Green Grow…

Once there was a character who discovered the grass isn't actually greener on the other side… That character was me and even though I am not free, I will tell you my story….

I was certain it was.

On the other side.

Was grass.

Was greener.

Always greener. For some reason. I want to know the reason, but…

I can’t seem to put things together again. I seem to be broken.

This wall that somebody built between (1) the here and ours and (2) us and the others. The wall that was the border between the green and the greener. Or so they told me and so I believed, for the longest time.

That foreign area had the only grass I knew of that was greener, according to the oldest woman I knew. She seemed to imply there was some sort of competition going on. We were always better than the other side, morally superior. I never knew the reasoning behind that self-evaluation. I did, however, know who taught me to think that way.

My grandmother. 

Mammy, as I called her, was neither a nice nor a healthy woman. She looked far older than her true years and weighed even less. Her smile, while infrequent, resembled a cadaver’s. She had cheekbones that made you forget the skin on the rest of her withered face. The same ones I have.

I never saw her look overly concerned about the state of any garden plants, despite this one particular belief in what grew beyond her side of things. On the other side. What flowers bordered the walls of our house had not been put there by her. However, she did make sure I learned all their names. Otherwise, she never took time to enjoy them. (She didn’t enjoy much of anything, as I recall.)

Unless, of course, she happened to be picking out the potted annuals that would be transferred to the family urns, in the family cemeteries. Then everything changed. Her concern was the strongest of anybody who bought plants.

When making her selection, she would grip her list of plants-to-purchase while simultaneously committing it to memory. If she were to lose it (not likely), she could still leave the greenhouse with exactly what items and how many she needed to fill the space to which they would be taken.

The list never varied, I am fairly certain. Neither did my grandmother. (I am even more certain of that.) Only her ability to move about, even as a passenger in a car, changed, meaning it decreased, while the strength in the wrist required to grasp a piece of paper and not ever drop it, decreased as well. But what was Mammy, her board-like essence, her scowling beauty with the expression placed there the day decades earlier when her daughter was killed by a car, that never varied over the few years our lives overlapped.

She was convinced that every year at the nursery, by virtue of her seamstress’ vision for the tiniest details, she had purchased the best of the lot of the annuals. Plants grown to be killed by late autumn’s chill. Planted where nobody would see them, for all the obvious reasons.

Still and all, the grave plants needed to arrive, at the cemetery plots of three different cemeteries, with their urns in perfect condition. Meaning that all their leaves, petals, and stems had to be intact, not bruised or broken. Mammy always quickly detected a minute flaw and moved on with the selection until her hawk eye found a specimen that was unmarred.

All for the eyes of her dead. 

I understood, even though I was little, was afraid of her scowls, and felt confused by the quiet place with grass growing around stone rectangles, either set flat in the ground, or standing upright.

Grass that was on our side, but alluded to what, or rather who, lay on the other side. Which side did cemetery grass - usually quite green - belong to, after all?

My grandmother’s dead deserved the best. They were the best. Perhaps it was because they were the most mourned. As each one left her, she would put aside another piece of her life plot. Her side got smaller and smaller.

I thought at times that her former living - all family members, because she had no friends, didn’t need them - had driven my grandmother mad. The look on her face increasingly suggested madness, although I was too small to understand such things. I thought all grandmothers were like mine. (And like my grandfather. His is a whole other story, not much better.)

I was simply afraid.

I never doubted her choices or her opinions. She was too rigid to be wrong. Too much a living skeleton to stand close to her or sit on her lap. Too dark.

But there was the thing about the grass. She knew about it, although she never paid attention to what was growing on her side, even in her own lawn. She pretty much ignored it. 

Only the plants for the urns mattered, because the urns, annually filled with new roots and silence, were one of the most important things in Mammy’s life.

Clearly, given the serious look on her face when she repeated the refrain, I also believed it was my grandmother’s honest belief that the grass was always greener on the other side. She knew a lot about buying the perfect plants, things like that. So if the grass happened to be greener on the other side, my Mammy would be sure to know it. Her sayings - which she simply recited as the came to her, for her because reading books was a chore - were simply not to be questioned. 

She thrived on remembering those who had passed. Seemed even to enjoy it. 

It was her Valley of the Shadow of Death. She walked through it constantly. She couldn’t escape from it, never tried, never wanted to. It had grass, but it was pale and the tombstones encroached upon it. It was her home.

Was this part of the belief she had regarding the grass on the other side? Because on this side things were grim, filled with graves and the obligation to fill the urns annually. Or because on the other side the cares of the world no longer existed, no urn obligations, just walks in meadows? Probably not. (Protestant faith is apparently a beautiful thing.)

*****

This should serve as an introduction to why I used to believe certain things like there is a much greener shade of the grass on the other side could be taken literally. I wasn’t aware yet how that might only be a literary trope. Of course I now realize it means be happy with what you’ve got. Serves me right for being so literal, even when listening to a woman from the shadowy Valley.

Maybe my grandmother’s story helps justify my naïveté. That part about walking on or staring at the other side kind of unnerves me, though. You know, the ‘other’ meanings of the term. In this sense, ‘other’ definitely has negative connotations. Like ‘the other ‘ or ‘to other a group in society’ when speaking in terms of cultural theory. (Sometimes I read too much. Then my definitions get tangled up.)

You could say that, thanks to my grandmother, going to the other side isn’t one of the items on my list of desirables. I wasn’t thinking at all about going to see it, despite my curiosity. My theory has been that anticipation just sets us up for a big shock. Especially so if we’ve learned from a reliable source (we know who mine was) that the grass of the other side is of a supreme quality, resembling a high-pile carpet we can drool over but never acquire. It is a supernatural greenness. 

Now I can’t decide if I fear the other side or am drawn to its richer shade of grass. So tempting to go…

We think of lawns in general as normal spaces. We think of green grass, plus maybe some gray for stone and brown for the earth. To prove or disprove if the other side is greener, it’s just a matter of taking a quick peek over the neighbors’ fence, nothing more than that. No big deal, nothing to be afraid of.

That’s when it hits us. Green, you’re not even the half of it. My grandmother was completely wrong! Line up, colors, so you’ll all get your turn. Everybody needs to get along. Some say that’s survival… in uncharted territory.

Thou shalt not covet…

Is that what my grandmother’s religion was trying to teach me? 

But I have never coveted anything, not anything on this side and certainly not on the other. Especially now that I have looked over the line and seen how all that glitters isn’t green.

Wrong metaphor. And I find I am allergic to color.

The red of the boiled lobster, the blood on skinned knees, the fire trucks.

The blue of the pond where somebody drowned, the shade of sadness, of deadly nightshade.

The orange of the mushrooms that should never be eaten or of the dried orange peels littering a perfect beach, not to mention the orange tabby waiting years to be adopted from a shelter.

This belief about the superiority of othersided greenness? Not a relevant question now, it would seem. Perfectly moot, in fact. 

However, perhaps it is precisely the manner in which the original tapestry was crowded out, when everybody learned to think alike, and that gave rise to monster cities and a group of people (growing) that sold a lot of things for profit. Rainbow was a good thing. The thicker and more populated the rainbow, the more advertising potential, right?

So we ‘promoted’ the multicolor, rainbowesque, multi-everything and everybody we have met has said more is more although in reality it is less, so much less. There are often times when the scowl of the sky just before a downpour is much more appealing.

Pink makes me puke, first of all. All the bad memories from my childhood are infused with pink, girly, good, pinkishness. Living with that all these years has obviously not helped me to accept the color that all women supposedly love. Like they were born predisposed to being pink-lovers.

Lavender combined with pink makes me want to scream bloody murder.

Lavender by itself is prettiest when it’s what’s called periwinkle blue or hyacinth. However, the manufacturers of lilac-like products usually miss the mark. There are also too many purple and pink pairings that are like assembly art using the original pink Bazooka bubblegum with the short-lived fake grape flavor. Sicky-sweet and ugly. 

And little girls are supposed to like that color combination?

The inventor of that two-color fetish ought to be in jail.

Orange is out of place in many environments. It has unhappy thoughts, too. For me, at least. I’ve already provided a few examples, but there are many more.

Clearly the grass, if not greener, was much better on the first side. Not the other one where I am now, struggling with chromatic overload and missing the controlled gardening of the cemetery urns.