Sand in My Eyes (43 page)

For months now, my thoughts have been going round and round like dust devils in my mind—swooshing up memories of when you were small. Not big moments, but little ones, like the morning I filled a pan with soap and water, and watched as you twirled through the yard after your first bubbles, kicking your heels in temper as they popped
.

Life’s sweetest moments do pop quickly, but I have to believe, Fedelina, that there are always more waiting to be had, for us to breathe life into. My problem lately has been that I see no more bubbles heading my way, and no children to blow them toward me. Everyone tells me, “Just wait for the grandchildren to come running your way!”

Until then, I’ll force a hyacinth bulb into a glass of water and keep it by my bed. Hyacinth means “remembrance,” and they are poisonous (wear gloves when working with them). At the sight of it each morning, I’ll know that reminiscing is okay, but that living in the past can be poisonous. It’s hard not to worry, to think of you every day, and so I ask myself, what is a mother to do
?
I tell myself, all she can do now is pray, and so I will each and every day—it’s what a mother who loves her grown children can do
.

I’ve filled every white nook and cranny of this book, written over pictures of flowers, folded and tucked stationery notes throughout. What more do I have to write or say about flowers, or life, that hasn’t already been said
?
I only hope one day you open this book
, How to Grow Roses,
and discover it is more than a book on roses, because in it your mother wrote all her crazy little inspirations about womanhood. It doesn’t contain everything about life, as I once wanted it to, but I have a hunch that one day, if you don’t already, you’ll know more than me. They say that’s what happens when daughters grow up and have little girls of their own
.

Mums

P. S. Just as you fear your mother is about to rot into nothing, here I am now, out in my yard looking at the ground around me, at all the work to be done. It has been a frigid fall, and I feel winter life approaching. But there is always work to be done in one’s garden, no matter the season, and we shouldn’t let a frost line stop us. So I’ve decided to pick up my rake and clear the ground. Then plant new things. I think I’ll grow some roses. Roses grow everywhere in America
.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

WHEN MY BUTTOCKS WERE
sore from the stone bench I was sitting on, and I no longer felt like reading about that stage of my life—the brief and passing whirlwind I had experienced when my children were small—I closed my recently published first novel, wiped my eyes, and looked around to be sure no one was looking. I didn’t want to be one of those authors caught reading and crying over their own book. It’s why I didn’t tell them my name when I bought it earlier this morning at the island bookstore, or that I was the author, and that I was returning for a visit after all these years, to visit the stomping grounds of both the best and toughest days of my life—those days when my children were sprouting and my marriage crumbling.

Everyone has their own story to write, sing, or paint, but it had been a while since I had read mine. Now, as I fingered through the pages of my book—one I started long ago and kept tucked away all those years in my desk drawer—I was finding it hard to believe that this was the yard in which it all began, the inspiration for this story, this silly little story about flowers and an overwhelmed mother and the master gardener living next door. There was no champagne, no release party, when it first came out. I wasn’t publicity-crazed and didn’t go about setting up book signings. No one sent me flowers. And so I bought my own—roses, of course. But I had no desire for hoopla and craved neither fame nor praise, nor discussion of this book. Unless I was a Hemingway, or a Stein, or a Tolstoy, I would
never be proud. Writing it brought me insight and pleasure, along with grief. Reading it would do me no good, but leave me cringing at the parts in which I could have done better—the things I could have done differently in my life. Once a book is released into the world there is no going back, no changing the things you wish you could change, no spending more time with the chapters you knew you should have spent more time with.

It’s the same as when a loved one dies. There are no last kisses to be kissed, hugs to be hugged, words to be spoken—no going back, apologizing for what once was or wasn’t. It’s why I found it hard to talk about this book, why my mind went blank when people asked me what it was about. It is hard for me to tell, even to my own children, that which is fact from that which is fiction, and hard for me to accept the truth, that Fedelina Aurelio never lived to be so old—only in my book! In real life, she had a stroke that morning, the morning I took my children to school, and shortly afterward her children moved her to Indiana, to a nursing home. I never had the opportunity to visit her the way my book describes because she died shortly thereafter.

The news of her death hit me hard and left me sad for the longest time. I did take a trip to Indiana, to visit with her daughters and tell them about the way in which their mother had inspired me. They were surprised, saying she always claimed she had no secrets with regard to raising children, marriage, or living life. Maybe she didn’t, but we agreed that she did have experience, which is where the secrets hide, waiting to be uncovered in a conversation or set free from the rubble of memories.

After meeting with those beautiful girls of hers, who were there beside her every morning of her brief stint at the nursing home, I returned home, eager to interweave what they told me about their nursing home experiences into my story. But when I sent it out into the world—to agents and publishers nationwide—they rejected it, one terming it the “silly little story about flowers.” It was then that I saw in my mind a tree, a barren tree, for the first time. So I went to work, adding more, layer upon layer of embellishment, starting with those letters from Cora that weren’t really from any Cora. They were from me. I thought up all the things I wanted
my own daughter to know about life, and then I did historical research. Adding those letters to my story was like putting leaves on the tree. I added more things, too, like making Fedelina a master gardener. She wasn’t really, but she could have been with all the passion she had for her garden. Suddenly there were flowers in my tree. And because I wanted birds, too, lots of birds so that none would be lonely, I added to my story Fedelina’s trip to the Grand Ole Opry, and her computer class and game night, and anything else I could think of. She never did any of that. But showing her living out her life in a lonely state wasn’t how I wanted my story to go, and I wanted to believe that a person has choices in life, and that when one is lonely there are options, things they can do to pull themselves from the stagnant swamp. I stepped away from my manuscript for several months, but knew from a distance that the branches of my tree never moved and that they needed to move. I went back to work, adding more spirit and the part about prayer. It was the wind that made my story move.

And when I saw in my mind that my tree was as beautiful and full of life as it could be—when I reached the words, “The End”—I was done, and felt both happy and sad, and older, too, for having gone through all of that. A writer doesn’t only pick her themes like apples from a tree; she prepares the ground, plants, grows, harvests, nurtures, and processes those themes, too. It took a long time, and the process of writing it was hard, but I never wanted to look back one day and ask myself,
Why didn’t I plant a royal poinciana
?

Now, sitting on a stone bench in the yard that once belonged to my main character, and with a view of my own old yard where the children played, I opened the novel once more. Reading it was like biting into an apple from a tree I had grown myself. I had two of my own copies from the publisher somewhere at home, but the day they arrived in the mail I found it hard to open them, and never did. Doing so would only spook me, I had decided, from seeing my heart and soul poured into words. I had questioned for months whether a heart and soul are meant to become words. There was only one thing I felt sure of when the book was released, and that was my adamant opposition to the publisher when he wanted to
change the title to
Mrs. Aurelio’s Son Knocking at My Door
or
Knocking at the Door to my Soul or Letters from Cora or The Flower Letters
.

If only Fedelina were still up in that old house of hers, or out here pulling all these weeds, I thought as I dropped the book in the grass, leaving it for someone else to read. Then I could walk over and ask the reader what she thought the title should have been.

There had been a subtle breeze all morning. I waited for it to pick back up again, and when it did, I let it carry me over to my old yard, and to the time in my life when I was hardly seeing all the beauty that was there. It was as if I had something in my eyes, clouding my vision. The grounds were full of memories of when my children were small. There were thorns and thistles, too, reminding me of the man who had tried dulling my colors with his betrayal, crumbling my petals with his impurity, wilting me with his forbidden act.

He said he felt remorse, said he wanted to start fresh. So for my sake, and that of my children, I stopped cursing the ground their father walked on and I forgave him for the thing he had done to me. And because my neighbor did indeed tell me one day—whether I liked hearing it or not—that women need to put more care and nurturing into the well-being of their marriages, I went to work. My husband and I went to work. We worked on everything, starting at the roots deep within ourselves, raking through the disturbed soil, fertilizing, nurturing, and caring for the ground around us. We worked until the stench was gone, the impurity raked away, and the water clear. It was when the water was clear that I felt myself loving him again, truly loving him, pure and simple. But then he did it again—pursued his pleasures once more, dulling my colors, crumbling my petals, wilting me for good with his wicked ways—and raining on my parade!

And so I left him. A mother does things for the sake of her children. I left him for my sons. I left him for my daughter. But first I loved him, and they saw this, too. Thanks to the advice from my neighbor, my children saw a mother loving a father, a wife caring for her husband—at least trying! And when he yanked at my roots once more, pulling me from the Earth, tossing me into the dirt, I waited for a breeze and found in it the
energy to get back on my knees and crawl away. My children saw that, too. They saw their father, an adult, bearing the consequences of his sin. It was a lesson they needed to see so that one day they will know what not to do, and what not to let someone do to them.

And then they saw more. They saw their mother in her darkest days of dormancy. All I kept thinking while I was down was that, hopefully, my children would see that not everything in life is always going to be a beautiful blast of color. But it was also for them that I knew I would have to reemerge. It was for them that I looked up to the Lord and made sure they saw this. And then my stem emerged from the dirt and grew tall and strong, and to my own surprise my petals opened again, and my colors returned more brilliant than ever before.

I saw the marvel in my children’s eyes, and knew then what a mother is supposed to do, show her children life in all its stages and that not everything is going to be blooming at once. Sometimes it feels as if nothing is blooming or will ever bloom again. A mother can only use words to tell her children so much. It’s how she lives her life that teaches them the most.

I worked hard to support my family—did what I had to do to put food on the table—and in the very little selfish time that I had through the years, I wrote. I wrote for comfort. I wrote for pleasure. I wrote to make sense of it all. This is not the only novel I had tucked away in my drawer. There are more, several more, and it’s time now to pull them out, get them published, and write more. It’s quite common for a mother to put her own passions aside, tuck them in a drawer, but it’s my time now and writing is what I want to do.

My old house was vacant. There was a “For Rent” sign out front and no furniture in the windows. I sat down on the bottom step and pulled the letter I had been writing to Marjorie out of my purse. I was always writing a letter to Marjorie, or Thomas, or Will.