The garden you leave behind for the next family risks being erased by the blades of a rented orange tiller. I discovered that digging up these shared roots allows you to carry your history forward into the next season of your life.
The beds looked like something had been erased. Where the dahlias had been there were just holes, oval and clean, the soil darker at the bottom the way a pulled tooth leaves a socket. I crouched at the fence line and touched what I thought was a weed and pulled - and the root came and came, a white thread going down past where my finger could follow, disappearing into the clay like a cord plugged into the house. I pulled again from a different spot and it was the same root, or the same family of root, impossible to say where one ended. The ground was full of decisions nobody had written down.
She had the map pressed flat against the baby's back like she was burping it. My mother opened the door still holding a dish towel - and for a second nobody said anything, just the three of them on the porch in the November cold with the folded paper between them. The handwriting was my father's mother's - I recognized the way she made the letter p, a loop that came back around and crossed itself - and my mother touched the edge of it with one finger, the way you touch something you thought you'd lost. The woman said she'd found it in the track, folded small - and she didn't know what peonies looked like but she wanted to be sure before she did anything in spring. My mother kept the dish towel in her hands and stood there holding it, and I watched her decide not to cry about it, right there in the open doorway, with the baby watching her face.
The Colander in the Dirt
He called me from the car, after - and I could hear the engine still running. He said they had a tiller, the kind you rent, orange itself, and he'd stood on the sidewalk long enough that the father had waved at him, friendly - the way you wave at a neighbor. The spider lilies had come from his mother's house in Opelika, wrapped in wet newspaper in the back of a Buick, and he had never once told me that until he was telling me over the phone in a parking lot in October with the engine running. He said one bulb had come up whole for a second, caught in the tines, before it didn't. I didn't say anything and he didn't say anything - and after a while he said he was going to get gas, and I heard him put it in drive.
The bulb was the size of a shallot, paper-skinned, with a broken stem still attached that left a green smear across his thumb. He had it cupped in both hands on his lap the way you'd carry a coal, though it wasn't warm. His good pants - the gray ones, had a half-moon of mud at each knee that had already started to dry at the edges and crumble. I got in the passenger side and he didn't look up, just sat there with the heat going and the bulb in his hands, and the green smear on his thumb.
The saucer had a crack along the glaze that I'd filled once with clear nail polish, and the bulb sat in it all winter with the stem nub pointing up like it was waiting for something to agree. The skin went the color of old newspaper - then the color of the newspaper's shadow. I moved it once, to dust under it, and set it back in exactly the same spot the way you return a sleeping thing. Sometimes I'd walk past and know it was there without looking, the way you know a photograph is on the wall even in the dark.
What the Tiller Found
Spring came late that year and when it finally came I missed it by a week, and the stem was already three inches out of the saucer's crack before I noticed - pale and urgent, the color of something that had been reaching in the dark for a long time. I didn't have a pot. I used the colander. My mother laughed when she saw it, one short sound, because she recognized it, and we stood there in the kitchen looking at the spider lily in her good pasta strainer with the mud still ringed around the outside from the year before - and neither of us said the word Opelika or the word Buick or his name, though all three of those things were in the room with us, crowding the counter.
The colander stayed on the back step all summer, and the spider lily got tall enough that it tipped, so I wedged a wooden spoon handle between the tines to hold it upright - and the spoon left a rust-colored stripe across the colander's rim where the metal had wept a little in the rain. In August the lily bloomed, six thin red petals opening in a way that looked surprised, and I took a picture of it on my phone and then sat for a long time trying to think of who to send it to. I typed his name and deleted it. I typed it again and let it sit there, just his name, no message - and the lily in the photograph behind it with the wooden spoon visible in the lower corner, and the mud ring still on the colander, and all of that from Opelika, from a Buick, from a wet square of newspaper in somebody's hands on a day I was never there to see. I didn't send it - but I didn't delete it either, and when I finally put the phone down I noticed the rust stripe had left a thin orange mark on the heel of my palm, the way things you carry always do.
The following October I dug the bulb out of the colander with a butter knife, and it had made three more of itself, four bulbs now where one had been - each one the same paper-skin, the same shallot-size, and I held them in my palm and stood there at the back step not knowing what to do with the extra ones. I put two in a coffee mug with a broken handle and set them in the cabinet above the refrigerator where I keep things I mean to deal with, and they were still there in December when I found them by accident looking for the good scissors, the skin drier now - the stem nubs still pointing up in the dark. I wrote his number on a Post-it note and stuck it to the mug and then peeled it off and threw it away and then wrote it again on a new one, because his number was still his number, still the same, and the mug needed something written on it even if I didn't know yet what I meant by that. In January the people who bought his mother's house put a realtor sign in the yard again, and I saw it when I drove past on my way to somewhere else - the yard flat and winter-tan, and I slowed down but didn't stop, looking at the beds along the fence for anything red, for any sign of what had been left, but the grass had come in over all of it - smooth and indifferent as a made bed.
Disclaimer
This article is for general informational purposes only and doesn't constitute professional, financial, medical, or legal advice. Consult a qualified professional about your specific situation.
