Peonies

Until a few years ago I didn’t know the names of most flowers. 

Roses, okay, sure. Daisies, tulips, but that’s about it. I would see flowers and like them, but didn’t feel any particular curiosity about what they were called. It worked the other way too. If I came upon a type of flower in a book or poem, Wordsworth’s daffodils, for example, or D. H. Lawrence’s Bavarian Gentians, I could only hold a vague, flowerish picture in my head.  

This all changed six years ago when we moved into our new-old house. The yard was overrun with plants we couldn’t identify. Also, the house was overrun with stuff we couldn’t identify. Wooden sculptures nailed to the walls. Glitter mixed with the orange ceiling paint. The giant Gatsby-like eyeball decals pasted to the dining room wall. But this is another story. That summer we focused on the house and left the yard for later. 

Later, turned out to be the first scary, bewildering months of the pandemic. Project one was to pull out the jungle of bamboo. Bamboo, I could recognize. Next, came the mass of wild grass. One day I crawled through it and had the shock of my life: a crazy woman on hands and knees coming straight at me. 

Ha ha no, that was a mirror and the crazy woman was me. Why was there a large mirror propped up in the center of a thicket of wild grass? Who knows. But then, why had the doorknobs on all the doors been replaced with water faucets and why was there a prison door on the patio and why were we in the middle of a global pandemic, the president advising us to drink bleach? But back to the flowers. 

After the bamboo came out and the wild grass, I was starting to get somewhere with my flower identification. This was summer 2020, and I was aiming the plant app on my phone at everything remaining. Those orange things were day lilies. The yellow stuff was Black-eyed Susan. The purple was coneflower. A delicate blue with spokes shooting out of it was called Love in the Mist.   

When the library opened its curbside delivery service, I ordered a bunch of plant books and painstakingly mapped out the yard on graph paper. The yarrow. The blazing star. The crocosmia with its feathery petals that looked like flames. And the peonies.

Let me tell you about the peonies. It’s a spring flower so I missed it completely in 2020, but the next year I noticed the big blooms behind the garage. This is a part of the yard that I didn’t know was our property so I had never seen the flowers back there. By the time I found them, they were flopped over, smushed on the neighbor’s driveway. I dug up part of the plant and replanted it in a place where we could see it, and now every spring, it’s my favorite flower to watch bloom.

First, a tight pink bud, and then an unfurling, a poof, and it’s a full-blown flower, too heavy to stay upright. There’s the inevitable flop over and a shedding of all of the petals, this entire process only taking a week? two weeks at most, and then it’s back to being an ordinary bush until next spring. Which is such a shame, the quickness of it, the loss. 

This year I decided to do what I could to slow things down. Can you slow things down? Maybe not, but I’ve been clipping several of the stems at the tight pink bud stage and putting them in jars around the house. I wish you could smell how sweet it is as the buds open, see the loveliness of the blooms. I put a vase in the guest room for our daughter, who is visiting for the weekend. 

Oh! she said, when she saw it. What is this? A peony, I told her. And like magic, we keep seeing them. A farmer selling bouquets at the farmers market and on our walks with the dog. Bushes on the edges of front lawns, the flowers brushing the sidewalk. 

We've been talking about other times she’s visited, when we first bought this wacky old house (that she begged us not to buy because it needed so much work) and later, during the pandemic, when she was in our bubble, the days we jumped on shovels together, tugging out bamboo roots. It feels like yesterday, it feels like today. The time with her, 

it goes too fast. But right this moment, she is here and I am taking her in. This morning before she wakes up, I tuck a fresh peony into the vase for one more day of frothiness and delight.  

Unwatched

On Friday my smartwatch broke. The face must’ve snapped off at some point when I was unrolling the baby yoga mats for our weekly tummy time program at the library, and it took me a minute to register that it had broken. To say that I am attached to this watch is an understatement. I've been wearing it pretty much non-stop for five years. 

It’s the first thing I look at in the morning, to check the time and analyze my sleep. Was my heart rate up or down? Did I fall into the recommended minutes of deep sleep? Did I wake too much to toss and turn? Later, I’d check my steps, noting with satisfaction when I crossed 5000, when I crossed ten, and braggy alert: when I crossed 15. 

For the rest of my work shift, I wandered around feeling the ghost weight of the watch on my wrist. I was already calculating how fast I could buy another and have it sent to me, because really, how else would I know when I completed the requisite standing-for-one-minute-per-hour? And what else was going to give me a digital badge for doing twenty minutes of outdoor exercise?

Home, though, and I had a wild thought: What if I DON’T buy another watch? 

This question came up courtesy of the three books I’ve read recently about the emptiness and dangers of over-consumerism and how we might all be happier with less. (For the record the books are: The Year of Less by Cait Flanders, The Art of Frugal Hedonism by Annie Raser-Rowland, and The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer.) 

On fire with my new awareness, I told my husband we should stop buying so much online and try to purge ten items from our house each week. I made a list of things to purge and promptly did not purge them. 

For example, a bike we never ride that has flat tires. Do we fix it? Stick it out on the curb in its flat-tired state? Haul it to the junkyard? Or, my ancient wedding dress which I had never stored properly, and frankly, who would want it now, with the Lady Diana-inspired poofy sleeves and fiddly beaded bodice? 

I did have one moment of purge-y success. A few days before the watch broke, I noticed a sign at my library that they were collecting gently-used musical instruments for the city schools, and I remembered that I have two violas gathering dust in a closet. When I toted them into the building and set them in the collection box, a wave of nostalgia splashed over me. 

This was the end of an era. The kids playing viola in their school orchestras. The music lessons. The concerts. But the funny thing is that it was the end of the era twelve years ago. For whatever reason I kept hanging on to the violas. I took a picture of the dusty cases and walked away, and immediately felt lighter. 

Wait, my husband says when I tell him about my plan to NOT buy another smartwatch. How will you know how you slept? How will you keep track of your steps? 

I don't know, I say. Do I have to keep track of these things? 

We were out to dinner with friends, and this morning I woke up groggy and tired, and I knew it, without the watch, that the one cocktail and delicious deep-fried barbecued chicken sandwich I ate the night before had really affected my sleep. But, oh well!   

Later, I went for a long walk with the dog, keenly aware of my bare wrist. I ambled along the usual route, but it felt like unmapped territory, a new path unfurling before me, my heartbeats unmeasured, my footsteps, for now, uncounted. 

Mother's Day

Today is the day I plant seeds. First, I set out all of my planting containers and fill them with potting soil, and then, I gather the seeds. 

The seeds are stored in envelopes and paper bags and plastic baggies, collected back in the fall or given to me, the dried-up marigold heads and zinnia, the basil and cleomes (which are big blobby brightly colored Dr. Suess-like flowers), the lettuce that bolted in summer, the red beans and black. All of the seeds have a story and the stories are all about gifts. 

The beans, for example, came from a farmer in New York near where my son and daughter-in-law live. Last year we helped the farmer dig holes in his field and he served us dinner, and as we were leaving, he handed me five black beans and five red. The cleome seeds were given to me by a neighbor after I told her how much I loved her “Dr. Seuss plants.” The marigolds are a gift from myself, several falls ago when I realized I didn’t need to buy these seeds, they were there all along, hundreds of them, in each cluster of blooms. 

Drop the seeds in the containers, add a bit more dirt. Water. Label, so I will remember. (I am big on remembering.) The process takes me all morning, and I am so grateful for this kind of meditative, lose-yourself-in-the-moment kind of activity. The second Sunday in May is always the day I plant my seeds. In central Ohio, it’s officially the start of the growing season—no more freezes or frosts (we hope!) 

It also happens to coincide with Mother’s Day. To put it mildly, I have mixed feelings about this day. I am a mother and I love being a mother. I am a daughter and this is where it gets tricky. For most of my life the daughter part of me took up an absurdly outsized portion of my brain. I don’t know how to explain it. 

Some of us grow where we are planted. Some of us are like the seeds dropped by birds and watered by kindly strangers. 

It’s warm outside while I work and lovely. When I’m finished planting, I have many more seeds left than I have containers to put them in. This happens every year and I am grateful for this too, a gift for those who have gifted me. 

A story. 

The Binge

Yesterday it was raining and unseasonably cold and dreary, and my husband and I sat down to watch one episode of a show we’d started the night before, a medical drama called The Pitt, which takes place in an ER and is weirdly mesmerizing. The one episode turned into three, turned into five, turned into nine, 

and the afternoon slipped away, the two of us parked on the couch, only breaking for meals and shuffling the dog in and out in the rain. When was the last time we did something like this, my husband asked me. Never, I said, but then I remembered the pandemic, 

our daughter and her boyfriend, now her husband, the four of us binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy, another medical drama (what is it about medical dramas?). Something about the intensity, the life-or-death moments, the glimpses of humans in crisis and all the ways we save each other. 

The Pitt covers a single day in a trauma center, each episode one hour in the twelve-hour shift. Slowly you get to know these people, the doctors, the medical students, nurses and orderlies, the head doctor doing his best to lead the place, but grappling with PTSD. Turns out, four years ago, during the pandemic, he was unable to save his mentor and now he’s flashing back, struggling to forget because who wants to remember that chaotic, terrifying time? Not me, but,

once, early on in the pandemic, in between Grey’s Anatomy episodes, I sneaked out of the house and drove across town to meet up with a friend I hadn't seen in weeks. The drive was eerie, the highways crisscrossing the city empty except for my car, a sign flashing over a bridge, reminding me to Flatten the Curve! Stay Home! 

and one man on the side of the road, peeing into a clump of bushes. This is the end of the world, I was thinking, and it was. Except it wasn’t. My friend and I wore masks and spent an hour together doing a socially-distant walk, and then I drove away on the vacant streets, 

home, where my family had moved on to binge-watching The Great British Bake-off, a marathon session of multiple episodes, punctuated only by stopping to bake a cake or whip up an elaborate French pastry. My son-in-law who had dreams of becoming a chef, made me a grilled cheese. The grilled cheese took hours and many episodes of The Great British Bake-Off because first he had to make the bread. 

When he delivered the sandwich, it came on one of my fancy plates, the thick homemade bread toasted, the cheese gooey and topped with thinly sliced pear and slivers of red onion. Nearly five years later, it’s still the best sandwich I have ever eaten in my life. Maybe I shouldn’t have broken the rules to visit my friend. 

I don’t know what spurred me on. The way everything had shifted out from under us, the library where I worked, closed for who knows how long, the claustrophobia of the house in lockdown, the binge-watching and binge-eating, the intensity of the love I had for my family, the terror that any of us might get sick, and suddenly, I thought I might lose my mind if I couldn’t do one ordinary thing. 

My friend and stayed on opposite sides of the street as we walked. When it was time to say goodbye, we held out our hands, pretending we could touch.