Sand in My Eyes (42 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

BELVEDERE

I KEPT WATCHING OUT
my window the rest of that day, hoping to see you in your garden,” I told Fedelina when I came to the end of all I had written in my novel so far and closed its pages. “I wanted to thank you for the plant.”

“I know,” she said.

“I knocked and knocked at your door the next day. I swear, I even looked in your windows,” I went on. “I figured you left, went on a trip.”

“It’s okay, Anna, forgive yourself.”

I turned my face from her and tried focusing on all the butterflies, but I was crying now and couldn’t hide it. “Forgive me. I’m sorry I didn’t help you. I didn’t think, didn’t know! I didn’t know until weeks later, when your daughters came to pack your boxes. That’s when I found out what happened.”

“Diabetic shock,” she said. “A stroke, too.”

“I would have come to see you,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I would have come to the hospital, had I known.”

“I know,” she said. “But I was in poor condition, and before I knew it my children had me transferred up north.”

“You didn’t want to go back north.”

“No, but the best time to move an established rose is when the rose is
dormant,” she said. “And it was more convenient to have me in their neck of the woods. They were busy with jobs, had their own lives. It was best for them.”

“But you loved your life, your garden.”

“Yes,” she said, “which only proved what I already knew, what you and I talked about, that no stage of life lasts forever. It’s all a big metamorphosis.”

“I see what you mean. The best stage for me was when my children were little. At least then I knew they were coming home from school each day. Back to what we were talking about before, I’m lucky now if they come home for spring break!” I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. “I know I need to start doing things for myself, but it’s hard. I’m not crazy about the stage I’m currently in.”

“You’re in a transition stage, like a pupa, suspended under a branch, hidden in leaves or buried underground,” she said.

“That’s exactly how I feel, and I’m ready to get out, move on to a new phase,” I confessed.

“And you will.”

“I hope,” I said.

“You will!”

“I don’t know. I’ve been stuck in this rut since Marjorie left for college.”

“Oh, it can last a few weeks, months, even longer, but keep in mind, if you’ve ever watched a butterfly work its way out of a cocoon, you’d know it’s a real struggle. It has to be. It’s the struggle that pumps blood into its wings so it can fly. Did I tell you what I did the first morning alone in my house after my youngest left home?”

“No.”

“I sat in my pajamas at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and reading the paper, drinking coffee, and wondering, is this it? Is this all that is left to life? And then,” she said, “I became a certified master gardener!”

“You became a master gardener? Just like that?”

“Well, nothing is as easy as it sounds. I took an intensive training program. I learned everything about botany, soils, vegetable gardening, annual and perennial flowers, insects, diseases, and weed control. Whoever
thought, after raising seven children, that I’d then spend several years planting and maintaining public gardens?”

“How rewarding.”

“Oh, it was. I made horticulture presentations to civic and garden clubs, and helped with community beautification projects.”

“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. “I did not know you were a master gardener.”

She laughed. “So when, Anna, are you going to start doing what a mother of grown children does?”

“I don’t know. What does she do?”

“She looks around at the garden she is in, which, by the way, is usually overgrown. Then she goes about creating a master plan for a new garden, something more suitable to her liking.”

“I don’t know for sure what I like,” I said.

“You’ve got to ask yourself a simple question.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Not, who am I?”

“No,” she laughed. “But what do you want?”

“What do I want?”

She nodded.

“And then what?”

“Then you put your gardening gloves on, and get down in that dirt and dig.”

“Dig?”

“For the dreams you once had, the ones you buried.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“Nothing is easy,” she said. “And let me warn you. Once you start, you’ll probably find yourself pulling weeds—all those things keeping you down, hindering your joy. And you might come across worms and pests and layers of memories, as well as dried-up stuff that you never intended to let dry up.”

“Nice,” I said. “And then what?”

“Then you pray,” she said. “Don’t forget to pray.”

If she weren’t so frail-looking, if her eyes weren’t starting to close like she were falling asleep, I would have jumped into her arms and given her
a hug, for her tidbits on life—hers and her mother’s—had been what helped me through, before and now. That was the reason, one of the reasons, I had come all this way to see her.

“I want to find closure,” I said then. “I’ve been working on this same doggone manuscript all these years, tweaking here, adding layers there, and voilà, this is it—all I’ve got to show after all these years of toiling.”

“Yes, there comes a time when you must declare yourself done.”

“You have no idea,” I told her.

She looked at me oddly. “But it’s inspired by real-life events, like your knowing me.”

“That’s true,” I said, worried by her reply. Her not liking it, opposing it, would have me crawling out of here on my knees.

“What are your intentions for this book?”

“Well, I was thinking it might be a book others would like to read, so I was going to send it out into the world, find an agent.”

“And what will you do if it’s wildly accepted?”

“I don’t know, build a mansion by the sea and live in it, then write another.”

“And what if it gets rejected?”

“Burn it,” I said, “and spread its ashes out over the Gulf of Mexico, vowing never to write again. But don’t worry—after a period of mourning, I’ll move on. There’s got to be other things I could try, like painting, or learning the piano. I’ve always wanted to play the piano. I could move into a town house and buy one of those ten-dollar battery-operated pianos for children that I see all the time at the drugstores.” I stopped there.

“Anna,” she said, “will you ask the nurses to bring me back to my room now?”

“Of course,” I told her. When we got back, I went to her window with nothing but cornfields outside and closed the blinds, thinking to myself how gloomy it all looked.

“Open them,” she insisted.

“You like them open?”

“I love them open. I love that view,” she said.

“What do you like about it?”

“I look out at all that land,” she said, “and think of the stages of growth, the cycles of life. Fall, even winter, serves its vital purpose.”

I opened the blinds and looked back out, trying to see things differently, the way she saw them. And when I came back to my chair and sat down, she said to me, “I see the vulnerable state you’re in, Anna. You’ve toiled, you’ve sweated, you moved onward with this story despite your fatigue and insecurities, and you did all this because you were led by blind faith. You are a writer. You wrote a story,” she went on. “But it’s a story about me! At least, a large chunk of it is about me!”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“I don’t mind that it’s about me, but nowhere in the story do you mention what I think is the most powerful thing a mother can do for her children—and I remember saying it to you when you asked one day whether I had any secrets regarding motherhood and marriage.”

“In my book, I said you claimed you didn’t have secrets or advice, but you did.”

“Yes,” she said. “And if you’re going to use me as a character, I hope you’ll include it somewhere.”

“Okay,” I said, reaching for my pen, touching it to the paper. “I’m ready. What is the one thing a mother, a woman, can do?”

“Pray,” she said. “I prayed and prayed, and still pray today, for each and every one of my children. Why do you think I spent so much time in my garden? It was the place that brought me closer to God. And it made me want to pray!”

“I see what you’re saying,” I told her. “But I didn’t mean for it to be a book on spirituality. It’s supposed to be about the stages of life.”

“It’s your book,” she said. “You do what you like. But if you use my name, put it in! I think adding a spiritual side will only make it better—breathe life into it—but you’re the writer, not me. What do I know? All I know is there’s a butterfly on your head—a monarch.”

“Is there?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s one on your stomach,” I said, pointing. We watched it until it flew away, and then she said, “Are you ready for the other thing I
see missing from your story?”

“There’s more?”

“Yes,” she said, pulling a piece of paper from the side of her bed. “This is the other letter from my mother, the one I was going to share with you the day of my stroke. Read it to me, will you?”

“I would love to!”

“Read it to me, then catch your flight. Go home and get your story published.”

“You mean that?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Dearest Fedelina
,

I look in the mirror and wonder who the old woman is staring back at me. But I know that yellowing leaves are part of the normal aging process. Days like this, when I’m mourning the vibrant colors that once were, I force myself to look up. And then I spot a cardinal sitting in a branch above me. I listen closely to its chirp. It sounds like this: “Pretty, chirp, chirp, chirp. Pretty, chirp, chirp, chirp.”

The birds sound lovely, but to tell you the truth, I miss those days when the parade came down my street, filling my yard with the sounds of bands and the clapping of hands, of children laughing and of babies not napping. Older women standing on the sidelines, watching us go by, used to yell out to me, “Those were the best years of my life! They go by fast! Enjoy,” but I was too busy keeping children in line, marching this way, heading that way, mending costumes, tidying the streets, picking up confetti and candy wrappers, to think about my children marching on ahead of me one day
.

But children grow up and yards become quiet. And it’s sad when there are no reasons to roller skate, or floats to decorate, or candy to hand out, or little girls dancing about, and there is nowhere I can think of to march to, no routes to pursue, no band I can join or clap to
.

I take my pen and paper and go down to the garden, where I sit like a flower stripped of her petals. How quickly it all happened, as though driven by a gust of wind—you were off and married and moved away. It’s hard going about my days with the most precious part of me—you, my daughter—off and into the world, and I see now why it is wise for a woman to have a few things going on in her life so that when petals blow off she still has other things surrounding her
.