Moonflower

She stood by the climbing moonflower vine as the light faded from the sky. Her eyes were still puffy and red though it had been two hours since she’d last cried--her final sobs reaching their peak as she crossed the bridge and saw the beginning of the sunset, red, over the city.

Now she was waiting the way she always had, barefoot, outside and alone, waiting for the night to swell up around her and bring her comfort. As a teenager she had run out through the empty field where her grandfather’s cattle had once grazed; the grass was thick with clover and springy under her feet. When they were arguing she would stand in her pajamas until the cold of the dew made her legs tremble with shivers, until the moon rose up and the moonflowers opened.

She had rented this house because of the expansive plant at its southern corner. The minute she drove up the gravel drive and spied the great, fat buds “like swirls of soft ice cream”* she had known she would pay whatever the landlord asked. In the end, it had been a good price and it had been a good place for her. An empty outbuilding nearby had become her pottery studio and what had seemed to most people to be a passing whim--a few extra credits her senior year of college, was now close to becoming her vocation. She had made the jury cut and had a tent booked at the Stone Arch Bridge Art Festival later this month. She should be throwing pots now, she knew, but she didn’t move. The dark settled in around her. She waited.

They had had an argument--not anything very different from any others, but this time he was more insistent, or she more stubborn--she wasn’t sure.

“Marry me,” he had said. “Damn it, Ava, be sensible and marry me!”

She couldn’t say for sure what had made her say no--made her flat-out refuse instead of being coy and tactful. But then he had made some off-hand remark about her pottery, about how his recent promotion would provide them with more than enough and she could “keep her hobby” at least until they had children. That had made her angry, but she was old enough to sense that it had only scratched the surface of something deeper. She hadn’t expected to snap at him, but then wasn’t surprised when she did. She watched, as if from over her own shoulder as the argument turned from catty to heated. In the height of it she had closed her eyes and thought of this moment, outside, barefoot, waiting for the moonflowers to open, and it had brought her back to the meadow outside her childhood home. Her eyes had snapped open then.

“I will never marry you, Ricky!” she had said with such venom and certainty that her boyfriend-of-three-years’s jaw had dropped slightly open and hung there, gaping.

“I’ll go spend fifty bucks on a vibrator and another fifty on a bottle of wine [throw all the dame pots that I want] and get on with my life!”

The fight had only escalated after that, of course--how could it not? They had never spoken to each other that way; those words would have stung anyone.

“I was just so tired of dealing with his--” she whispered to herself in the dark, then stopped. A flutter of wings rushed by her head and she opened her eyes.

The moon had come up without her noticing. It was behind her and, thin though it was, it illuminated the enormous buds so they nearly glowed. A second sphinx moth whirred past her ear, loud as a hummingbird, and Ava saw the first flower open.

It did not unfurl or open delicately. The six-inch pearl-green petals snapped apart like the smacking of a pair of lips released from the furtive embrace of the long, hot day. A light breeze swirled the air and, “Oh, God,” she groaned with pained pleasure: the smell.

She stood there until well past midnight, unaware of the passing of time, thinking of nothing but the moonflowers, counting them as they spread themselves before her, one, two, three, sixty, eighty! She was giddy with delight, drunk on the lushness of it all--their rich perfume swathing her, the sphinx moths beating the air, brushing against her until her skin, her whole body was humming! She swayed and hummed a silent melody, she stepped out of her bitter sadness, she drank in dew through the soles of her feet.

At last when the last moth had moved on--flown to the rich and drooping lilac bush beyond the drive, she shook her wavy head, turned her face up to the million stars.

“Thank you,” she thought.

Though it was early summer and the nights were still cool, she left her bedroom windows open to the south. Alone in her double bed in her simple white nightgown, with the hoot of owls, the steady chirrup of courting frogs, and the mixture of lilac and moonflower floating in the window, Ava fell asleep.

The night was her lover and she was completely content.

-Rose Arrowsmith DeCoux

*quotation: Jenny Andrews, Garden Design, May/June 2010, “Plant Palette”

photo by Anita Munman: Moonflower & Moth

The Golden Courtier

“Oh, my,” she said, shaking her head so that the thin-stemmed feathers on her hat quivered. “This is simply mind-boggling.”

The two women, the older in her Sunday hat, the younger in black pants and jacket with an orchid-purple scarf knotted at her throat, stood in the entrance of the greenhouse. Damp, warm air swirled slowly around them, inviting, but the gray-haired woman stayed where she was, gloved hands clasping her purse.

“They’re just flowers, Mom,” said the younger one.

“Oh, no,” said her mother. “Mums.” This she breathed as if the very word was a perfume from long ago, from a younger, more vital time in her life.

The daughter shook her head, then stopped herself, her brown hair rustling silkily against her neat jacket. Her voice was softer this time, “Let’s just pick out the displays, all right? We shouldn’t be late.”

This time her mother allowed Rebecca to take her hand and lead her slowly down the far left aisle. Her feathers quivered anew as she turned her head left, right, left, right, and Rebecca thought how much she looked like a little bird: eyes bright, head cocked, lips parted.

They walked past the standard daisy-style flowers--Rebecca had to squint to read the names. Her townhouse was filled with hardy green plants like ficus and palm and jade--plants that no one expected to burst into bloom. She didn’t consider herself a gardener, but then, she didn’t consider her mother to be one either, though Vivian could nurse any bedraggled houseplant back to life.

“Sing to them, dearie,” her mother had told her once when she came to reclaim custody of a Christmas cactus the orange tabby had gnawed to a pitiful state. This was before Dad had gotten sick. Rebecca had put a hand on her hip and said, “really?” expecting her mother to laugh at her own joke, but Vivian had only raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips in a distinct, mysterious way that was entirely out of character and said no more. Some years later, when Rebecca had found the bags of fertilizer out in the tool shed, after they had moved Dad to the home and she and her brother, Kevin, were helping clean up the yard, she had clucked at her own gullibility. While she had never gotten the nerve to actually sing to her plants, she had allowed herself to hum along to the radio when the classics came on, glancing self-consciously at them where they sat in the big windows that looked out over the city. Anything more than that and she would risk being reminded of the cello still in storage in her mother’s upstairs hall closet, and guilt and failure would settle in like mist. Easier to just bring the plants to Mom’s house like wayward grandchildren and leave it at that.

“Look at this, Rebecca.” Her mother’s voice, still soft and rapturous, pulled her back and she instinctively took a deep breath in, feeling the living, fertile moisture fill her lungs. She turned.

Vivian was fingering a bloom bigger than her hat. Its scalloped petals curled over each other, forming an almost-perfect sphere of orangey gold.

“A Golden Courtier,” said her mother with that same faraway whisper that Rebecca had never heard before in her life.

“It has to be this one.” She touched the petals once more, tenderly, then, with a small sigh, like a child who must leave her longed-for favorite doll in the toy shop yet another day she returned the little gloved hand to her purse. “I’m ready,” was all she said, but her voice, though soft, was direct now and Rebecca was startled to have her mother’s eyes meet hers, all the dreaminess gone out of them, a touch of her tiredness from the past three years showing in them again.

“Are--are you sure, Mom?” she asked. “Don’t you want to look at these?” She swept a hand past the thistle and quill mums with their thin petals and wild colors; her mother was already shaking her head, sending the little feathers bobbing resolutely.

“All right,” Rebecca sighed. “How many?” She waved a garden boy in a canvas apron and work gloves over and he loaded the plants onto a wagon and into the back of her SUV. Rebecca paid with a card, scribbled her signature. Vivian was already belted and ready when she got to the car and started it up.

They pulled onto the highway in silence. When they reached the first crossroad, Rebecca cleared her throat. “Everything ok, Mom?”

An almost imperceptible nod. “Oh yes, I’m fine.” And then, “These will be perfect.” Just a hint of that dreaminess returned, a ripple of youth flowed over her face once more and then was gone. Rebecca thought of how much of her mother she would never know, and they drove in silence the rest of the way to the funeral.

-Rose Arrowsmith DeCoux

p.s. Inspiration comes in many forms... in this case, a Garden Design magazine!

Delight in Spring

I’m sitting outside facing east, facing the still-bare trees and beyond them, Lake Superior. Cars hum by steadily on the road between, but I don’t see them because the tangling bushes are thick together, even without their leaves.

A pair of crocuses have begun to open, near the house, well-protected from the wind but in the full force of the sun. It’s April and the sun is hot and the wind, cool.

Flies buzz and are still confused after their hibernation. I heard a robin yesterday for the first time this year and didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t until I saw a flash of rusty red breast that I guessed it. More are trilling their throaty songs now, “chirp, chirp, chirp, chirrup!”

Wind sweeps through the red pine, balsam and spruce. Chickadees squeak. I don’t hear any incensed red squirrels, but it’s only a matter of time. They are territorial and aggravated by “love” this time of year.

The grass still matches the rather tired brown of the deer who wander freely into the yard, but upon closer examination there is green beneath the dead stuff.

Ennis played outside for the first time yesterday. Of course, we’ve gone on walks since he was born (and before that) in all sorts of weather, but yesterday, still in his soft winter boots, I set him down on the asphalt driveway and waited.

He waited. He stood, solid, unmoving, looking around with a half-grin, his eye brows furrowed in the sun. At last he took a few steps, but it was sitting on the lawn that delighted him

He picked up spruce cones and blown down sprigs, handing each one to me with pleasure. When I showed him how the dry aspen leaves were so light I could blow them from my palm with a puff, he giggled with surprise and delight! He handed me leaf after leave and laughed to himself again and again. Then he clutched at clumps of dry grass and tossed them in the air. (When I told him that spruce cones are only food for squirrels, if he didn’t understand he at least obligingly enjoyed them without eating them.)

The ravens are calling. I learned yesterday that crows don’t stay here through the winter, and that the raven’s tail is pointed while the crow’s tail is flat. I have seen them flying, all black but for the strand of nest material they are bringing home.

All these animals (and insects) make their homes anew in the spring. Maybe they return to the same tree or nest, but still they are rebuilding, reinforcing. Perhaps we miss the newness and renewal of this season by staying inside our same old houses and apartments, only finally packing up the Christmas decorations in preparation for the chicks and bunnies of Easter.

But a good ten minute meditation in the sun on someone’s back deck makes up some of the difference. Out in the hum and chirp and caw of spring all the old wonder and appreciation comes back, like a long-frozen mother tongue. We respond to the sudden, cool wind with a shiver, to the warbling bird with a cocked head, to the wonderfully bright sun with a squint. We pick up spruce cones, we touch the dry grasses and see the new life pushing up beneath them, we delight in the day, in the earth and the sky, in spring.

-Rose Arrowsmith DeCoux