My Nan tells me about a plant she was given by her friend Joanie. Some people say they ain’t good at caring for plants, she says, and I know she’s shaking her head on the other end of the line, but I always tell them: Just keep watering your flowers. She has no such problem with caring for things. When her new plant bloomed, she says, It was like Joanie every day.
There is absence and there is distance and there are the things that fill the gaps.
When I answer her questions about the rest of my family, she holds onto my words in that particular way people hold onto wishful truths, wringing them out along the sidewalk without ever needing to loosen their grasp. She is among the ranks of old persons who have an exceptionally strong grip–even keeping a hand on the possibility of death, if only to make it seem like less a fact of inevitability and more a question of when she concedes.
I am among the ranks of human beings who like to touch everything at once, if only to find some guaranteed presence in the point where my fingers meet something solid. As if a place of one dimension is somewhere you could ever survive; as if that one dimension–a certain scent, striped moonlight through the window–could ever constitute a place at all, let alone one high enough for you to stand.
If a thought is merely a point of departure, then it is a place to which we never return again. If life is spent accumulating distance, then there is no way for you to understand this story. The light changes just as I turn the corner. The flowers flutter as if to fly out the window. The leaves flood green over the wide road and I think to myself that I do not know what makes a place a thing you can inhabit.
***
When I was young, my mom gave my brother and I buckets and gloves and sent us into the yard to pick weeds. She particularly wanted us to go after the dandelions, incentivizing their capture with five cents per flower we picked. I wound up kneeling in the grass with a flower cupped in my hands, leaning close to listen—the flower was alive! Humming with energy even after the plucking! I opened my hands to add it to the bucket, and out flew an undoubtedly angry bee. It circled me once, twice, and then was off. I wasn’t stung that day and haven’t been since.
I was recently informed that dandelions are hydrophobic when they go to seed. What this looks like when a stem is plunged under the water is: every seed equidistant from the center. I thought for a while that when you are yourself, you are a sphere, which is to say that you are someone whose every part is equally distant from their center. Maybe when you are this spherical self, maybe with the water pressing in, there forms a membrane of what can be seen on the surface and spun any which way to always resemble the whole. If this is true, then the integration of your being is mostly composed of that distance between the center and the things it reaches out to touch. I’m not sure. Regardless, I no longer pick dandelions.
When I left home, my mom packed five tubes of sunscreen. She insisted on buying a wedge of asiago from the grocery store even though I rarely eat cheese. She inspected the bathroom once, twice. She talked over and over about the best beaches in Rhode Island. I only knew beaches, real ones, from family vacations long ago. She has some infatuation with the shoreline from childhood days spent at the cottage in Maine. On our family trips, she would always sit back in her white sunhat, reading a book or a magazine with toes sunken into the sand while I dared myself to go farther into the surf. She surveyed the scene with a contentment I didn’t then understand and now am too far from to picture clearly. In the times she let me drag her out to the ocean, I felt safe enough to swim out to the bigger waves, safe enough to stop my paddling and put my face up close to hers to see through her brown tinted sunglasses.
I’m losing track of the story. Let me try again. I’m driving home. The flowers are fluttering, remember? To my right, a man raises a flag from half mast. I never find out why the flag had been lowered. I think about it from time to time, along with the image of your face in the moonlight asking some perpetual question. I’d charcoal in the moon to dust over your superstitions, but how do you begin to forgive the things you cannot see?
I cut the flower stems diagonally like you taught me. They are sharp at the bottom, but this way they can take in more water. Using the present indicative is maybe a way of getting closer to acceptance, just like tricks of the light are maybe a way of getting closer to home.
***
The stone skips on the water because it has something to say, but it says nothing but look. That’s all I can give you here. I grew up in a house with a mother who loved me in ways she doesn’t remember and said things I’d rather forget; with a father who hid things in the back of the cupboard and always liked watching TV for the knowledge that thousands of people were watching at the same time. Sometimes there were flowers on the counter.
For my Nan’s second wedding several years ago, I made a bouquet of origami flowers: paper that would last forever. But flowers, I think, are in a forever way of leaving. I was younger then, anyway. She keeps the flowers on her desk, and when the sun strikes through the window, all I see is the dust folded between each layer of tissue.
When I return home for the first time, I find that even a homecoming can be a way of moving farther away. My favorite scabs to pick began to heal when I wasn’t looking. I pass streets I have no need to turn down; houses on corners with porches to which I can no longer walk up and knock. The flag still remains at full mast, but I didn’t stop by to tell you. I was somewhere else, thinking that if I fall away from every person I want to address in the second person, maybe I’ll fall into myself.
Distance, by definition, is the length from here to where we began. What does it ignore?
A final memory I offer you: I am small and my mom lets me choose the plants for the little garden patch right beneath my bedroom window. I’m standing with the hose showering that pine bush, the one perpetually dying with half its needles red and dry. We kneel among the coneflowers and dogwood and sprawling tree with the soft little buds on it, and she explains why we have to cut back the lamb’s ear, trimming its lushness to some arbitrary margin; the gangly offshoots will stretch farther away and steal more and more water from the original plant. Still, she smiles to see me sitting in the grass, clippers cast aside, with the softest of leaves between my finger and thumb.
Sometimes I look at a flag and see a distress signal. Someone raised it from the froth of peonies, tumbling over each other in a way that we call blooming, because they have reason to want to return home. Sometimes I look at a flag and see you, waving your white hat from somewhere further down the beach.
Sole Magazine