Connections

Flowers - peonies, dahlias. I love lilac and honeysuckle for their smell. Oh and beach roses. I have a tattoo of an iris. And I love lilies - hence my daughter's name. I like the big flowers - gladiolas too.

This past September, on the morning of my dear friend Jennifer's wedding, I woke early and rode my bike to a woman's house (we'll call her Mary.) My stepmom decided to join me, and we met Jennifer's sister there. The woman - Mary, has thousands of dahlias planted in her backyard gardens. I learned that morning from Mary that since winters are so bitter in Rhode Island, she has to dig up each of the bulbs in the fall, and then replant them again in the Spring. She said it took a special sort of person to have dahlia gardens in the cold climates, that they had to be "touched".

These gardens were gorgeous, and most assuredly felt enchanted. With wooden arbor-covered gates, the sort where vines and miscellaneous flowers wind their way protectively overhead. The grass was the deepest of greens and wooden benches were placed just so. The perfect spot to sit with a cup of coffee and a friend, or perhaps more often, by oneself. The plantings were mostly informal and certainly abundant. I had the sense, once I'd entered this space, that I was surrounded. Not in a claustrophobic way, but as in an embrace, or snuggled down warm in a well-loved quilt. The trees, the high grasses and the flowers, so many flowers. It felt, and I'm sure you'll think it hyperbolic of me to say, but it felt sacred.

Anyway, about 25 years ago Mary lost her daughter. At the time 16, she was in a car accident on her way to high school...My stepmother happened to stop by, spur of the moment, at Mary's house that morning and was there when the call came in from the police. It is something that you don't easily forget. A year or two before, Mary had stopped by my parent's house to see them on a whim, and it happened to be the morning my sister Naomi was born (she was 3 weeks early and Nan had her at home.) These two women, although friends, were not the close sort who often stopped by to visit each other's houses.

Anyway, on the other end of things, Jennifer's mother committed suicide almost 4 years ago. It was awful. Really and truly awful. Jennifer's mom was friends with Mary too, and used to go to her gardens with her aged and slightly senile mother. Growing up Jennifer would tell me that her grandmother was a bit "off" due to her, we'll say difficult relationship with Jennifer's grandfather.

A spider's web of connections...

So there was Mary who'd lost her daughter; and Jennifer's sister who had lost her mother; and my stepmother and me. We four, roaming through the gardens cutting oversized flowers for the table arrangements at the wedding.

I've been thinking a lot about that morning in terms of my relationship with my stepmother, who has been in my life since I was four. I was really having issues with it and her last year. Which was surprising to me. I have spent so much of my life railing against my "real" mother, that I think I never wanted to acknowledge any issues real or imagined with my step mother. I found myself trying to work through some of my hang ups, and anger and pain - very vocally at one point, with my father at our favorite breakfast spot. I know he must have told her the things that I said, but it's all remained unspoken between the two of us. And over the course of the summer, while I was visiting, she reached out to me. In a very quiet way. Trying to let me know, I think, that she chooses to love me, and wants to include me as a daughter. A daughter of the heart, if not the blood. So here I am thinking about mother-daughter relationships. And that September morning. The beauty and loss; the circle of life and the potential for healing...and the things we do to survive; a thousand flower, annual tribute to a memory. Anyway...that's where my head's been for the past week, revisiting that garden, trying to listen to what it was telling me.

Okay. I'm just a geyser today.

Finito bandito.