my internal counsel divided as to whether I should murder Rick while I was clearly not in my right mind and said murder would, by any competent jury, be excused as a crime of passion in self defense or wait till later, when though it would be a cold-blooded crime, premeditated, it would lack witnesses. A counsel divided just stands there.

It was a weird moment, tense, as I have said, and it stretched out kind of too far because I was not only angry, I had not asked for this and I was scared. Really scared to say a stupid poem for this slender, mild academic who was now looking kindly, carefully, away from the awkward, seething, mute stranger at his side and glancing politely but questioningly over at his star debater. Something? Anything? Since Rick just stood, his back against the door, arms folded, mouth closed, ostentatiously calming his breathing, giving me silent glare for silent glare, Dr. Parnell turned back to me to wait with calm hands and only slightly raised eyebrows, clearly communicating that he was a gifted teacher who lived to help young people reach their full potential, however oddly they went at it, and that he was there for me.
Whenever.

I found I couldn't hate Rick more than I wanted to like Dr, Parnell, that I couldn't scratch Rick's eyes out or burst into tears or faint on this lovely man so I just caved, collapsed, crumbled, and said the damn poem.

For that small, small act of succumbing I received in exchange all the surprised applause, admiring, sincere praise and monetary rewards a freshman girl could desire. As, I suppose, Rick had known I would. Well, probably not, on reflection, all the monetary rewards a freshman girl could desire; not all of those, no, but more than than I had seen coming in the brief, fierce struggle down the quiet hall of the old administration building to Dr. Parnell's office. Rick had not mentioned scholarships, but as Dr. Parnell happily questioned me, discovering I had been a Sterling Scholar in English, reflecting that I knew my way around spoken English, even in verse form and that there was certainly money in that, Rick gave me one firm nod. Yes. As it should be. And off they went, Rick and the doctor praising my recitation to the skies and commending each other for discovering me and plotting my imminent addition to the team, while I got to be simultaneously livid (discovery?!? hey, you guys know I'm still here, right? what am I suddenly, an object?) and secretly, terribly, pleased (hey! they like me! they really like me! and I've just become an...an..object! coool). This was precisely the way things always turned out with Rick. Huge rewards in return for what any sane person would describe as small, unimportant losses. Like being forced to audition.
It was horrible.

Horrible and every time a huge defeat, but the defeats never made any difference except for differences like this one, for example; thanks to Rick's machinations I suddenly had a full scholarship handed to me, which was HUGE since we were poor at home and it would never, in a zillion years, have occurred to me to try for one myself. I would not have thought I merited any such thing. Never would have crossed my mind. When I say it made no difference I mean it made no difference to Rick. I so, so, didn't want him to shove me onto a better place (again!), to force me into being (once more) infinitely better off, because. Because. Because I felt a deep moral obligation to resist. Afraid that if he succeeded he would think he ruled the world and, hellfire and damnation, I was not going to be a part of any world Rick ruled. Trouble was, he did rule the world, and he knew he ruled it. He would be just the same, to me, the very same, the day after he had smoothed my way at school (perhaps, perhaps, even made it possible for me to continue) as he had been the day before and would be two weeks hence. Had I triumphed in my little rebellion, preventing him giving me that desperately needed help, he then would have been, with me, the selfsame Rick of the day before. He would notice neither my gratitude nor my vexation. Monarchs do not require, thanks anyway, appreciation for improving the lives of their subjects, it's what they were born to do, but neither do they ask approval or permission for their plans. They execute; you benefit. Had I thwarted his intervention on my behalf, he, as king of the world, would have been well within his acknowledged rights to have committed me forthwith to a lunatic asylum. Not a voice would have been raised in my defense. Not one. Not, of course, that Rick would ever have told, mentioned in any way either that he helped me or that I resisted. Had I pushed him away hard enough, unbreakably stony and silently unyielding in Dr. Parnell's office, Rick would have just looked at me, then held the door open for me as we left, made pleasant conversation or not as he walked me to my dorm and disappeared from my life for a month. Or shown up the next day sitting with his feet on my grandmother's quilt, his homework spread all over my bed, ignoring me at close range. Or brought me lunch and left it on my desk. Or asked me to the Winter Ball. Or brought a truly hot date to hang out in my living room. Or none of these. Just as he would if he succeeded.

I see myself never writing fiction. Harder than I can do to wrestle someone I knew onto a (virtual) page and bind him there with words. How impossible to build a man from the ground, flesh him out to the full. Of course, I could simplify. Yes, that must be what sometimes happens. I've read those books.

Rick was not simple. One evening after a fracas (never one to back down, me) with the football-playing boyfriend of my (former) cheerleader roommate I stumbled out to the big common room, too angry even to see tables and chairs. I have a bad temper and though I'm better now, at this point in my life I believe I had several bad tempers warring even with each other. Sat with my back to the room, face to the bricks, melting, dissolving, consumed. Rick was suddenly crouching beside me, remote, curious. Asking what was wrong with me. How did he do that? Materialize like that? And how did he choose his moments? I was unable to give complete responses but could indicate I'd had a set to. Rick stood and considered me from that altitude then held out his hand. "Come on, there's someone you need to meet." Sorry, Rick, not this time, oh, so not in the mood. I didn't deign to look at him or his hand. He calmly used it to haul me up and begin dragging me. I became compliant quickly; it was embarrassing when he did that. He took me across the dark campus, humming Primary songs, and knocked at an office door (yep, we've seen this before). A small, homely, sandy haired man answered, delighted to see Rick. Rick said, "She needs to talk," and closed the door with me on the inside. The man sat down smiling, as if all this were perfectly commonplace. Perhaps it was, certainly judging from my experience Rick may have spent much of his sophomore year dragging struggling freshman girls into the offices of wonderful teachers and counselors.
This man was one, a wonderful teacher and counselor, and a father and a bishop and after he asked me what was on my mind I talked to him for two hours. It was already late when I started. I have no idea how he led any sort of life, helping people willy-nilly that way, but he saved my life, that night and many times after that night. When I finally opened the door to leave, all cried out and floating on the peace that bishop had poured into me, Rick was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, staring into the distance, waiting. He got up without a word and walked me a very little of the way home. I ran the rest alone, always terrified in the dark.

He was not nice to me. He made fun of me, cruelly. I walked into my bedroom from the bathroom, dressing for a dance in a borrowed formal, and he was just there, sitting at my desk. He looked up from his book, ignoring my spluttering and shock to look me over, asked if I would marry him, and went back to his reading. I said something hard and empty and scathing. It didn't matter. It never mattered what I said. The thing about Rick was that nothing made a dent. I know, I kicked and kicked. If you fail to leave a mark you vanish without a trace.

"I'm singing at church," he said. "Come." I went with Jane who was a year older than me and had been Rick's friend since the year before and loved him. I loved Jane. He came in, saw us, nodded, sat with other girls. Stood up to sing with boys I didn't know, making them look like children though they had returned from their missions and he had yet to go. Stood with his hand in his pocket, calm, offhand, waiting like nothing. And when they sang, he sang the solos. I guess the shock showed on my face, and he saw it. Royalty does not smirk when it is acting royally but the thing they do that is smirking is what he did. "He can sing," I said to Jane. "He can sing." She smiled at me with too-bright eyes, the special, happy sadness of a wonderful girl best friends with a man who will not love her. "Silly," she said kindly to me, "of course he can sing. How else do you think he played Danny last year?" He did? He acts? Too? I hadn't known. He had played the lead in Grease and quarrelled fiercely, continuously, with the director; the blond girl who played Sandy had been his girlfriend and wasn't anymore. I don't think he spoke to her that year. He stood in the church, singing like a miracle, like a dream. Left without talking to us.

Now you know a little about this friend. Only you don't know how silly he was, sillier than anyone could possibly be while looking for all the world like America's ambassador to France. You know how Edward-the-Vampire can get people to do things by smiling at them and leaning forward while he talks? Rick could do that for reals and he was every bit as dangerous. I don't know how to write about him smart and funny, clever and kind, making everyone in the room (especially, but not exclusively, the girls) feel like they were special and known. I can't write that stuff, I don't know how. Would I say, we all went on a hayride and Rick was there on the wagon and no one minded that he isn't in our ward and he was just so much fun! So dear! Made us laugh all evening! Even the Priesthood brethren! Helped everyone down from the wagon and complimented everyone and sat with his arm around everyone and brought them treats! What a guy! And he looks so mature for his age! There, now can you see it? I made that up, but it would be something like that. Arm around everyone. Just don't try to be the girl sitting next to him. Just don't try.

Do I entice you? Do I speak you fair?
Or rather do I not in plainest truth
Tell you I do not nor I cannot love you?
Midsummer, Act II, Sc.1

He did look older than the rest of us. I marked my eighteenth birthday during the months I knew Rick. He was nineteen and not on a mission, but should have been, he told me. Should have been gone. I made him show me his driver's licence. One of the few times he really smiled at me. About me. I thought it was the moustache that made him look so much older till a day I came trudging home from class to find him reading on the (former) cheerleader roommate's bed. (You don't get plot like this at BYU.) He kept his head down while I worked through the roll of irritation and exasperation (privacy, locked doors, personal space, why bother, where is my chocolate?). Our customary ritual of greeting. Then he looked up slowly and I didn't know him because the moustache was gone and because he looked oddly...real. Exposed. Wary? Hurtable. Still immeasurably older than me, immeasurably distant, the beautiful Governor Royal of the Eastern Seaboard, beloved for his flawless management of all matters from weather to birthday presents yet pained in his glorious soul that while his books of poems were critically acclaimed, the populous had not embraced them and poetry is so edifying for a populous. Ah well, he would only be pained in secret, only show a sliver of it here, on my roommate's bed.
"You shaved," I said. "I did," he answered. "I like this better," I said and that was brave and a gift. "It'll grow back," he said.

"I don't have a partner so you're debating with me. I entered us."
Snow was hosting a speech meet and I was there to say my poem and help Dr. Parnell. That's all I was there for.
"I don't have a partner so you're debating with me. I entered us. Here's our number."

Flabbergasted is such a luscious word. Say it to yourself with concentration and lots of breath support. Webster tells me it's 18th century slang, probably from flabby and aghast. Those words were me. Fabulous. The stuff of fable. I'd never seen, never seen, a debate round. "Oh, sweetie," he said, hands tight and supportive on both my arms, "it doesn't matter what you say because I'll be speaking second. And anyway, it's too late. What are you worried about?" looking at me carefully, "You look terrific. And I'll buy you lunch."
Lunch. Hmm.
"What's the resolution?" I ask carefully.
"Mmm?" He's flipping through note cards. "Ask Gary."
Gary is Dr. Parnell, who tells me I am a lifesaver and administers emergency aid. And tells me the room number. Rick is waiting at the table in the front of the room, impatient. I say, "You didn't tell me the room number." "Hurry," he says, "you're the first speaker, remember? I know I told you that."

After, I wait to stop shaking and for Rick to talk to me. Something? Anything? He's shaking hands with the other team, who come shake hands with my shaking hands and are very nice, and now he's talking to the judges who he knows, who smile at me, and now he's gathering stuff. Nothing.
"Was it alright?" I ask.
"It was fine. Why?" He's being an idiot.
"Did I do alright?"
"You were great. We didn't forfeit the round." (That kills a team score.) "And I told you, it didn't matter what you said." He is finishing, looking at me, impassive and also curious. "You speak really well. Your thought processes are very strange. Lunch?"
Yes.

But his wallet is in his jeans pocket in his room and he has to help with tabulation but we can still get lunch if I will run and get his money. Run means run, lunch is only an hour. I excel at running in heels (after all these years science has shown how good it is for us, sprinting on our toes). And I'm hungry and he owes me.

This is the story I set out to tell, not Rick ruling the world or the speech meet or our lunch or the rest of the day or how he left school after finals or how he would call me, sometimes, looking for Jane. Just the story of me getting his wallet.

I had forgotten about his room and it set me back a bit. He and his roommate were conducting an experiment, determining what would happen if no one ever hung up clothing again. Lesser people have toyed with this same project in an unscientific and haphazard way (a badly conducted version is going on not twenty feet from where I now sit typing); these two proposed a rigorous application of the scientific method. Question, hypothesis, careful documentation. They took pictures, posted a notebook for ease in recording observations. The pile of clothing completely filled the space between the unmade beds and spilled up onto them. (Not making beds was part of this, too. Of course.) You could open the door but that was it. I mentioned, I think, how silly Rick could be, well, he had told me the jeans were on the floor between the beds but there was no longer a floor. Time was wasting and I worked fast, grabbing with my right hand and, as everything in the pile proved not to be jeans with a wallet in them, chucking stuff onto the bed at my left. I'd gone about a third of the way into the pile and was actually reaching into the back pocket of a pair of jeans for what I was fairly sure was my lunch ticket when I became aware of the most awful creeping horror. The clothing I had been piling onto the unmade bed was moving. Slowly, shifting, without apparent direction. And it started breathing, moaning a little, now moving more and moving faster. I was clawing my way through the door (with the wallet) when a gym shoe flashed out from under the crawly, tumbling mass and I saw all. Rick's roommate, indistinguishable amidst his own experiment's apparatus, had been napping in the petri dish and I had buried him under a mountain of scientific evidence.

Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit,
For I am sick when I do look on thee.
Midsummer, Act II, Sc.1

That's my little story. That's it. That's what I thought of for years, if I thought of Rick at all. The lost wallet and the haunted bed. Till I tried to put it down here, just a funny storylet, and discovered I had to explain, justify, reveal, something, anything, lest anyone assume from what I said that not hanging up his clothes summed up this person I have renamed Rick so that I could write about him without his permission. In writing we rule the world; I work without his assent, I protest to myself that I needn't justify my memories. Sometimes, trying to show you how I saw him and burdened by only the memories I have, some secret, some faded, I spun little scenes that never were, but that were as really him as anything that ever happened. He made me take all those out, stay scrupulously truthful. I felt him laughing at me for using words I cannot spell, guesses so bad spell check runs amok in a hundred false directions. He always mocked my odd vocabulary; "That would be a word you've never heard spoken, right?" and corrected the pronunciation. He scared me into caution. He really was funny. Making me take a history class held in the late afternoon he promised, "It doesn't matter which half you sleep through, the other half will be amazing." The gift of that professor was so great I was a history major for two whole terms. And I held back, here, the unbelievable stories, how he took me to a formal and spent the whole time talking to other girls, dancing with them and me sort of alongside, then the elaborate, fantastical compliments he paid me when I threw a fit about it, apparently expecting me to believe the story he spun, that the depth and danger of my charms left him no alternative. And how he turned away again. And how I carried those compliments for weeks, for a year. Stuff of fables. But I wanted to tell the truth. I wanted what I said to matter.

What is the force that binds the stars?
I wore this mask to hide my scars.
What is the power that pulls the tides?
I never could find a place to hide.
What moves the earth around the sun?
What could I do but run and run and run?
Afraid to love, afraid to fail,
A mast without a sail.
The moon's a fingernail and slowly sinking,
Another day goes by and now I'm thinking,
That this indifference was my invention
When everything I did sought your attention.
You were my compass star, you were my measure,
You were a pirate's map, a buried treasure.
If this was all correct, the last thing I'd expect,
The prosecution rests, it's time that I confessed,
I must have loved you.

Ghost Story
Sting

Blessed, Honored Pioneer

Brightly Colored Burdens, Brian Kershisnik

In the summer, especially in July, we think about pioneers. We can't help it.

Whenever I think about pioneers
I think of brave women and men.
I like to remember that children came too;
I would like to have been a child then.

For starters, this sentiment was, for me at least, patently false. I wasn't normally one to question, or indeed, even to notice the lyrics of the songs we sang Wednesday afternoons when the bus dropped us all off at the church for Primary, but these sort of jumped out at me. (Interestingly, if you weren't headed into the church for Primary meeting the bus still dropped you at the church and you walked the rest of the way home. Same for the activity bus that brought you home from the school in Fillmore if you had to stay late. You walked from a central drop. Alone. In the Dark. I'll tell you more about that another time. Back to Songs About Pioneers.)
I did NOT want to be a child then, or at any rate, there. I did NOT want to cross the Great American Desert (named by the namers of names before they got very far west and found out about the actual great American deserts. Baker, anyone? Barstow?) on foot or in a wagon or on a fast horse or a light spring buggy or any other way. I wanted ocean and trees and cliffs and mist and stone walls haunted by aristocratic shades with romantic tales attached, not stoic ghosts moving ever westward with such grim determination they had never noticed (or so it appeared to the child I was) that we were here. This was it, The Place, we had gone no further and had been here as if for years really quite some time now. The pioneers we sang of every July in preparation for their day on the 24th seemed to me like sailors in ghost ships, clinging eternally to their prairie schooners, ceaselessly roving westward, losing an endless supply of loved ones along the way, sharing out flour by teacupfuls from sacks mysteriously replenished, raising by their faith the essential draft animals which were doing their solid best to expire, fiddling, singing and dancing their ghostly heads off around their buffalo-chip campfires. (Good thing our civilization didn't destroy the buffalo any sooner, how on earth would anyone have ever gotten themselves and their families across those plains to colonize and conquer the west without the buffalo? We'd still be stacked up on the eastern seaboard, standing in line for passage in sailing ships headed 'round the Horn, stymied in enacting our Manifest Destiny till the invention of air travel.) The pioneers of my childhood were contradictory that way, always, always still in their crossing though I knew they ages ago got here; I lived, after all, in a town they made out of nothing. All the Mormon relatives that stretched between them and me were somewhere in the cemetery, to be ordered and stacked by those with the interest to do so. What was now the granary on our lot was first a house with one inch of milled lumber, a layer of tar paper and several of pretty wallpaper between the pioneers who lived inside it and the Utah Territory that lived outside it. The upstairs loft where the entire family slept (always said as if there had been thirty of them, at least) was my playhouse. They made, used and left the blacksmith's shop still standing twenty feet beyond the granary. I knew they had gotten here. But all the stories of them I ever heard as a child were snapshots en route and our Primary songs embalmed them in forward motion on a great wheel, Sisyphean, running on a barrel in water, an exhibit for all time of The Crossing, frozen in their faith, a grim and impossible comparative measure for ours.
I'll show you.

Day after day the wagons are rolling,
Onward and westward we ever must roam.
Roll along, roll along, covered wagons, take us safely to our new home.
Night after night we sit round the campfire
Singing the songs that remind us of home.
Roll along, roll along, covered wagons, take us safely to our new home.
Someday we'll reach the land of our dreaming,
Settle and build on some land of our own.
Roll along, roll along, covered wagons, take us safely to our new home.

See what I mean? When do they arrive? Not in any Primary song I ever sang. There's that ominous ever must roam for good measure. Nobody's got an ETA, sister, so settle down and pass the ashcakes. And just for further glorious confusion, where in this song is home? The songs that reminded the child-me of home were the songs about the pioneers leaving home to come to...home.
This is the catchy descant from To Be A Pioneer

We are marching, ever marching,
We are marching, ever marching,
Marching onward, ever onward.

Doomed to walk for eternity... The actual verses remind us that, of course, one needn't do the normal things we associate with pioneers, walk a thousand miles OR MORE, or leave your family dear, to gain pioneer status, but believe you me, any Kanosh Primary child worth its salt (a very large lick of which sold for not very much at my dad's General Mercantile) knew the difference between pioneering and BEING a pioneer. What camp of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers does your grandma belong to? Your people come in wagons? Handcarts? On the shameful train? Don't be trying to tell us stuff.

Pioneer children sang as they walked
and walked
and walked
and walked.

Like that? Good. Repeat it. In addition to walking walking walking they got to wash in streams, work and play, camp, read and pray, but the song leaves them as it found them,

Week after week they sang as they walked
and walked
and walked
and walked
and walked.

That last walked, the last note, has a fermata so a wise chorister can draw it out to the gasping point, leaving the walking children suspended on our fading breath, for as long as necessary to drive home the point.

Little pioneer children, gathering berries for food;
See the pioneer children hunting chips for wood.

Do you know how many berries lie between me in my Kanosh chapel and the Gateway to the American West? This was why they needed the bottomless flour sacks, like in a fairytale. The very best part about this song was that the chorister had to explain chips to us. It wasn't that we thought it was interesting or a big deal, it was that she thought it was.
I think they are a dismal, dispirited bunch, those little songs. Slow, plodding, melancholy. Child-sized dirges for our departed ancestors. The only one with any spirit at all was The Handcart Song.

When pioneers moved to the west,
With courage strong they met the test,
They pushed their handcarts all day long
And as they pushed they sang this song:
For some must push and some must pull
As we go marching up the hill;
So merrily on our way we go
Until we reach the Valley-o.

There you go. These are my people. (Hey, Sam.) Strong, merry, tested, but moving on to somewhere they called the Valley-o. Who could resist? Plus, this has a rollicking good tune and made me feel excited for them. Like they were working through something hard but that it had a way through and it had an end and God didn't want them to suffer for the sake of it, He wanted them to make it and He knew they would and that they were going to be very happy-o when they got there. Got there. These people got there.

In the summer we think about pioneers.
We put in sod right before we flew to New York City. I told the painter we can do it but it will take all of us and anyone who will help and it will take all we've got, absolutely all of it, but then it will be over and we can sleep on the plane. I figured it would take us three days. We had two and a half. It was hard and hot and horrible and friends came to help us. On the worst day, the middle day, the dirt-moving day, one friend showed up and stayed with us all day. It made us work more cheerfully. Cheerful, because we had to be. She and I leaned on our shovels in the blistering afternoon sun (I don't know if she got a happenin' tan from this endeavor; I did not) and talked about our pioneer ancestors. Only the women because we don't understand men in the first place and we wouldn't have been them, anyway. Our talk was of hardship and unending physical labor. Our summation was that we could not have Done It. Could not. The next day tons of people showed up throughout the day and into the dark of the night they still came to help the painter while our youngest child had a birthday/end-of-school bash on the part of the lawn we didn't fix and I began packing. A sod bee, a grass raising. With those people I also talked about pioneers putting in fruit trees and plowing for grain, digging irrigation ditches. And we made it. In the morning there was green, green grass where before there had only always been dirt and we got on a plane and flew away while our automatic sprinkler system saw to our gorgeous non-productive planting. And we flew home to grass. Done and done.

July 24th is Pioneer Day. We celebrated it in Wales. Noah will celebrate it in Macau. It's my mom's birthday. She can use it to never have a fuss made about her birthday because what can we do? The Kanosh Town 24th celebration is consuming and enormous and what can we do? We can always feel a tiny bit, just a very little, guilty because we forgot to get something for that day, forgot the greeting because we were in charge of the Nursery float for the parade and all the two year olds had to be in costume in the back of the crepe paper decorated truck by 8:30 for the parade to begin at 9 and we had to keep them alive till it was all over. Perfect Pioneer Day. Just a pinch of guilt to season the dutch oven beef.

I went to the Kanosh house for three days to clean and fix. The painter stays there mostly alone so there isn't as much of that cleaning and fixing. I sat for a time in what I intended to make a flower garden. It never prospered, never took, but I sold myself into bondage and slavery spinning dreams of a day, someday, with lush dense flowers, clear beds, tamed paths, circle-in-the-square. I worked my brains out; it is nearly gone now. It's been watered and the paths mowed, but it's as if without constant observation my flowers just shimmered away into the wind that always, always blows. My sister tells me she went to the house she sold a couple of years ago, where the new owners have watered and mowed faithfully though they are not really gardeners. She asked for starts from her old plants; sure, they said. But there was nothing, nothing to take. Beds full of grass; weeds where gravel paths had been. Just that much time, looking away for a few seasons, and it was all gone. Why, we asked each other. Why did we work so hard? For what? For everything to just blow away when our backs were turned? Does nothing survive?

We thought about pioneers. We talked about England and how we had tried to build it in Kanosh. Singing the songs that remind us of home. Scandinavia. The British Isles. This other Eden. Our people came to Utah from God's gardens. Green and mists and cliffs and stone walls. Is this dusty Kanosh yard all that there will be when I'm gone? Stickers and foxtails? I was suddenly irrationally joyous I had written a few words and a few people had read them. Shakespeare was right, not marble, not monuments, words. These stay. This is also why I always sang Primary songs about the Crossing, those were the words most of the pioneers wrote down, a momentous life event, not the day-to-day once they reached the Valley-o.

I spent two solid days in my old house (though all my houses are old) in a deep melancholy. Deep even for me. Soft midnight blue velvet coffin lining. I thought a lot about death. I thought about impermanence and wasted effort. I thought in a panic about my children inheriting my messes as they now stood. On the third day, as I was vacuuming the ceiling I started talking to God (perhaps because I was looking up). I thought about the family that had built the house, a family I knew had struggled. Zella Allen, who died after being a widow for a long time. The builder, a man never really well, never really strong, a barber. When we tore out the plaster in the bathroom it was full of human hair. Curly, straight, lots of colors. Zella wove rugs. Nothing remained of their work in my yard. We found a bit of foundation on the property line, an out-building we would really have appreciated using. But the lot was nearly bare when we bought it. An old apple, a lilac and some roses. Those last. A young English walnut, a young black ash and a young locust. Those volunteer. A large Siberian elm. Those can't be killed. A terribly bumpy lawn, you could never lay on it or even sit without great care.
I wondered about hard lives and I asked God, is this house just haunted by a sad, overworked ghost? And He asked, would that be you?
After I got over that for a while I finally got tired of myself and asked Him, am I going to just be broken-hearted about this for the rest of my life? Do I have to think about this forever? And He asked, what can you learn?

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love.

I had talked to my sister about pioneers, about nothing being left of the gardens they made except where someone kept on keeping them alive. I thought about the apple trees, the lilacs and the roses. I thought about going with the painter's mother to Reliance, Wyoming, to show the girls the house where Grandma was born, about finding a town run-down and bereft, about the frozen horror of the memories of parties and football, of Beautiful Garden contests and prize vegetables. There are no gardens now in Reliance. Grandma could only find the house where she was born by counting buildings, first in her memory and then on the street. I thought about pride and I thought about squalor. Impermanence. I thought about myself fighting Siberian elms tooth and nail all the years I kept a garden in Kanosh, fighting them because they are boorish, trashy outlaws. But they cut the endless wind, they grow quickly, they don't drink much and they give shade. Had I fostered a few of them they would have given me shelter and respite--and I thought about my ancestors and some of the relatives at the reunions this summer.

Here's my heart, oh, take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

In July we sing to our pioneers. We cannot help ourselves.

What can I learn?
If I had it to do over I would have rolled out the bumps and filled the holes in the lawn at the Kanosh house the first year we lived there. My sister points out it is difficult to accomplish such a thing in Kanosh, the geography is against you. Where do you rent a roller? This is the point, I would do it differently.
I would plant apple trees and lilacs and roses.
I would let the trashy elms give me shade.
I would build high fences to keep out the wind.
I would finish every room in my house. Every room. There is not, right now, one finished room. I would finish every room.
We would dress the backlot and grow our own beef because cattle do well in Kanosh.
I would go visit England and build a Utah garden in Kanosh.
I would try much harder to keep in touch with the friends I had outside Millard County. This will surprise both of them.
I would, someday, write down everything that happened so people could remember that my son always sang as he walked through the gardens and my middle daughter spoke English like she learned it on Mars and the little one rubbed her face in the cats she always always carried. Write it down when I read a book or do a play or can peaches or sing with a friend. Words last, don't let them all be about not having gotten there yet.
I was raised on bits of stories, pieces of sentences I never thought to corroborate, fill in, flesh out. A woman in the first company to reach the Valley-o confiding to her journal she'd far rather go on as far again as she had come than stay in The Place they had found. Chicken coops, empty on every backlot, left after no one was selling eggs anymore, but people still telling me how the eggs were stored, shipped. Stories of fruit raised as cash crops, peaches you can hardly grow any more and watermelons stolen from fields at night. Watermelons? Who can grow watermelons? Brigham Young zipping through Kanosh, going somewhere warmer, promising no one would ever lack for food if they'd be good. Faithful. The Mormons who didn't pick up and go on to California, who stayed in the place they got to and submitted to being made into Saints. The Place, they were promised, would be good for that.

I see the emptiness of allowing myself to just keep journeying, distracted by hard work from being where I really am, no matter how faithful I may think it makes me look. I see the point is to get there, to at least be there as if for years. Day from day in my own Valley-o.
The painter says, we're older now. We've learned.
It's time to arrive.
My pioneers planted lilacs and roses alongside the apples and grain. Have you heard the stories about all the dances, the parties in the Valley-o? How they played as hard as they worked, right from the start? Every day, day after day, on the way and after they arrived.

It's a bonfire at my house. Someone will bring a guitar (he'd better). Plan to stay late. I'll put out quilts. The grass is green and smooth.
Lilacs everywhere, I found old roses still alive under the pyracantha, in the spring I'll plant apples.

We learned other pioneer songs in Primary too, from Sister George, in months other than July.

Come ye children of the Lord,
Let us sing with one accord.

When dark clouds of trouble hang o'er us,
And threaten our peace to destroy
There is Hope smiling brightly before us
And we know that Deliverance is nigh.

How blessed the day when the Lamb and the Lion
Shall lie down, together, without any ire.

...singing the songs that remind us of home.

Whenever I think about pioneers
I think of brave women and men.


Winter Dancing, Brian Kershisnik

Stories. Out of a Fired Ship.

Throwing Rocks at Playa Negra, Brian Kershisnik

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
For he commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.
They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits' end.
Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.
He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.
Then they are glad because they be quiet...

Psalm 107:23-30

When I was little I wanted to run away to sea.
Rather, I wanted to run away to the sea-faring England of the nineteenth (eighteenth? seventeenth?) century where (or should I say when?) first my heart and then my whole self might be carried off by a dashing captain instead of by the honorable but bloodless, um, curate? chosen for me by my careful but unimaginative landed gentry parents, to his ship (not the curate's ship, the captain's ship; keep up), The Black Emerald (or something), where I would win over his at-first-reluctant-crew and bring them luck and prosperity though not until the accomplishment of multiple and significant plot complications. Or, wait, no, be decorously courted by the same or a similar dashing sea captain after he spied me through the window of a, let me see, bookseller's establishment, instantly losing his here-to-for brave and unyielding heart to the lovely, book-buying vision who, alas, vanished (without a trace or clue!), till at last, but only after requisite strivings and sufferings on both our parts taking up page after page (in my journal, I suppose), he might wed me in the ancient rose-bound garden of my father's manor. Or, no--listen!--move the manor till it's high atop wave-lashed cliffs, where I can grow up watching the brave ships come and go (brave because rocky cliffs are murder on boats), frolicking among the roses (which are loving the salty air, we have a wonderful gardener, been with the family since...always; his loyalty will figure in later), kissed by their spray (the waves' spray; roses don't, of course, spray) and also (kissed) by a handsome reckless lad I played with as an innocent child, who, though not as high-born as some (the lad, not my winsome self) still made good through derring-do on the high seas and came back to my father's aforementioned salt-lashed, rose-swept garden for wooing both decorous and reckless, as occasion required. And, at the end, a wedding. After the wedding there need be no further recording of this story. It'll be too...fast-paced.

Here are the salient points of this particular facet of my childhood desires, in case you were overcome and missed them. Grip your smelling salts, loosen your corset and pay attention.
1-Ocean and more ocean. Ships with it.
2-Reckless, gentlemanly boy, taller than myself. Wind-swept. Laughing eyes. Reads by candlelight. Understands the use of a sword. Can sail, ride, not panic, perform advanced maths, fix what's broken even including animals and people, carry a compass and map in his head, is honest and true and a crack shot. My father taught me these are the essential characteristics of the ideal man and I never doubted him.
3-My self desired and sought after by said boy.
4-Comfortable life with sufficient means in an era before antibiotics, reliable communication or transportation, general understanding of basic sanitation, easily accessible chocolate, air-conditioning, reasonable health and dental care, and toilet paper. What mattered paltry, mundane, domestic detail to my ten year old self? All I knew was that satisfying description of the abundance and richness of such a life would demand an adjectival overload resulting in a significantly greater number of hyphens, exclamation points and parenthetical statements than ever I encountered in my own dull, dry century.

One might with reason assume all this was primarily about the boy.
But it was, in fact, about the ocean.
I was born in Seattle, lived in San Antonio and then in San Diego. Water was big, and it was there. I was about three years old when we moved to California. There was the beach and there was the bay and they were salty and you went into them, often, as often as your parents' lives allowed. There was also the marina where you walked up and down the bobbing sidewalks with your dad to look at boats and maybe get fish and chips at a water-side shop with gorgeous dark blue and green albacore-topped tables, marlins and swordfish stuffed on the walls and your dad unaccountably ordering fried clams. This is the birthright; smoothed stones and sand and salt water and gulls and sailing ships and sun and shells and fog and wind that tastes of the sea.

I am the captain and I have been told
That tomorrow we land and my ship has been sold.
Now losing this boat is worth scarce a mention
I think of the crew most of all the first ensign.
For all we learned the sea.

Not long before I turned eight we moved to Utah, where there are mountains instead of hills and wildfires on the desert and where bright little fast-moving streams tumble down over slick rocky beds through mountains to each of the valley towns pioneers built, intercepting, re-channeling the water through webs of irrigation ditches, garden and field furrows, flood plains, town just as big as each creek could sustain on its way out to the west deserts (you see on which side of the mountains I have always lived; I have no idea what happens to streams that flow down on the eastern slopes of mountain ranges). And, really, that was all the water there was. Fresh (but don't drink it; cows, you know) and noisy and shockingly, achingly cold with darkly glimpsed trout where it was deep and water skeeters zooming around where it was shallow, a teensy, invisible water frisbee under each of their six feet. You went to this new water as often as your parents' lives would allow. Between times you could run in the sprinkler and wade in the town ditches or, once you were big enough to ride that far on a bike, go slide down the spillway at the fast and dangerous dam. And Utah was weirdly comforting, oddly familiar because it had those unexplainable gulls. The child that was me knew the story about the gulls and the crickets of course, but no one ever explained what had possessed them to stay.

The summer after we moved to Kanosh we drove back to California for a visit and the strangest thing happened. I was lying down in the back of the gold station wagon (when I was little the color of a car functioned like its Christian name. We always spoke of cars by their full names; white van, green Dart, gold station wagon) on the folded-down seats with the little sisters and all our vacationing stuff eating fruit we had denied at the border. It was dark and we were nearly to Somewhere, California, my dad kept saying "about half an hour more" and all of a sudden the breeze changed. Just for a minute the air was utterly different, alive to me and I could taste it all the way to the inside of my soul. I yelled "what's that!?!" and sat up so fast I almost got sick and caused an accident. "What?" my dad asked but it was gone! and I waited but it didn't come back and I was too, too sad so I said "nothing" and lay back down on a sister that had usurped my spot. During the ensuing necessary fighting that magical air thing happened again and I yelled and lunged over the seat between my parents. "That! What is that smell!?" because smell was the closest I could get to this living, quivering sensation I could taste and feel. My parents were too nonplussed, I think, to get irritated at my histrionics but they had no idea what I was on about and then after a little moment my dad said, "Oh. I think she can smell the sea," and my mom said, no, we were way too far from the coast (it was a fib about being only half an hour away from "there") but my dad was right. It was the smell of the sea and I hadn't known it was gone till it came back. All my baby and little girlhood are bound up in that smell as my older childhood and teen years are in the of smell river willows and rain on fields of dry grass and grain.

The games of imagination and adventure I authored and choreographed fell roughly into one of three fairly equally important categories.
1. Huts. Building and maintenance.
2. Quests. My children called this game Gypsies or Faerie Wars. Some good friends called the same game Hobos. You dress up, fight people using sticks, make forts and shelters which must constantly be moved and remade due to famine, sword and fire, and fight more people using more sticks. It was for me mostly an excuse to wear the best cape, walk loudly and carry a long stick.
3. Ships.

Huts was played mostly alone amongst the sisters, we tended to fight over decor and made good neighbors but bad roommates.
Quest requires cast, we all played.
Ships was really for me alone. Played in groups it became just water bound Questing. The tall ships of my imaginings were no place for small sisters. You had to be always thinking on a ship, you couldn't be watching out for little landlubbers; they tended to be swept overboard and you just had to grit your teeth and carry on, admitting it was probably the best for all. Of course, you wanted to be careful, overly cavalier behavior could get you in some real trouble with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea when you made land and re-entered port for provisions at dinnertime.

In the deep back lot of the house my grandparents bought for their retirement, where we first lived in Kanosh, there was a massive tree trunk, limbs lopped off, burned on much of its surface, its sides and bottom covered in a thick charcoal. The top was not burned though, so once you accomplished the tricky ascent (tricky because my mom forbade any charcoal on clothing) the tree was so huge it was plenty big enough for seven year old me to walk all over it with ease, sit or even lay on it, far too broad for me to straddle it like a horse (I have never been a limber human). It was my first ship and it floated in a field of grassy waves, undulating like the surface of the bay where we used to swim, green waves in spring turning to gold as I sailed the great log through that first summer. Handily, if little sisters came clambering to join the crew, a captain longing for solitude could simply not throw them a line, lie back and close his eyes knowing they could not scale the charcoaled sides alone. If they ran crying to tattle, Mom would tell them she didn't want them to play there, anyway. In this way I learned a ship is both island and mountaintop. The deck of my ship was smoothly gray and softly fibrous, almost fraying like fabric, which I associate with old and weathered cottonwood or poplar. After my grandparents came and we moved up the street we still played endlessly on that tree, always a ship, in crews or as solitary sailors. Then one summer our tree ship was just suddenly gone, an enormous emptiness awaiting us beyond the watered, mowed lawn, in the dirt between it and the horse corrals. All that was left was a pile of its charcoal, as if it had slipped clean from its black cracked skin; a footprint, a shadow where it had faithfully floated all those years at anchor. Grandpa had burned it to make it go away. He told us it was in his way. The grasses grew into the space it had held but no use was ever made of the ground there. I knew how Grandpa disapproved of our daydreamy games, the way he disapproved of a pet, a dog that didn't work, herd or hunt, and I always wondered. "Why did he burn it up?" I asked my dad, heartbroken. "Well, honey." He stopped, sighed. "It was there."

Guiding a ship, it takes more than your skill,
It's the compass inside, it's the strength of your will.
The first ensign watched as tempests all tried me,
I sang in the wind as if God were beside me.
For all we learned the sea.

Miraculously and inexplicably there was a boat dry docked in the middle-to-deep backlot of the house my parents moved to, out beyond the blacksmith's shop and therefore hidden from the house. Not hidden from the other houses on the block, but who cared about them? Maybe no one even lived in them. Your own parents are the only ones you have to hide from as long as you're doing nothing wrong. We played there voraciously. Interestingly, this ship required crew. I never wanted to sail our acre-and-a-quarter lot solo in that vessel, I was too worried about the things I was pretty sure lived in it. Rats, you know, live in boats, and I was quite certain black widows lived in this one, too. Black widows seem appropriately associated with ships, don't you think? The mourning souls of the widows of sea-lost sailors hiding and rustling and scuttling about, avenging themselves by secret poison. Shudder. If it's a dangerous game, get younger people to play it with you so you can all be unsafe together. So I rode the grass billows of our backlot with a crew of sisters and cousins, all younger than myself, made brave by their busy humanity. We were very busy on that ship. Every moment of every day of that good ship's log recorded exercises in narrowly averted Tragedy and Disaster. You know, some of those things can take just hours and hours and a huge amount of yelling and throwing yourself about to avert. We came off conquerors, but it was always, always a near thing. I can't tell you how many times one or other of us stood on the burning deck, desperately bossing people, till mysteriously it fell someone else's turn to direct the narrative flow and another crew member shouldered the bossing. One day when we were all gone on bikes, my dad burned our boat. He explained, taken aback at our fury and outrage at the destruction of our possession, that the boat wasn't worth anything. "You could never use it, it could never float again. It wasn't ever going to be sea worthy. It was a terrible boat." It certainly was never going to float, dry and dusty in the center of a county that regularly receives less than a foot of precipitation a year. Worthy, though, is an interesting word. What gives worth, and how shall we judge it? I honestly believe that to my father (who has saved every issue of Wooden Boat since Noah first made up a subscriber list and began printing in order to raise money to fulfill his commandment from the Lord) that clunky, ugly boat rotting on the backlot, probably built by a Millard County farmer with pretensions to water, was an abomination. My dad was generally amenable to and supportive of our games so long as we held no one hostage and damaged no property. I think he must have truly assumed we all hated that landlocked plywood corpse, felt as strangled and trapped as he did whenever we looked at it. I believe my father's was a purifying fire.

You take the wheel, one more time like I showed you.
We've reached the straits once even I could not go through.

The best of my ships was our hay derrick. A box marked off by huge logs like the first layer of a log cabin, four smooth gray uprights leaning into the center, one from each corner, acting as lines or as mizzen and fore masts, the great central trunk of the derrick making a mighty mainmast with the triangular crane at the top for a sail. Derricks are made to move fairly easily so the crane swung a bit in the wind, creaking and groaning just as masts are supposed to groan and creak. Best of all, my father had laid stacks of rough-sawn wood on the derrick base and tied them down to cure and to dry straight. These made decks and ooh! below decks, cabins and a hold. This was the best ship of them all. This was where I played alone. I loved it most in a storm. Under normal summer conditions it was just too blazingly hot to play there, any metal on the derrick a branding iron, the decks of my ship searingly bright and blindingly hot. Who wants to play Crossing the Equator every darn day? I didn't have a clue what the Arabian Sea was like but I imagined it somehow as dry and dusty as Millard County, ships sliding down white sand dunes like the ones where people rolled Easter eggs at White Mountain. I wanted to sail something more like the Cornish coast. On a sunny day I avoided my derrick like a plague ship but the minute the wind shifted to the south west and brought the scent of rain, big clouds racking up behind South Mountain and then flooding over, spilling across the valley with the sound of thunder and far away flashes of sheet lightning and the suddenly cooler wind whipping around now out of the east, out of the canyon, I would abandon my huts, dump my sisters and cast off in the derrick, three sheets to the wind (not drunk, except on wind; look it up), headed north where the blackest clouds were now. That's the storm pattern in Kanosh, wind and clouds from the south west, twisting around to stack up big rain in the north. I would stand forever on the top deck, holding a line, wind whistling through the rigging and whipping my hair (released from its stupid braid) all over. Watching the storm, feeling it come. Holding on to the central pole, big enough I could really wrap myself around it, watching the lightning snaking all over the valley, feeling the gust and tug of the sails in the twisting of my mast, running before the wind. If it got really wild I could go below to sit in the storm's strange, yellow-gray half light, riding out the lightning and the thunder perfectly safe in my cabin under the lumber, only driven to the house by actual rain, and how often was that going to happen? Not having to defend my solitude as no one really wanted to play ship with me in a storm. "You're like your dad," my mom said, "watching tornadoes outside in the night." I came home from college and the derrick was gone. I was stunned. Too big for games? Over the loss of the last ship? Hardly. My dad loved the derrick, he'd never... "Where's the derrick," I asked my sister, "what happened to it?" She made her eyes big, responding to my anger and to her superior knowledge and to the drama of it all, the downing of The Derrick. "Oh," she breathed, "Dad had to take it down. It got hit by lightning and just blew up. It wasn't safe at all after and he had to burn it."

It's like four o'clock in the morning in some time zone, somewhere, and it's freezing. Noah's trying to wake me up, roll me off the bench in the snack bar where I'm wrapped up and trying to sleep, to sleep. "Come on, Mom. Wake up. You can see the White Cliffs of Dover. Come on." Everyone is asleep, Tom is sleeping and smiling because he's not going to get up, he's seen these cliffs. "Go without me," I say, and Noah leaves, disgusted and disappointed, but now I'm not sleeping. I leave the sleeping girls with the sleeping painter and walk to the top, pulling my scarf tighter against the cold, cold air. I don't tell Noah I'm there. Good thing the girls are asleep, the youngest gets so sick. England is rushing up and down but hardly getting closer. The further off from England, the nearer is to France. Is that how it goes? I look at the cliffs, the houses hugging the bay, the boats hugging the docks, my son hugging himself. Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance? I turn away from the chalk cliffs so that all that I can see, as far as I can see, is water.

I am a captain and I have been told
But I am not shaken I am eight years old
And you are still young but you'll understand
That the stars of the sea are the same for the land.
And we came to learn the sea.

We Learned the Sea
Dar Williams


White Boat, Brian Kershisnik

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.



Noah's photos