I garden. I would not say I’m an avid gardener. I’m more of a lazy one. You know, the kind. Plant a few bulbs and see what happens. Let things go to seed and see what pops up in the spring. Let the weeks grow so I can see what kind of flowers they have. Let things turn into a jungle when I can’t find the energy or time to clean them up. I like plants, and I like dirt, and I love the feel of the earth slipping through my fingers. But I also get tired and hot, and I lack the patience for weeding. Still, I garden. It reminds me of Grammy.
Grammy’s gardens were the most beautiful gardens you’ve ever seen. They were tall and bursting with color and blossoms. They were manicured, but also felt wild and free. They were magical in summer, when I would visit her and Pa in Michigan. The stalks of lilies and gladiolus waving in the breeze, a path through them that led to the pool. The bees were always drifting.
My gardens don’t look like Grammy’s. They are full of shade plants and annuals. They are too young, too roughed up by kids and dogs and hot Kentucky weather. I don’t have a path through mine because there is nothing on the other side of them. My gardens are not well established, they are too full of native plants. I look at them sometimes and wonder how she made her gardens look so beautiful.
Patience. She did it through patience.
This year, I decided to get serious about making my gardens look really beautiful. I invited a friend over to help me rip everything out of one of the beds, then replanted a few things and mulched the entire garden bed. I ordered tulips and lilies ahead of the fall planting season, planning out how I would place them for best results. I have weeded the bed almost daily. It looks really good right now, but it won’t look like Grammy’s gardens. Not for a few years. The plants need time to mature. I’ll have to be patient.
Then I decided that what I really needed was a sun garden. Grammy’s gardens were full of sun loving plants. But I don’t have any gardens that get sun. I looked around my yard, under the shade and shadow or maple and oak and wondered what I could do. The only place in the whole yard that got more than 6 hours of sun was a patch of the back yard that currently was covered in grass. There was only one thing to do.
After killing off as much as the grass as I dared using spray, I started removing the grass layer. It was tiring. It was slow. It was tedious. It was not satisfying. It was leaving huge holes that would need to be filled, and my dogs were very confused why I was tearing up their potty-spot. But I was excited. I ordered flowers- peony and coneflower, and brown eyed susan, shasta daisy, gladiolus, and hollyhock. Flowers that would grow tall. That would look as wild as they did planned. That reminded me of Grammy. I went to bed that night dreaming of my new garden.
But the next morning, when it was 90 degrees, I looked at the patch of dirt in the yard and sighed. This was a lot of work, and even when I was finished, it still would look like nothing. It would just be a patch of mulch incubating bulbs and roots all winter. Even in the spring it still wouldn’t look like much. Not for a few years at least, until the plants matured.
Patience. I reminded myself. Grammy grew that garden with patience.
I was in Michigan recently, and I stopped by the house. The House. The old farmhouse on M60, at the corner with the flashing light. We pulled into the driveway, but I didn’t get out of the car. The house is a different color, and the gardens are gone, and someone else lives there. But just being there on the property, filled me with love and peace an comfort. The kind that comes from a beautiful memory that you can’t ever get back. The kind of love that fills you up, and makes you tear up your yard, and envision how lovely everything will be if you just wait long enough for it.
Patience, I tell myself. It’ll take patience. Anything that can inspire someone so deeply, and move them to tears at just the thought, takes time, and care, and hard work.
Photo made available through the Library of Congress
I knew I would have girls. I can’t explain how I knew, other than to say I envisioned them, and brought them to life. As if they manifested out of the dreams I had of them before they were born. When they were growing inside me, I knew who they were. I imagined how they would be. I felt their spirits residing in me and they felt different than my son. I thought about a family portrait hanging on the wall and saw that it had two little girls. Girls who would be like me.
When I think about the ways in which my girls are like me, it involves a level of creativity that continues a tradition of my matrilineal line. They are constantly asking me for art supplies so they can make things for themselves and their friends. My girls watch me make things- wreaths, blankets, mittens, scarves, gloves, jewelry, art, decorations. I picked this up from my mother. She always had a project going. Even now, when I visit her, I see all her threads, needles and yarn piled neatly on the side table, or tucked safely in a bag. I have a basket that serves the same purpose at my house. Her mother created ceramics, plastic canvas decor and toys, sewed her own clothes. One summer she made a dollhouse while she was recovering from a broken hip. Her mother made doll clothes, and a years long project she worked on (re-creating the dresses of the First Ladies of the United States) is on public display in the library where she lived in Constantine, MI. My matrilineage is creative. In this family, we make things.
When my 7 year old asked me to take her shopping for supplies for a project a few weeks ago, we wandered the aisles of Joann Fabrics looking for exactly the right items to buy. At one point we stopped in front of the modeling clay, and as I was looking at all the colors available, I reminisced about my own mother taking me shopping at Michael’s to buy modeling clay, so I could sculpt bears and mice and frogs. My daughter asked me if she could have some, so she could try it out. While I was crocheting a few nights later, my 5 year old asked me to show her how to make the stitches. She practiced for a little while before she handed the hook back to me. I’ve been asked to show them knitting, embroidery, cross stitch, plastic canvas, sewing, painting. When I look around my house and she all the things that were made by Grammy and Mom, these questions of “show me how” bring a smile to my face.
It’s strange though, having this heritage but not having a name to connect it. I would say that my girls are following the Orr tradition, but Orr is my father’s name, not my mother’s. So I could think that me and the girls are like the Kilpatricks. But this isn’t right either, because Kilpatrick is my grandfather’s name, not my grandmother’s. So, perhaps this is a Burgener trait. Grandma Burgener, after all, is the one who made the doll dresses, the one who taught my Grammy, who is turn taught Mom, who then taught me. But Burgener was her married name. Before that, she was Wittenberg, but Wittenberg was her father’s name…
What, then, do I call this heritage? What is the name of the passing of tradition from mother to daughter? How do we talk about the things we learned from our mothers, that we pass on to our daughters, when the names of the women have been erased, replaced by the names of the men who were tied to them? How can I describe myself and these girls when I don’t know the names of the women who gave these traits to me?
I can think of myself in terms of what I do know. I am Sarah, daughter of Barbara, daughter of Evelyn, daughter of Vernie. Beyond that I’m not sure. What I do know for sure though, is that this matrilineage lives as long as I remember it. So I will teach these little girls the names of the women who came before them, who passed down this love of creating. Maybe they will come up with a name for it when they are grown. Or perhaps they will think of themselves as daughters of Sarah, daughter of Barbara, daughter of Evelyn, daughter of Vernie. Either one is fine with me.
The Quick and the Dead 