Dogwood
I saw their resentment bloom like a dainty, white flower that would grow on the dogwood by the rocky backyard pond. Before their interest in the stout tree reached its pinnacle, they married on the first day of spring 1993 while they were in bloom. That first year of their marriage, they planted the tree everywhere they could find soil. Every anniversary beckoned the sprouts to flower, and the backyard would transform into the Garden of Eden for them—each ring on the tree an extended metaphor for the strength of their marriage. They should not have picked such a stout tree to decorate their lives. They should not have planted so much dogwood near the lake. The petals so easily blow off the pistil.
My parents always did that; they grew things where they did not belong: a lettuce crop planted in August’s muggy heat, an incubator filled with chicken eggs on the fine dining room floor. In my childhood, I recall a singular row of grand, green corn stalks on the left side of our backyard. At night, the stalks appeared to be an army of lonely men lined up by my sister’s playset, like invaders to our landscape. The image only solicited our biological nature to assign a foe out of the elements. We subjected our minds to create a threat, but I miss those days before our foes grew faces. I long to be borne back to the days when we conjured our enemies from abiotic heaps of mud and imagination.
We all once lived in a neighborhood within a small town on a big lake, and I imagine our neighbors viewed our summer corn stalks as an eyesore among their azaleas and zinnias. Every fall, my sisters and I peeked out the windows to view our neighbors digging up the warm soil for their beloved bulbs. In contrast, our dad insisted on taking his farming profession home. I imagine it was a form of defiance against our mother. Before us, he lived in an isolated, open interior plain of southern Illinois. The scenery changed when he married again, this time to my mom, who longed for a more social atmosphere in town. Dad compromised, but he was not satisfied. I think, after the move, he lost something in the plains of his youth––some ancestral connection to the earth his father once plowed and harvested. Visiting the grounds did not seem to be enough for him, and he was gone for about sixteen hours every day, always claiming to be there. On one rare occasion when he came home early, I asked why he brought home a bag of corn seeds.You can’t eat beauty, he joked. So, the unusual suburban crop found its justification.
Now I know that my dad was wrong; you can eat beauty. It is just not how he imagined the process. Instead, it is slow devouring. It is picking off a petal at a time. It’s a trade-off: A compliment for two nights in a row without coming home, a bouquet of vital pink roses in response to rumors that he is cheating on his wife with a coworker. It’s setting a beautiful portrait on fire, then blowing it out, again and again, until there is nothing but ashes to gather and entomb in an urn next to the rotting stems of a mutilated rose.
In 2012, my mom learned about his coworker. At once, glass shattered everywhere, the lake gates rattled from the storm, and the tin finishing under the upstairs patio collapsed, so the metal blanket hung in the balance near our feet for months until my brother discarded the metal himself—everything fell apart.
Within the year, I switched from homeschooling to public school. Consequently, my vast garden, once filled with summer berries and sun-kissed tomatoes, wilted and was eaten by stray rabbits. My dad pruned and plucked the rest of the forgotten crops. The corn lay uprooted in a heap near a large fire my dad forged. He collected our plastic childhood toys, dirty from disuse, and watched them burn along with the dying gold husks. The ritual was a purification, I realized. He set our old world on fire.
My world was falling apart before I could define and explore it for myself. After the fire, I thought the worst of it was over—until dad decided to replace our lush Kentucky bluegrass with the Zoysia variety, which stays a yellowy-brown more than a tranquil green. I stood looking out my bedroom window, beholding a group of dirt-caked men rolling out the spiky dead grass like rolls of carpet. No one thought to tell me. I felt like Rapunzel, so high in her tower, watching the world rejoice and cry without her involvement, impervious to change any of it. I mourned the spot where I buried my golden retriever. The fallen dogwood flowers decorated her gravestone I retrieved from the banks of the lake when I was nine. I planted wild lilies over the patch, and now the dirt was bare again, as it had been the day she died. The entire yard was fruitless, as if we had never sewn countless seeds into the stiff ground like time capsules. It was as if the whole house was to be buried and marked with a headstone.
My mom’s prized flower garden in the front yard was the last to go. A new landscape company in town rocked over it; their grimy hands plucked the wild lilies mom planted for me like weeds. They threw the multi-colored stones onto the exposed, sad soil. I cried as they strangled my mom’s primroses and impatiens by the root and held them up in conquest. All the butterflies I memorized the names of took off like refugees to our neighbor’s homes. I wanted to be like them. It was like the army of corn stalks from my youth finally grew limbs as I predicted they could. But instead, they walked around seeking vengeance on the pretty flowers, so jealous of their beauty that they consumed it.
***
My mom and I moved out of there a few years later, just in time to see the dogwoods one last time. Quite a few of them died, too scrawny to survive twenty years. Some of them remained. It soon became my brother’s turn to take care of them. My mom sold the house for next to nothing. After all, there is little value in decay. The vitality of home rotted away along with the grass, flowers, and the five bedrooms of its inhabitants. My brother, however, has five young, bright children: my niece and my nephews. I now watch them play in my old room, where I cried for the wild lilies. My niece has a small garden next to the biggest dogwood—she swears that fairies adore the beautiful flowers. She believes that they make beds out of calla lily and blankets of sage. Sometimes, we have sleepovers where we collapse on a soft palette in the living room. My brother and his wife remodeled the windows to open wide-eyed to the water. I open the window, none of us minding the sound of swishing trees and lapping water as we fall asleep.
I do not keep much from the relocation. I left my Barbie dolls for my niece and my pink stuffed animals. I left behind my childhood in boxes marked for the church donation bins. I only took clothes, pillows, and old storybooks. However, I still keep the same photograph on my bookshelf: it is an old nineties Polaroid of my mom looking in the mirror. Her face is tanned, and she is wearing a vacation dress of many colors. Her sun-blonde hair swished to the right side of her neck, bent to the will of her hairbrush. I love the intimacy of this photo—the slight smile on my mom’s pink lips. I cannot tell if she is smiling at herself or the unseen reflection of a boyfriend capturing the moment, giving her beauty permanence.
The photograph is a cage to the past. It is a time before motherhood slumped the vitality out of my mom’s cheeks, before her belly was ever taut with the force of life—before she gave up her body to her four children, and before she gave up her agency to her husband. This picture reminds me that, before my mother was mine, she was her own.
***
Ten years later, my mom and I heal our wounds with patches of memory. I see her through the portal of a mirror, her hair blowing wild by a breeze—a smile on her pink lips. I can sense her arm outstretched to hold me again, for me to grow bedside her. She and I look out at the old lake, the same spot on the dock where I used to jump off in the water. The same place where my dad taught me to ride a paddle boat and fish for bluegill. As my nephew pushes me into the water, I transport myself back to 2010. I shed my brief annoyance in the same water I once pushed my big brother into, and I cannot help but smile as I resurface to the sound of my nephew’s bell-like laughter. I watch his face scrunch up in ornery affection, and we jump off together, hand-in-hand, again and again. The algae murk ruins my white t-shirt, but my mom keeps laughing and taking pictures with a digital camera. How could I ever mourn a t-shirt in moments like this?
I feel my mom’s nurture; her chin is pointed parallel to a freshly-planted row of impatiens, red and white like vital organs. I adore her keen eye for detail and how she plants more and more every year, as she once had before the day of uprooting. The butterflies return, and I greet them all by name: tiger swallowtail, dainty sulfur, red-spotted purple. There is a row of wild lilies for me. My niece says we must plant sage next to it, or else those beautiful fairies will get “chill bumps.” So, of course, I grow them, and during the Easter egg hunt, I write her name on a bright pink egg and place it in the hollow calla lily bed next to the fresh sage. I take a picture as she finds it and runs back to me with her arms wide.
I watch them dance around the tall magnolias and crawl under the willow canopy, searching for the sparkling, pretty eggs. Our yard swells with memory as they leap through the grass. Wonder dances in their eyes; what will they find next? I look to my left, and of course, my sisters, brother, mom, and grandma are there—all in a row seated on the white wicker. Their hands clap, and their eyes flicker. We gaze at the kids running across the lawn, their soft heels bounding through the Kentucky Blue. Their baskets are full of golden eggs as their dandelion fingers search for the beauty in the garden.