by Patrick Lane
This is not my memory. It is a story my mother told me when she was dying. I don’t remember running beside my father. I think, if I did, it would be a happy memory. But I don’t. What I had was my mother on her deathbed. I sat with her as the cancer quietly ate her. Somewhere inside her faded flesh with its grotesque slash of bright red lipstick and powdered cheeks was a pretty young woman with three small boys. I can see her walking up the hill to her rooms above the pool hall with the three of us in tow.
She spoke from her dying in a fierce whisper: I did not turn around.
A frosty morning, a car going by playing its strange, majestic tune to an empty street. I put down my mug of coffee and lean into my hands. My life seeps from me like the light from the risen, milky sun.
Yesterday I wept for memory and now, a day later, I buy a Jelena witch hazel and plant it against the fence put up last year by the neighbor. To do is all. The spidery, orange-yellow flowers glow against the new cedar boards. A perfect spring color to match my mood, which is resolutely optimistic. The war has been put away again in the place where memory sleeps.
The day is the day, no more, no less. This morning I couldn’t get past the shrubs at the nursery. I fell in love with a campanula and bought it. Late spring will see a myriad of bell-shaped, red-veined, creamy-yellow flowers in clusters and in the autumn the leaves turn fiery shades of red and orange. I’ve planted the campanula near the witch hazel. The spot is shady until noon, but both shrubs don’t mind the lack of morning light. After taking out a diseased cherry tree last summer I have eyed the empty space. I imagine their roots exclaiming at the rich soil, the abundance of earthworms.
Nothing in the garden gives me as much pleasure as planting. I talked to both shrubs as I moved them into the earth, telling them they would love it here and not to be afraid of anything. The cotoneaster across the path seemed to join in the discussion, nodding its long branches with the red berries the robins and thrushes love. It will be bare soon if the birds have their way and they will. The shrubs seem content with my assurances.
This is the time when I have the best view of the garden. The earth is bare around the stubbled perennials. The early bulbs are up and their first intense colors are everywhere. Now is the time to sit and feel my way into the garden. I know already what will appear and fill in the vacancies. Much is happening under the earth. The roots of the plants are pushing out their feeder tips in that living layer called dirt.
Everything is alive in the skin of this planet. The worms and nematodes, the bacteria and fungi are spreading their lives beneath the surface. They are breaking things down and building things up. The plants feed off their living and their dying. Without this crust of earth we have nothing. I think of pure sand. I love to hold it in my cupped hands. The grains shine and shimmer, each one a singular stone. Yet most people hesitate before picking up a clod of damp earth. It is full of secret life and that worries them. There is something inside the dark, moist granules and it unnerves them, makes them uneasy. What is in there, they ask?
I go to the compost bin and run my hands through what was once kitchen waste, leaves, and flowers. Over the past year it has been turned by the worms and bacteria into a soft, fluffy substance that I will spread across our garden. I will work it into the soil beside the many perennials, the shrubs, the bamboos, and the ferns. It is alive with worms. In another month I will find them in great writhing balls in the waste. I will hold a thousand worms in my two hands, some of them six inches long and others tiny red whips all twisting and turning on my palms.
Basho watches me rummaging in the earth and like any good cat thinks I am digging a hole in preparation for my toilet. He happily comes alongside, scrapes a hole beside the one he thinks I’m digging, stares down into it, and then changes his mind. He glances up at me as if to say the dirt here isn’t quite the right consistency, moves over and digs another, this one obviously just right. He squats and gets that dreamy-eyed look cats and humans get when they are relieving themselves. Done, he turns and looks into the hole for a moment just as we humans do. Satisfied with it all he busily scrapes the tossed earth over it and then looks inquiringly at me. I take my hands from the earth, scrape my palms together for a moment if only to reassure him that what I’ve done is equally satisfying, and we both walk over to the compost bins, Basho with his tail high and me ruminating on the lives of cats and men. Roxy watches us balefully from the edge of the deck.
My feet have known the earth since I could stand. When I leave sidewalks behind I can feel the world give under the weight of my body. I remember when I ran barefoot across beaten clay or sand, the times I stood in mud and felt the earth squeeze through my toes. I was in touch with the earth when I was a child. The thick mud along the banks of Coldstream Creek, where I hunted for turtles, toads, and frogs, was warm and welcoming. It made me want to lie down and roll in it and sometimes I did. I would take off my threadbare T-shirt and shorts, lie down in the mud, and roll until I was covered with it, my skin, my hair, my finger- and toenails. When I was done, I would wade out into the creek. The mud would slide from my skin and slip away in thick clouds in the running waters.
Childhood is a strange paradise. I remember my father’s return from the war. I can see myself in the bedroom on Fall Street, see the small boy I was. There were stars in the night that bloomed like flowers in my eyes, mountains fell in blackness to the water below. The lake was rippling silver, a fierce gentleness I tried to understand, it was so hard and soft at the same time. The air slipped into the room through the open window like a quiet thief and touched my face, my hands, and narrow chest. My elbows rested on the sill. I was standing on a small cot in the corner of the room.
In the bed behind me was my mother. She was moaning softly and her bed moved with the sound of her voice. It was the kind of sound an animal made when it was in pain or a cat when it was roaming through the bush below the house, a night-cry I had listened to many times. It was a hurting sound. It cried through my skin. I was afraid.
I had been moved from my mother’s bed and now, sleepless and lonely, I stared from the window at the night. My father was back. He had been gone three years. I have no clear image of him. All I remember is the silver of the cold waters below and the sound of my mother in the bed. I thought my father was hurting her and there was nothing I could do. There was a shape on the bed, an animal like the black bear I had seen by Cottonwood Creek, humped and dark.
I stared across the bands of my arms. The bed shuddered and grew still again. My mother was saying my father’s name. She said it in a way I had never heard her speak before. Red, she said, Red.
In the night sky were all the creatures I imagined. While living things slept I left to fly among the mountains in the faint light of the moon. Below me small axes glinted upon the waters. Deep below the whitecaps, there were great fish, wide-eyed and sleeping. Only the mountains were still. Their skirts of fallen stone fell gentle beside the long dark lake. Somewhere under the rubble of rock a marmot slept in my thin arms, a nighthawk cried in my eyes. In the sky a last swallow quavered. Its bright beak breathed my flight.
Flying dreams stayed with me for years. I loved entering the sky on bright wings. Yet my going back into time is only another kind of flight.
I am trying to know who I have been so I will know who I am. I can’t fly from what made me. The air I breathed, the stones I touched, the dirt I rolled in, entered my pores and my body learned the good earth. A garden grows in me.
The fear I had of my father was not one of violence. I didn’t fear his punishment any more than I feared my mother’s. It was a fear of love. From the first day he returned I watched him as if from a great distance. I searched his body for the signs of love. The hair on his forearms, the tilt of his head, his laugh, his frown, the way he leaned back in the weight of his weariness at the end of a day of work were measured by me and by my brothers. He had returned, but though it was from a war and that his absence was a holy thing, still I was unsure of his pre
sence. A touch from him, any small acknowledgment, a word, a smile, was enough to make me come alive with happiness. He had seen me and that was sometimes enough even though I might have wished for more. The garden that grows in me is full of many kinds of flight. One was the flying toward my father and the other was my leaving him. I was afraid of love for what I knew of it in those early years was that love was a kind of loss and that to hold on to it was to prepare my body and spirit for pain. Did I know that then? Yes, I knew that, though the understanding of it was another matter.
If I want to understand my garden, then I take myself into the forests and meadows, the bogs and swamps, the wild fields and hillsides and there I watch and listen. How a plant lives, where and why a plant grows are some of the lessons a gardener must learn. Much can be learned from a patch of forest or an open meadow. Much can be learned from a backyard.
I find myself on my hands and knees crawling around naming the different mosses in my garden. Their colors are an endless variation on yellow and green with a bit of gray or red thrown in here and there, a dark blush of blue or black at the base of their leaves. Under the canopy of red cedars and Douglas firs the ground of much of my garden is dark and acidic, perfect for coastal lichens and mosses. I love their names: awned haircap, juniper haircap, cranes-bill, tall-clustered thread, Menzies’ red-mouthed minim, ribbed bog, lover’s, false-polytrichum, Menzies’ neckera, golden short-capsuled, Oregon-beaked, lanky, step, twisted ulota, hairy screw, bottle, red roof, wet rock, black-tufted rock.
I might as well search out the lichens too: bull’s-eye, cladonia scales, bark barnacle, lungwort, lettuce lung, frog pelt, pimpled kidney, orange pincushion, questionable rock-frog, tattered rag, beaded bone, forking bone, tickertape bone, waxpaper, antlered perfume, devil’s matchstick, false pixie cup, blood-spattered beard, and common witch’s hair. Nineteen lichens and as many mosses. There are probably others if I search diligently.
What wonderful names are blood-spattered beard and common witch’s hair. How much more delightful than the tiresome nomenclature of the Latin taxonomy, necessary as it is for scientific identification. Ideas of order, yes, but not a feeling among them. Questionable rock-frog is far more interesting to me than Xanthoparmelia cumberlandia. These plants live everywhere in the garden, innocuous and largely unnoticed, but everywhere I look there is another one sharing a bit of rotting wood, a shaded spot beneath a fern. The twenty-year-old shakes on the roof of the old child’s playhouse I use for storing kindling and empty planters have seven mosses and five different lichens growing on their gray wood.
The world of the mosses is small, but their pervasive presence is like a mass of exploding galaxies in the garden. There is no better time of the year to find them. The winter rains bring down nutrients from the air, and the wood, soil, and stone they grow upon is awash with water. Their sporophytes are impossible forests. The mosses and lichens creep imperceptibly over everything in the garden. Surely they must go back beyond the Jurassic to some earlier time when everything was new.
I have trifocals now and the only way I can really see anything up close is to take my glasses off and get to my eye’s focal point, which is six or seven inches in front of my nose. I must look like some grazing animal here on the ground with my head down and my ass in the air. At night I take my glasses off and streetlights become Van Gogh’s stars. They are swirling balls of nova light. This seeing was how I learned the world in my first seven years.
They are very beautiful, these mosses. All year they are a canopy for sow bugs and pill bugs, slugs, fleas, flies, worms, ants, and whatever else crawls under their forest cover. In winter they are the soft green blanket that shelters the sleeping beetles as they wait for spring. I have spent my life in the intimate world of infinitesimal things.
I lie on my back, the moss softer than my bed, the water soaking into my sweater. Above me Canada geese ride on their way to Georgia Strait, where they are sure to find food in the tidal swamps or the bog behind the beaches. Theirs is a constant, reassuring gabble. I am told they are always led by an older female as they drift back and forth above this narrow peninsula. When I was young I was led by my mother.
Nineteen mosses and nineteen lichens? I’m sure there are more. I roll over and peer through the misting rain. There is more than meets the casual eye here on the floor of this garden. I look up for a moment at the fir tree and there on a branch is some speckled horsehair. It is a hanging hair lichen. Up or down, there is something growing everywhere. By the old cherry stump, scarlet waxy caps have appeared in the moss. The bright orange caps glisten in the rain. The mushrooms are tiny. They appear here every late winter. I could eat them but what for? There are so few of them. Like the lichens and mosses they occupy this quiet place and are easy to miss or ignore. It is only up close they take on their beauty. They feed off the debris of the years. Things return to the soil and on the way they are the dinner for a thousand creatures, the scarlet waxy cap only one of many. It is the first mushroom of winter I’ve seen. The year will produce dozens more.
My presence on this half-acre is only that, a presence. What is here now has been here in some form or another for many thousands of years. Fifteen millennia ago this bit of land lay buried under three miles of ice. I am a passing stranger, one who has stopped here briefly to play in the fields of the lords and ladies who govern all things.
A short month ago I stepped back into the world after an absence of forty-five years of addiction. Those years were the life I lived, but I am seeing this old garden now with new eyes. This search through my garden is for the naming of things, but more than that it is renewal and endurance, patience, knowing, and acceptance. My hands are feeling again what they last felt when I was little more than a child. When I place my hands in the earth my fingers are like the tips of the first root of a seedling sprung to life. What I feel is wonder.
PLANTS
Big laughing Gym (mushroom) – Gymnopilus spectabilis
Bigleaf maple – Acer macrophyllum
Bracken fern – Pteridium aquilinum
Bunchberry – Cornus unalaschkensis
Campanula – Campanula alliariifolia
" – Enkianthus campanulatus
Caraway thyme – Thymus herba-barona
Clematis – Ranunculaceae clematis montana “rubens”
Corkscrew hazel – Corylus avellana “contorta”
Cotoneaster – Cotoneaster divaricatus
Crocus – Crocus spp.
Couch grass (quack grass) – Agropyron repens
Daphne – Daphne laureola
Day lily – Hemerocallis
Douglas fir – Pseudotsuga menziesii
Forsythia – Forsythia spectabilis
Giant redwood – Sequoia gigantea
Golden bamboo – Phyllostachys aurea
Holly – Ilex aquifolium
Hosta – Hosta sieboldiana
Japanese iris – Iris laevigata
Lenten rose – Helleborus orientalis
Ponderosa pine – Pinus ponderosa
Siberian iris – Iris forresti
Sitka spruce – Picea sitchensis
Skimmia – Skimmia japonica
Snowdrop – Galanthus
Sword fern – Nephrolepis exaltata
Valerian – Valeriana phu “Aurea”
Viola – Viola canadensis/labradorica
Western anemone – Anemone occidentalis
Witch hazel – Hamamelis japonica
Yellow glacier lily – Erythronium grandiflorum
ANIMALS, BIRDS, AND INSECTS
American robin – Turdus migratorius
Black bear – Ursus americanus
Black-capped chickadee – Parus atricapillus
Bobcat – Lynx rufus
Chestnut-backed chickadee – Parus rufescens
Cooper’s hawk – Accipiter cooperii
Cougar – Felis concolor couguar
Coyote – Canis latrans
Eastern gray squirrel – Sciurus caroline
nsis
House finch – Carpodacus mexicanus
Nighthawk – Chordeiles minor
Northwestern crow – Corvus caurinus
Oregon junco – Junco oregonus
Pine siskin – Carduelis pinus
Raccoon – Procyon lotor
Red-breasted nuthatch – Sitta canadensis
Red-shafted flicker – Colaptes cafer
Rufous-sided towhee – Pipilo erythrophthalmus
Sharp-shinned hawk – Accipiter striatus
Slate junco – Junco hyemalis
Townsend’s vole – Microtus townsendii
Varied thrush – Ixoreus naevius
Western rattlesnake – Crotalus viridis
2.
Come before rain;
rise like a dark blue whale
in the pale blue taffeta sea;
lie like a bar in the eyes where the sky should be.
Come before rain.
—P. K. PAGE, “EMERGENCE”
“I WILL PLAY THE SWAN, and die in music,” said Shakespeare in Othello, and I can understand his wish as I watch sixty whistling swans pass over the garden. Their white feathers shimmer with a ghostly light this early morning. They are on their way to the fields of wintering grass where they will feed among the fresh green shoots. Their long honking cries flow among the low gray clouds this early February day. Only the loon can evoke the same shivers. If I listen closely I can hear the faint whistling whip as their strong wings cut the air. They call endlessly to each other, the cobs and pens making great joy of the day, a late breakfast ahead in the far fields.
The cry of the swans is among the great beauties and their grace in the air is as mysterious as it is magical. I could dream my way into their flight. How I have wished that my life and perhaps my struggle will find its shape in imagined feathers, wings to allow me flight.
