My big, old rhododendron trees are blooming profusely, fat lilac flowers with darker purple starbursts in the center. But it rained hard over the past few days and now the petals are soggy and bruised from the storm. Some have fallen, and litter the ground like pale confetti. I keep reaching for my phone to call my mother, to tell her how achingly beautiful my garden looks this summer. To tell her the azaleas survived being moved last fall, and the apple tree weathered my ignorant pruning. To describe the birds who have returned en masse, cardinals, red house sparrows, and robins. To tell her about the snapping turtle we saw in the pond, and the family of rabbits who appear on the lawn at dusk. To complain to her about the frogs nightly concerts robbing me of sleep. But I can’t call her anymore, and it feels like I’ve lost some integral frame of reference.
When I was 12 my summer job was to work in the garden. I mostly weeded, and deadheaded masses of rhododendrons. I didn’t wear gloves back then, and my small fingers became perpetually sticky from sap. When I complained of the monotonous work, the endless hedges in front of me, my mother explained. “We must deadhead them if we want them to bloom properly.” We had a full time gardener for the long sweeps of manicured lawn dotted with old trees, and the wide ribbon of flowerbeds lining the property. But for three years every summer, I was assigned to the smaller, more tedious tasks. My mother would tend to the half dozen flowerpots, artfully placed around the front of the house, and the rose garden in the back. If she wasn’t deadheading petunias or geraniums, she was clipping back the roses in the beds lining the patio. She enjoyed being outside in the sun, and I didn’t mind the work when she was near.
I didn’t understand until later how perfectly my mother could arrange things, both outside and inside the house. I used to watch her direct my father hanging the many paintings they collected over the years. My father always wanted to measure, to avoid putting more than one nail in the wall if he could help it. But perspective is not an exact science, and I never saw my mother use a tape. I grew up in a house with walls covered in art set at exactly the right viewing height for my mother’s 5’8” frame.
Recently, I have hung some of those paintings in my own house. They look perfectly at home, like they have always belonged on my walls. I inherited some of my mother’s perspective, and learned the rest of it at her feet. As a child I watched her move furniture and art and sculpture around the house until she was satisfied with whatever tableau she was decorating. She had a kind of creative asymmetry that I couldn’t help absorbing. When my mother chose material for furniture, beds, or drapes, I began to understand her balance of color and texture. I would run my fingers through the different fabrics much like I stroked the different coats of my dogs and cat, or the feathers of my parakeet. When I set the table for dinner, I could feel the heft and bumpy smoothness of the hand glazed Majolica pottery my parents bought in Mexico. At holidays we used the fine china, hand painted with birds, light as air and nearly translucent in my hands. My mother loved birds.
I miss her more desperately now she’s gone, than I ever did when she was alive. There is so much I long to share with her, but all I can think to do is fill the hole her absence has left in my life with paintings and dishes from my childhood. These large, colorful abstracts and family portraits now adorn my walls, her china now sits in my cupboards. These objects comfort me, cloak me in the veil of her presence, but the wound is still fresh and there is a bittersweet aspect to my inheritance. Like the petals of my rhododendrons, at times I feel bruised and crushed from sudden storms of grief.
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