It’s About the Flowers

May. What a lovely day. I love this month, May. Here where I live, I can’t remember that it has ever rained. Sounds unbelievable, but it’s true, I promise.

I see Mom is bustling around the way she always does when we’re getting ready to go somewhere. I don’t bustle or get ready; I just wait for her to call me when she’s finished bustling so I can get in the car. Today I’m excited and don’t mind Mom’s fussing about, because it’s so warm and sunny and I am so happy going places with her. Just the two of us in our car-womb. She is my world, and on these golden days of May, my world is perfect.

We’re ready to leave. It’s morning, but not too early. The cereal I had for breakfast is still in my stomach, preventing me from feeling hungry, but I know Mom has something to munch on in her purse or the car. She’s thoughtful like that. We have to go buy some flowers to match the sun. 

I love buying flowers any time of the year, almost as much as I love buying books or a new skirt. Maybe more, at least today. I get to pick out colors I like, and that’s usually yellow, although the blue and gold pansies are so beautiful and the blue needs lobelia to balance it out. Not that there’s anything wrong with marigolds, of course. If you look closely, all the different shades of ochre, rust, and coral are quite the thing.

We turned off Route 31 just before Newark. I was pretty sure this is the place we’d be stopping. Mom knows exactly what we need and how much money she can spend. She spends what seems like forever picking out plants she calls spikes but I’m not convinced that’s their real name. They’re green and white with leaves like, well, spikes, smooth on the edges and pointy on the ends. The thing that works against them is they can curve a bit when they get bigger and then the spike resemblance isn’t so strong.

We’re wandering through the dappled light of the greenhouse and we know (she knows) exactly what we need. Of course we both want geraniums, sweet alyssum, petunias, more geraniums, pansies, marigolds, geraniums, and some other plant whose name I forget but is curly and whitish. Oh, wait, now I know: it’s a dusty miller. It’s rather homely, but kind of velvety, which makes up for that. And it’s got a winner name. I don’t know where it came from.

I see Mom has loaded up the back seat in the car with cardboard trays. So many colors! They remind me of my boxes of crayons, although I don’t color as much as I used to. There are some bigger pots that go on the floor of the car by the back seat. That’s better, because they could fall sideways and crush the little ones if we had to stop quickly. The sizes and amounts of our plants - which are all called flowers in our minds - have all been calculated by my mother. She knows exactly what we’re going to do with this lovely haul of blossoms, this back seat rainbow.

I’m feeling a bit carsick. It’s the only thing I don’t like about when we go to buy flowers on a day like this in ‘may. Luckily for me, the cuddling sun, a slight wafting fragrance of jovial geraniums, and the promise to stop for ice cream serve as consolation. I close my eyes and wait for the queasiness in my tummy to go away, which it does, eventually.

********

I bet I dozed off for a while, because I don’t know otherwise how we could have gotten here so fast. Mom never speeds, so ninety miles usually take close to two hours. I look at the back seat, twisting at the waist to check: all is well with the beautiful flowers we bought. Well, Mom did, but I helped a lot.

I know we have two stops to make. They are about twenty minutes apart, although I could be wrong because I don’t wear a watch. This is the first stop and I jump out of the car to help Mom remove the cardboard trays. Some of the flowers will wait until the second stop. I know this is Trumansburg, because while my mother was driving she talked about it a lot. She repeated names familiar to me, people I could swear I know, have met, talked with. 

Mom is the repository of her family memories and she carries out her role perfectly. She knows who is who and who married whom. She knows about second marriages, which can only happen or should only happen if one is widowed. Mom knows nothing about affairs or adultery, or if she does, she defends that secret. That is why I must believe affairs and such are terrible things. There is no alcohol, no drugs, in our family. At least that’s what I’m told by her silence. She should know, and I trust her.

Now that we are out of the car, I can put spellings and dates with the names. People who never seemed to have a profession or a degree of any kind. At least here I can place dates with the names and the engraved letters are reinforcing the names I heard as we were driving. I don’t exactly know what this place is called, but obviously I know what it’s for. Like I knew what the flowers were for, why we bought them.

Trumansburg. Where some of Mom’s family were born, and where a lot of them are buried. I don’t know if there will be any more buried here, because Mom will never die and if she did, she would not choose here to end up. Too far from Dad, and he can’t be here because his family is somewhere else. 

[Narrator’s Note: Three syllables in the name, like in the names of so many places I know, love, or have lived in: Trumansburg, Rochester, Palmyra, Ithaca, Syracuse. Even Orono. But the last place hasn’t happened yet. Still, there’s a music to it all.]

I don’t know how big Trumansburg is, haven’t asked. The town is its cemetery for me, green and quiet, shady in parts. I see how proud Mom is of her family’s urns, how lovingly she removes dry stems and blooms, now an impossible year old. I wonder if they dried up from a hot August or if the first frost got them. Then I put my thought aside, going to help Mom slip the flowers out of their little pots.

I remember now that last year Grandpa came with us. We’d picked him up on the way here. He is my least favorite relative and likes to tickle me hard. I hate that. He never smiles, either, and always talks in the past. Today I’m thinking he seemed more alive that day in this cemetery, obsessively arranging beautiful blooms in urns sitting above dead heads. Mom’s got a few photos of my livelier, happier grandfather, if you don’t believe me.

Don’t get me wrong, but I don’t like sharing the car-womb space with Grandpa, so I’m much happier today. Mom reads me the information on each headstone, even though I know how to read myself. I’m thinking she wants me to hear her reciting the stories, adding more when she knew it, stifling any I shouldn’t ever know. She wants me to hear her voice so I can carry it with me everywhere.

I’m trying hard to draw mental portraits of my great-great-greats, on my mother’s side. All I’ve got to go on are their names, dates, maybe a word like wife, daughter, son, father. Always loved or beloved. I like this. It’s sweet to declare love for the dead. To do it here, publicly.

[Narrator’s Note: a little more than an hour has passed.]

Here we are in Cortland, which might be the origin of the apple by that name but I’m not sure and will have to ask Mom. I need to ask her, too, about why two cemeteries, not all that far apart? Why not put everybody in the same place, even if they can’t be in the same plot because there’s no room left?

We’re doing just what we did before, except that the back seat is now empty. Where have all the flowers gone? Gone to cemeteries where Mom’s family is. The respect due her, and them, is obvious. Gone, but not forgotten, as the saying goes. I heard that said somewhere by somebody sad.

We are done here. It seemed quicker than the other cemetery, but maybe Mom and I were having such a good time, planting the flowers in the prettiest way possible. Mom might have been an artist, I bet, if her life had been different. I’m too young to understand, but I know. Anyway, we need to head back home, our job well done, with love for the dearly departed (I heard that term somewhere, too). 

We just need to water the urns, because Mom says you always have to water plants well when you replant them. Now I’m thinking it’s strange to have urns here, in a cemetery, and urns at the house where you live. Some for the non-living and some for the living, I guess. Or is it because both house and cemetery are home?

Thank you, Mom, for this gorgeous day. I know you didn’t create May, didn’t give birth to it, but to me it rose and set in you. You made this day happen with your soft voice, a bit uneducated. You told me what you knew, except for a few things I discovered myself through genealogical searches online. I get it: the same religion that taught you the fear of God taught you to hold all others very close. Love-hate. So familiar.

Along with holding memories inside, you taught me the importance of rituals, some of which I continue and some of which I don’t for reasons better left for another time and place. Thank you for this day, which began this story looking like it was me telling it in real time. 

No, it wasn’t real time. It was, however, exactly the way that day lives in my mind. I don’t know exactly how old I was, but I did dress up for the occasion, wearing a summery skirt instead of shorts. More respectful. Anyway… clearly it all lives on (ironically) in my head, where it continues to drag on threads of words, roped with silence some of them. 

It being the beautiful day, perfect mother, quiet repose of the dead remembered, by people who hadn’t been born when they died. It being these lessons of duty yet connectedness (my new age vocabulary is such a cross to bear) to your line. Of commitment to it. It being faith(fulness). And more. A lifetime of learning in a day, Mom. Learning to honor, and doing it.

Since you left me, Mom, I have never returned to where I saw them put you. I have never seen the headstone I ordered to match Dad’s but that’s all I know. Your name and dates, the words loving wife, I trust they are there, in the cemetery you two both chose. Since I have never returned, I have never put flowers in your urn. I cannot do that.

Still, I am sorry. The flowers we bought in Newark will last forever, though.