Where Lilacs Still Bloom (4 page)

I
t became important to me for Frank to understand my need to create, and daffodils were the perfect school slate. I tried to explain what I wanted to do.

“Really, Huldie.” He called me Huldie when he was questioning my wisdom, making me sound like a young girl when I’m nearly forty. “You can tell such differences?” Frank—if he swept the floor—would sweep with a wide brush and not notice the little things that stuck in the corners. That feature of his nature allowed him to overlook a person’s flaws, for which I’m grateful, as I have my share. But it kept him from seeing the world the way I did, full of small parts to puzzle together to form grand pictures.

“Yes, I can see traits. I notice which rosebush opens its blooms before the others, and I can see the slightest shade of color difference in a daffodil. They aren’t all yellow as a canary.”

“Show me,” he said.

We walked outside into the March morning. The daffodils were planted in patches in the front and another in the back. Bobby, our dog, bounded past us as we stepped down from the porch. He was an inside dog for his meals (along with the cats) but out in the woodshed on his old quilt for sleeping. This meant more sweeping every day, but the children learned how to do that early on, and even Fritz, our youngest and only son, wielded a broom with aplomb by the time he was four, Bobby barking at the straw strands as our boy laughed and swept.

The dog with his swirling shepherd’s tail bounded ahead as Frank and I walked to the closest daffodil patch. I had a hundred bulbs planted south of the house that year, and many were well up, nodding their yellow heads. A chinook wind warmed the air and teased those flowers open, slow and tender like a courting man’s words to a young woman’s heart.

“See, this one’s slightly more yellow than … that one.” I pointed to a plant a few feet away from the one whose bloom I held in my hand, two fingers separated by the stem, the bloom soft as a baby’s bottom in my palm. I leaned my steady hoe against my knee as I squatted. “This one here has a hint of red.”

Frank squinted, touched the bloom as though the feel of it would help him see the color better. He took a step toward the one I pointed at. “That one over there is slipping toward more yellow,” I said. I walked the edge of the patch and
checked for snakes before I reached into the flush of yellow, choosing another single bloom that had the shade of a male meadowlark’s breast; such a brilliant yellow. “Now that one is even more golden than the first I showed you, can you see that?” He nodded, but I wasn’t sure he really did. “That one is duckling down. This one, morning sun.” I pointed to another. “Egg-yolk yellow.” Frank squinted. I could tell he tried to see what I did.

“I’ll mark that one.” I took a strip of red yarn from my apron and tied it to the stem. “The sunlight is perfect to catch the slightest distinction. When I break the bulbs apart this fall, I’ll want to plant this one right next to the other egg-yolk yellow, and that way, they’ll fertilize each other. I might get an even deeper hue.”

I inhaled their scent. I noted those differences too, marking ones with the most deeply satisfying smell with a white strand of yarn. I thought of my mama. She loved the smell of daffodils. Inhaling a soothing scent from a flower could take away pain, the kind of pain that comes with loss and longing. I urged Frank to inhale, and he stuck his slender nose inside the bloom.

“They’re all individual to me, Frank. I see each one, unique and perfect as it is, but a few move toward more what I’m imagining than another.”

I showed him a few more distinctive blooms, noting the size differences as well as color and then found myself kneeling
and weeding, my mind soothed by the effort, inhaling scents of heaven. I pulled yarn and marked them for scent and color and hardiness and early or late blooming.

It would take time to change a tree’s or flower’s habit of being. My father used to say it took thirty days to change a person’s ways. Much longer for a plant. But like people, they can be shaped if the qualities one loves the most are noticed and nurtured. In some ways, I think Frank knew that insight first, as he loved me out of my annoyances from the time I was sixteen and his new bride until now when we partner together to raise our family. I hoped he understood that daffodils gave me more.

“Where are you off to?” I asked him as he turned, began to step away. “I thought you wanted to know how I see things.” I was irritated with him for flitting from one thing to another like a bee to a bloom.

He pulled out his pocket watch and looked at it. “I’ve been standing here close to an hour watching you seek and find. You just disappeared inside that patch, Huldie.”

“No,” I said. No to my not realizing he’d been standing there, and no to how much time could have passed. I looked toward the sun.

“Yes,” he said.

“I just—”

“I submit you’re lost in the blooms. Like once you got lost in me.”

“Oh, Frank.” I stood and kissed his cheek, the hoe against my shoulder between us. “I still get lost in you.”

Frank gave me a wistful smile, and I swallowed no small level of guilt. I didn’t devote myself to him the way I did to those flowers, but wasn’t that in human nature too? We fall in love, our passions deep and moving, and then we go on to living, the love still strong but different, as babies come and cry and need our loving too. They grow older, and we seek nurture in new places, and what safer place can there be but in a garden?

Frank walked off toward the barn, and I didn’t know what to say to keep him with me. A hummingbird vibrated past my head looking for sweets. I worked my way back toward the house, calling Bobby with a slap to my knee, hoeing out a few weeds as the dog came running. Was it wrong to find sustenance in creation, to feel pride in seeking those crisp apples? I put my hoe away, took off my hat and decided to bake fresh bread for Frank’s supper. It was the least I could do when he felt my love for him wasn’t as grand as it was for a daffodil. Or an apple. He was wrong, of course, wasn’t he?

That fall we harvested the apples from my father’s orchard. I gave each apple tree that same scrutiny I gave my daffodils so I could keep shaping and deciding which branches I’d graft where the following year. Baskets sat on the ground, and despite
the work, it was a happy time with my children—all four here on weekends, the oldest two away in Portland attending school during the week. I looked for the largest apples, and on that day in 1900, I saw the fruit of my labors. On the ladder, I pulled a good-sized apple from the stem, rubbed it clean with my apron, then with anticipation, bit in.

Crisp as thin ice on a spring morning! “Frank!” I shouted, nearly spilling off the ladder. “Come here. I think I’ve got it!”

“Got what?” he shouted back. I watched him step back off his ladder.

“Just come.” I scrambled down, lifting my skirts. On the way I grabbed two more apples, then three more cradled in my apron. “Here.” I gave each child and Frank an apple. “Bite into it.” I grinned.

“Tart,” Lizzie, our oldest said. “But good.”

“Good,” Frank said. Fritz nodded agreement, and Delia and Martha rolled their eyes with pleasure as they chewed.

“Tart, yes. And big. And now the test.” I took my knife out and began to peel the apple I’d bitten into. I managed a long, slender peel instead of the dozens of small, broken bits of skin that I was used to. “Would you look at that?” I held up the length of peel that wiggled its way into an S. “I’ve got my crisp, bigger, easier peeler. Right here in Papa’s orchard!” I danced a little jig.

“Glad a good apple makes your day,” Frank said.

“Don’t you see? I bred these, Frank. Papa and I grafted
them. A Wild Bismarck and a Wolf River variety, and now I have the best of both in one fruit. Oh, I can hardly wait to make you a pie.”

“You grafted these?” Frank raised an eyebrow.

“I did, and I’ve been waiting these long years to get what I wanted.”

“Why didn’t you say?” Martha, our youngest girl, asked. She’s fourteen, and she sounded hurt.

“Oh, it was just an experiment. If it didn’t work out, I didn’t want to bother you all. I had no idea it might actually work.”

“But you look so … happy,” Delia said, she with the deep brown eyes.

“Is something wrong with that?” Their caution brought my spirits down. “I thought you’d like having more pies.”

“That’s fine with me,” Fritz said. “Let’s get them picked.”

We returned to the work at hand. I heard geese chattering on the Lewis River. It made a wide loop not far from my father’s house, and the birds liked stopping there on their way south. I set the apples from that tree aside and marked the basket too. I’d cut a dozen branches from that tree this winter and graft them in the spring to extend the number that gave me my perfect fruit. I heard my family call to one another, make jokes, and gather at the baskets to drink water from the jugs. I felt separate from them and couldn’t name the feeling that settled over me. Frank caught my eye and sent an encouraging
smile. Perhaps I should have shared my dream and effort along the way so that this moment of triumph wouldn’t seem like mine alone.

It occurred to me that my father had been only half correct with his lessons in the orchard that day: it was important to dream, but sharing it with those you loved made achievement even better.

S
helly Berringer would arrive any time now. It was her first trip to Bill’s home in Baltimore. She’d obsessed about what to wear, how much dust there’d be on the stage between Annapolis and Baltimore, whether she might change her clothes somewhere in between before seeing Bill. She carried an umbrella to ward against the June sun but wouldn’t really need it. June along the Chesapeake Bay was never really warm so much as balmy.

Shelly wasn’t impressed with professors, yet W. A. “Bill” Snyder, in his forties, had caught her fancy. She was surrounded by instructors at the naval academy where her father taught. One had to see through the fog of their academic words to find their true hearts. Bill was shorter than her father but carried himself like a general, which he wasn’t. He was a man with a purpose, though, aware of his surroundings. Bill
had brushed away the fog and shown that his true interest wasn’t for teaching so much as the subject he taught: botany. Shelly had never paid much attention to the science of plants. It was the comfort of gardens that offered happiness.

The stage bumped along, and Shelly remembered Bill’s description of his mother’s garden and conservatory and how he’d planned an outdoor luncheon for them. She wondered what flowers he might choose for the centerpiece, hoping it wasn’t chrysanthemums, because those made her sneeze. Had she told him that? Mums were his mother’s favorite. She was glad now she’d chosen to wear what she had. She needed to be direct and let him know exactly who she was—his mother as well.

He’d shared stories about his mother—whom he obviously adored—stories that caused a stream of perspiration to dribble down Shelly’s neck now, alighting at the collar of her dress. Bill loved his conservatory and the garden on the family estate where he said he “forgot about his loneliness in the company of stately roses, flashy peonies, and the ever-quiet sweet williams in season.” His mother seemed unaware of her son’s companionship with blooms, urging him to “let the gardeners do it; that’s why we pay them.”

Shelly shifted on the seat, put her feet up across to reduce swelling. She was glad she was the only one on this stage so she could lift her legs. Bill would meet her at the stage stop. She’d stay with her aunt that evening. Even though Shelly
was twenty-two and had lived around the world, traveling with her parents, her father insisted she have proper escorts. At least he’d let her make the trip alone. Bill had told her he admired independent women but “it makes sense to accommodate your father until such time as you marry and would then be accommodating your husband.” He used his professorial voice, and she’d bristled at that view of independence but kept silent. The relationship wasn’t far enough along yet.