What a tremendously odd and surreal Mother’s Day. But in the context of now, I am thinking of seed catalogs. In this time of coronavirus, many of my friends have become prodigious growers of plants and makers of bread and doers of great, quiet deeds to improve their homes and take care of their own and there is an extraordinary magic. A kitchen witchery that runs through many different lines down to this generation – all us layabout Millennials and Oregon Trail kids. And I have my small claim to this, this domestic instinct.
I was reminded of it today, sitting in the backyard, talking to my mother through 6 feet and a screen door so as not to inadvertently wallop her immune system. With spring comes the seed catalogs – Park Seed mainly, Burpees (perhaps by virtue of its name alone always seemed second tier), and my mother and I would pore over them and she would make her lists of tomato varieties and a butterfly bush and perennials to fill in the gaps and Stargazer lilies for a bit of height and nasturtiums (“little nasties” as her mother called them for her.)
I can see them, I can still feel the way that green ink, that hopeful copy made me feel. The histories and pedigrees, the whirling colors of the petals so easily converted to enormous ball gowns, the smiling children with watermelon spilling down their faces, cherry tomatoes swollen and gleaming like lollipops, like jewels. It was incredible magic. The storytelling was never just in the imagery, but in the idea that we can put a thing in the earth and it will know enough to rise up out of that earth, alive and beautiful and reaching toward the sun.
Every spring, it was a question of palette and narrative. A painting my mother could see in her mind for the raised beds and the rows along the greenhouse where she would put the daffodils and crocuses so we would know it had begun. A narrative I could tell in royal clematises, in moonflowers blossoming under moonlight, in the faces of Johnny-Jump-Ups.
I don’t know if she has any idea how very much of it I took on board, how much of it feels like my heritage. Watching Victory Garden on PBS with her, feeding egg shells and coffee grounds to the compost pile, digging and finding earthworms deep in black loam, working it back into recalcitrant clay, yanking the sharp spindly weeds, trying to step on the shovel to get down deep enough to get the root so it couldn’t come back.
I hope she knows now, if she didn’t, that I feel like some of my favorite parts of myself were grown by doing that with her. Learning that from her.
We did not have a wild and crazy life together, but yet…we did.
There were battles drawn against the trellises there. Dark patches weathered under the arbors. Frightening things that we still have to fight today. But we did grow a Victory garden over and over again. We truly did. I regard it now as such a gift of magic and lore she shared with me and even as I feel tonight a depth of loneliness I have not known in some time, and some of the frightening parts of the world feel so powerful…it does feel like a quiet strength is in me that is bubbling up to fight back these hells.
It looks like spring and dirt and peach verbena and easter bonnet alyssum and just keeping it going.
Right now, I am remembering this and just keeping it going.
Love you through the screen door and the walls and the miles and the days good and bad, Mama.
