This is a disease with no dignity, yet my mother has somehow managed to keep hers. Her appreciation of beauty remains as a purifier for her spirit. She notices the cardinals, the blue jays, the mallards, the squirrel hanging upside down on the feeder swinging like a member of the circus. She notices the seasons as they advance, the water rippling on her dark Texas lake, the bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush in April. She is pleased to see her Japanese woodcuts and embroidered peacock pictures on the walls. My mother always made a beautiful home: she filled a space with light and color and aroma, with silk pillows and Japanese tansus made of cherrywood, with marble-covered dressers, with jazz records, and, of course, with lovely flower arrangements that greeted you like a deep curtsy, and a warm hug, when you entered the room.
At her lake home in Texas, we light a fire and watch a movie and I say, “That’s me, Mom. In the movie. It’s called The Spitfire Grill.”
She makes the connection between me and the film, and she smiles and nods. “Wonderful,” she demurs.
“You visited me on that set, and on Mother’s Day we woke up and looked out the window of the old cabin I was renting, and saw my Jeep Grand Wagoneer completely covered in jonquils! Hundreds of them!” I imagine I see a spark of recognition, and go on. “My ex covered the car in jonquils on Mother’s Day—maybe two hundred of them!” She laughs, happy to imagine this scene. “He was trying to impress you, Mom!”
“Well, he did,” she responds, then adds: “That’s the happiest flower in the garden, the daffodil.” I am thrilled that she had made the connection between daffodil and jonquil. For some reason I always call them jonquils, maybe because once I heard Katharine Hepburn call them that, but Mom prefers daffodils. Yes! She has remembered that they are the same thing! A small but important victory. Mom had once described this sweet yellow flower to me. “The daffodil seems to be smiling at me. It is proud to be up and blooming and greeting everyone it sees. It has on a beautiful new petticoat and a bonnet, it must be the happiest flower in the garden, ready to start the new year,” she said. I tell her that, and remind her that she also taught me how to slide a wet pipe cleaner made of chenille inside the daffodil stem, so that it could bend to one’s whim in an arrangement. “Oh, that would be a good idea,” she says.
Time is full of telling my mother who she was, and the information sits on the periphery of her brain, dangling like a girl’s swinging feet off of a bridge. There is a moment of lift as she relates the story to herself, yet it swings there in the air, not connecting to any path.
Unbearable loss. I want to plant her feet firmly on the path.
“Mom, you used to be president of Ikebana International in Washington, DC.”
“Oh . . . that’s nice.”
Rip Van Winkle, go to hell. I want to write a different story, a defiant story, where my mother’s legacy will not be sleep, but rather the resilience and beauty of her spirit and a celebration of her art.
“Mom, we are writing a book about flowers.”
“Oh . . . that’s nice. If they’ll let us.”
At first, I’m not sure who she means by “they,” but then I realize that “they” is all of it—all of loss, all of the ravages of time: the deaths of loved ones, aging, divorce, relocating, broken hearts, sorrow, trauma—all of the shit that “loss” puts in the way of following our dreams. But Mom and I are ready to embrace this journey. I am, after all, the daughter of a woman with an unbreakable spirit; strong and resilient and ever growing toward love, and we have picked up the notes and pieces of the book we had started so many years ago in the Catskills. We have gathered vases and flowers, and unearthed memories. Let us walk with shin, soe, and hikae. Let us take you on a journey through the seasons of my mother’s flower path.
Spring
My mother is a brightly ribboned maypole
IT IS MAY DAY. IT’S my first memory of my mom and her love of flowers.
Standing on tippie toes, I peek through the window and watch the morning light slide down the street. The block is quiet. The chatter of crickets slowly fades as dawn stealthily creeps across dewdrop-green lawns, then slithers over curbs and sprinklers. Soft rays now pool in small puddles, like golden mercury, and are reflected momentarily in the still water next to the battered neighborhood hoses. Sunlight advances over a sleeping dog twitching on the patch of threadbare grass, then glides between forgotten plastic garden toys scattered around the cul-de-sac. Now swirling in eddies like sun-melting butterscotch, the golden mercury spreads relentlessly, then seems to evaporate. I gazed mesmerized as glorious light gently drifts higher and higher up the trunks of swaying palms, over the tops of trees and houses. Nests of baby robins blink in surprise, awakened by the passing floodlight. The light is softer than the glare it will soon become—here in this small ranch house neighborhood, just west of Disneyland, in Garden Grove, California.
The sun peeks through the window of our house. It chases me across the carpet and lands on my toe for one second before climbing the wooden table leg and washing over what seems to be a garden spread amongst spoons and Lucky Charms–filled bowls.
My older sisters each have a cluster of bouquets: iris, roses, a bird-of-paradise, some dandelion stuck in by the smallest of hands. We children call dandelion balls a “magical weed.” We take delight in blowing the fluffy cotton buds and chasing “the fairies” as they are released and drift through the air, blowing until their stem stands alone, stripped naked. Naked fairies—it seemed so forbidden.
The night before, my sisters and I had gathered all the flowers with Mom. Dressed in our cotton pajamas, Mom in her nightie, we had separated the sprigs into little piles so that we would each have an equal crafting opportunity. Some flowers had come from the garden, like the lavender, rose, and azaleas; some had come from Ralph’s grocery store, like the puffy angel’s breath; and some had come from the roadside, like regal Queen Anne’s lace. With store-bought white doilies we created cones, then glued blue and pink and yellow and green silk ribbons to the cones to make a handle. We had made the tags using crayons, and stapled them to the handle. Some years, when money was tight, we would use little strawberry baskets instead of cones, and the bunches of flowers had garden leaves included instead of store-bought angel’s breath. But regardless of how much money we did or didn’t have, we always carried out the tradition of May Day.
The brightly ribboned nosegays are carefully laid out in a cardboard box.
Mom, wearing a blue A-line skirt and white button-up-the-front blouse, and for jewelry a blue stone necklace but no earrings—because, as she was taught in her elegant Dallas home, “pierced ears are for cheap girls”—begins to sort the clusters.
Her soft drawl: “One for the Kraufchecks. One for the Joneses. One for the Kolariks. One for the Morgans. One for that house on the end of the loop—I don’t know what her name is, but she is old and really nice.”
Mom was like that, always looking out for others, always wanting to include people, especially old ladies, in the niceties of life. And a May Day bouquet was definitely one of the niceties of life, sure to bring a smile and a spot of beauty into someone’s humble home.
The tradition was always the same: knock knock. Wait. Silence. Stomachs lurch. Knock knock. Nothing. Then . . . distant footsteps fall, clicking the parquet flooring on the other side of an oaken door. Knock knock . . . again, quickly now, and little hands hang the ribbon on the doorknob, lavender and white angel’s breath spraying out the top, and garden flowers peeping out of the doily cone so carefully glued just hours before. A HAPPY MAY DAY tag carefully written in cursive crayon dangling from the ribbon.
“RUN!” Giggle. “GET DOWN!” Giggle giggle. “HIT THE DIRT!” We wait: the door creaks open and the mother of the house discovers the bouquet. We keen as she murmurs “How niiice,” then loudly proclaims to the morning dew, “I wonder just who could have left this pretty little bouquet on my porch?” Our giggles sneak in the crack of her door as it closes, and we run on to the next house, and the ne
xt, and the next, until our cardboard box has only a crushed flower or two scattered in its bottom.
It is a tradition I have enjoyed since I was five years old—one that I passed along to my own three children, and one that they will pass along to theirs (or so they say). Few people remember this little holiday, but when I lived in Harlem and my kids and I were running up and down the block leaving aromatic bouquets, some of the old-timers nodded with delight and said, “Ahh, yes . . . May Day! Now just who could have done left this little bunch of pretty flowers on my stoop!?” My kids and I giggled just as I had once giggled with my own siblings. We hid behind the cars parked on the street and ran on to the next brownstone once the old-timers’ wrought iron gates had squeaked shut.
How did this tradition start, this ritual that has become such a sweet little part of my life? How did my mom start doing it? Did she and her mother, Coco, run through her Dallas neighborhood leaving garden gifts on the first of May in the 1940s? Or did she walk slowly with her stately grandmother, Mammy Riddler, who wore pearls even in the morning? Why do I not know so many things that could fill out and enrich the story of my mom? How can I tell my kids exactly who my mom was—and thus, who I am—and why, in this age of instant communication and technology, do I have so little record of the past?
I know that, historically, the ancient Romans may have been the first celebrators of May Day, with the festival of Floralia occurring sometime in April and celebrating the Roman goddess of flowers, Flora. I know May Day marks the beginning of spring and is often celebrated with dances around a ribboned maypole, young girls and boys weaving in and out of each other in a circular rhythm, the crowning of Queen May, and the giving of little anonymous baskets of sweets or flowers. And I know that since we were doing this May Day activity in California before we moved to Japan, Mom’s love of flowers and gardening didn’t begin with ikebana—the Japanese art of flower arranging that she learned several years later—but, in fact, predated it.
The innocence of the virgin village girls dressed in white with flowers in their hair and jasmine necklaces drooping around their necks and scenting their breasts and bodies, is something that would have appealed to my mom. She liked traditions, celebration days, sensuality, purity, virginity. She liked gathering community together through the arts, beauty, and flowers. She was my Bluebird leader; she took us camping under the stars, and skating at the roller rink; she helped organize Campfire Girl fun for my sisters. She liked activity, joyous activity. And it’s funny, because in some ways the maypole festival is pure and virginal and uncomplicated—a simple act of dancing with ribbons, wrapping them around a pole, and celebrating spring and new beginnings—but in many ways the underbelly of May Day is just the opposite. It is also a celebration of mating and fecundity and all the birthing and blossoming that explodes in the spring. I wonder what happened in ancient times when the sun set on May Day. Did the festival transform? Did feasting and drinking dominate the night? Did the dance of the virgins arouse men, the young boys, the girls themselves?
Would what happened after dark have scared my gentle mom—the feeling of being preyed upon, of being defenseless in the wake of lust and uncontrolled desire? Night-lights were always scattered around our house in the hallways and the bathrooms. Perhaps the dark represented a scary freedom that my mom never knew, and possibly, never wanted to know.
She was brought up in the age of no birth control. Which I can’t even imagine—birth control is such an obvious game changer for women. The difference between my mom’s generation and mine concerning women’s sexual freedom, attitudes, and presence in the workplace feels more like the difference between a hundred years than just a mere twenty years. Social mores allocated the word “slut” to a woman who enjoyed sex, and “stud” to a man who enjoyed the same. Just the feeling of desire seemed to be condemned: if a woman (especially a wife or daughter) was flirtatious, or dancing wildly, or dressed even minutely in a sexy or formfitting way, she was looked down upon. “Loose, tramp, and whore” were the reputations of women who were independent and sexual in the fifties. So it makes sense that my mom never spent much—or any—time as a “single” woman exploring her sexuality while slightly inebriated, as so many of our young girls do today. (Or as I did in college . . .) Instead, she settled down at nineteen years of age, after two years of attending the University of Texas. She married her college sweetheart, NROTC candidate Thad Harden, and ten months later she gave birth to her first child, a beautiful girl named Leslie. Within ten years, she had five children. With my dad away at sea, much of her “nightlife” was spent changing diapers, attending to her bustling household, and likely falling exhausted into bed at 9:30 p.m. Mostly on her own, with very little help, she did laundry and schoolwork and made breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She cleaned and shopped, and she locked the doors at night to keep us all protected. We didn’t have a home security system as so many people do today. We had a brass chain that mom slid in the door as the stars rose in the night sky. She shut and locked the windows, and she drew the curtains closed so the Peeping Tom in the neighborhood couldn’t see her, or her children. In the mornings, she threw the curtains open and let in fresh light and fresh air and sunshine creeping across the floor, glad to have made it to another beautiful California day. Maybe that’s why she now loves the sunshine so much. And toothy bright smiles and unfettered joy. And yellow kitchens, and the song lyric “Blue skies smiling at me . . .” She loves the good things of life, the pleasant scents, the positive, the seen, the known.
She was, and is, one of the bravest women I have ever met. And even as the pitch-black darkness of this hideous disease called Alzheimer’s advances, the core of my mom has remained the same. I think of it as her light that cannot be extinguished. She has forgotten so much, sometimes her own childhood or even the names and faces of her children, yet she has not forgotten her own personality. It possesses her, it clothes her, and bleeds with her, it shines all around her. She didn’t suddenly become someone who could condone, for instance, a messy home. She knows that she likes polite children. And beds that are made up. She loves birds, and classical music, and she hasn’t suddenly developed a tolerance for, let’s say, AC/DC. The Beach Boys, Gary Puckett & the Union Gap, Petula Clark—this is her music. She is neat, almost prim, and as her memory fades, it is remarkable to see how the foundation of her character remains intact.
Sometimes it’s hard to know where my mother leaves off and I begin. We love so many of the same things. We are, I am forced to admit, old-fashioned. Which is okay for my mom, but for me? Yikes. There was always the desire to be hip, somewhat cool, certainly tough, and definitely edgy. (I’m an actress, for God’s sake! Am I not glamorous? Shouldn’t I at least insist upon vegan marshmallows in my hot chocolate?) And yes, while I am all those things, I am also my mother’s daughter, and share almost exactly in the delights and pleasures that she does. Not only do I share in them: I pass them down to my own daughters and son. I replicate the nighttime reading in bed, the notes from the tooth fairy and fairy godmother, the planting of tulips in the spring.
My mother loves spring. She loves Mother Goose and church bells. She loves warm water between her toes on clean bright sand. She loves pretty hair and ladies in dresses and pearls. She loves tulips, and aromatic Stargazers, and night-blooming jasmine. At least I think she loves night-blooming jasmine—but maybe that’s just me. If I ask her, she’ll say, “Oh, yes . . . of course!” But she won’t really remember. She loves cherry blossoms and the Fourth of July. Fireworks and Gregorian chants and Dave Brubeck. She loves family and puns. She loves magazines. She loves arched eyebrows and clean skin. She loves travel. She loves to move. She loves to teach. She is all these things she loves, and so much more . . . and so much more that I don’t know.
Does she feel heartache from the confines of her wheelchair as she struggles to remember her self? I do. I feel it. While visiting Mom in Texas, I think of something Peter O’Toole once said in a rather melodramatic movie I did with hi
m called Christmas Cottage, about the painter Thomas Kinkade. “Don’t get old.” That’s what his character said. Several times. Once with periods after each word. “DON’T. GET. OLD.” I think of it now, with Mom. She is stooped, bending over her red walker and walking with such an enormous effort that it hurts to simply watch. The effort for her is not the walking itself, but to remember what to do. To remember where to put her foot; how to move it forward. She wills herself to accomplish the journey, and then moves one slippered foot toward the red leg of the walker. Then, the other foot moves an inch. And so we go. The flowered legs of the walker, and then Mom’s own two legs—until ten minutes later she finally sits, exhausted, safe in the wheelchair. She sits quietly and waits, hoping for a hummingbird to pass through the view of the window. A victory to have made it to the dinner table. She watches the cardinal and the blue jay flit to the bird feeders, which my sister Leslie has positioned perfectly outside the window, ensuring that Mom can always have a happy view. I watch her smiling at the birds and remember May Day. Her energy flows into me like the mercury sunlight seeping across the lawns: For a moment she looks up and smiles, and in that tiny glimmer I know she knows she is loved. Nothing else matters for a while.
Later that day, I am happily reminded that though she is losing her memory, she hasn’t lost her wit. She is still funny, with a crackpot sense of humor, and she has a great time ribbing me. In the afternoon, when I say “Mom, I am going to turn your chair around so that instead of facing the coffee cup, you can face me as I dust these pictures on your tansu! See, Mom, I will shake my butt and dust just for you!” And I demonstrate a rousing and lascivious version of me dusting and wiggling my butt. She responds, “I would rather take the coffee,” and we laugh and laugh.
The Seasons of My Mother Page 2
