santos scribes

Truthfully, I hoped you’d ask about the Paper-whites. About their 4 x 3-foot patch of soil, about the piece of hand-me-down wrought iron fencing behind them, the single stake with the pointed spade missing between stake 5 and stake 7. I could tell you about my mother, Sandra then and for a few moments at least, she could just be a mother who died young, and I could be the daughter who misses her and in doing so planted this garden bed in her memory.  

All that happened before wouldn’t matter as much. The story of how I’d effortlessly thrown wildflower seeds into the earth here since 2020, grown too many tall, purpled bachelor buttons and nameless pink & yellow wonders to count would speak for itself and the recent musings and mystery that started last spring would feel kismet and exciting still.  

You wouldn’t think twice about the esoteric allure starting only after I’d dedicated the space to my long-gone mother or how my over-enthusiastic nature caused me to drop enough wildflower seed into the ground for a plot six times its size. But my voice might change here, or I might break eye contact when I tell you about the months that followed: how I’d come to learn so much about gardening and wildflowers, about my mother and her daughter as I’d watch endless green sprouts shoot up and next to none of them bloom.  

You’d sense the turn in the story now and so I’d rush to tell you how it hadn’t taken me long to realize the garden was mirroring Sandra’s life and perhaps more obviously her death. I’d tell you then that my mother was just like the Black-eyed Susans and the Fireweed; that she was a wildflower who never found her bloom. She’d shot up and out from the soil beneath her and still she’d died- her magic still inside her. I would tell you how I know in my bones she was stunted by her own prowess- too much of a good thing. How with nowhere to pour it all into, her unexpressed affection turned to rage, and her rage grew to an enlarged heart and how in the end, her dispassionate ticker was just an ordinary vessel which imploded and gave out on her at just 43. I would tell you all of this and you would think to yourself or out loud, ‘wow, so young, so tragic.’ 

To make you feel better I might say something about poetic injustice or art imitating life, how whatever it was it’d caused me to pluck and weed at the frozen garden bed weakly for weeks. My mission, to thin out the over-saturation, to undo what had already been done, to forget for just an afternoon that nature is nature and while her generous abundance and lingering fortitudes may cause us to believe we’re the ones calling the shots, when it comes to nature, almost never, are we. 

Next, I’d tell you that by August, my own 43rd birthday come and gone, I’d finally submitted to the fact that my tiny backyard flowerbed was a bust. I’d leave out how it’d undone and humbled me, the multitude of ways. But you’d know that by October, one clumped, tangled strand of Cosmos had grown magenta and strong, and I’d known wherever she is now, my mother had forgiven me.  

And that would bring us to this last piece, to the month after the Cosmos and how all that had come to or not come to pass in Sandra’s Garden was still heavy on my mind and so this time, in an attempt to make myself feel better, I impulse-bought a small, netted bag of Paper-white bulbs on my way out of a grocery store. I’d tell you I’d never heard of the “White Daffodil” as I’d learn some people call them and how I didn’t know its curiously scientific name, “Narcissus Papyraceus” yet, but nevertheless, on a cool sunny day last fall, I’d sat down to the patch of earth at the front of my mother’s garden and began digging 8 cup-sized holes, six inches beneath the dirt line. Reverently placing a single gnarled polyp into its matching hollow, dutifully covering and filling each one with dirt and water and a drop or two of my own waning optimism.   

I’d want you to know all of this so you could stand with me here looking out on the blooming white clusters of today and see a little of what I see: five, tiny perfect bouquets that somehow found their way up and out of a cold hard earth and then again out of a sleeping sealed bud, to air and to sunshine they feel on their petals and in their roots. We would stand here together, and I could tell you even though I hadn’t set out purposely to create a fresh page I could in turn, turn, somehow, it’d ended up this way. You would smile at me then without using words, and I would just be a daughter who misses and loves her mother, and you would just be the mother who misses and loves her daughter too.