Anna—1890s
My Elizabeth was as round as a Rome Beauty by the time apple harvest began. Her back bothered her, I knew, so Puff and I tried to give her chores that would keep her busy without taxing her unbalanced body.
She sat at a battered old table in the backyard, coring and slicing apples for drying from the bushels Puff laid at our feet.
I helped in the orchard as much as I could and still keep up with running the house and Elizabeth’s lessons. Some days we hardly spoke over supper, we were so tired.
“Tired’s got my tongue,” Puff was fond of explaining.
Delighted as a Spanish explorer with a new find to report, Puff unearthed a root cellar near the springhouse. Its entrance once hidden by a tangle of blackberry bushes, the root cellar’s cool interior now boasted crates of our beautiful red and yellow apples . . . far more than we would need to sustain us through the winter. It pleased me to think about hauling a crate of apples to the mercantile midwinter to trade for necessities. God was providing as only He could . . . although I noted that He got considerable help from Puff.
Puff taught us how to string dried apples on cotton thread and store them in the attic for safekeeping. He advised that I hang a sheet a few inches above the garlands of apples to keep dust or mice from settling on them.
Apple perfume scented our work clothes. Our hands were stained rust-brown from apple acid, and stayed that way until wash day, when hours of scrubbing clothes in hot soapy water bleached our hands clean.
Elizabeth’s lessons stuttered at first. I jumped from one thought to another, one discipline to another. One minute we talked about diaper care, the next about grammar, the next about baking bread, the next about home remedies for childhood ailments and how to watch for infection, the next about understanding men . . . as if I knew a lot on that subject. I marveled that Elizabeth was so patient with me.
She didn’t seem to mind that we were learning as we went along.
Sweet-tempered, Elizabeth was easy to love. She soaked up Scripture as if she’d been living in a desert. As her baby grew within, so did her understanding of grace. It registered on her face and in the timbre of her voice.
But she was just a child. We had to discuss her plans for the future.
“Elizabeth, as much as I would like to, I cannot let you stay here forever.”
“I know.”
“You and your baby will have to find a place of your own, lives of your own, not long after he or she is born.”
“I know.”
“Or . . .”
“Or what?”
“Or you will have to decide if you should let the child be raised by another family.”
Silence stretched halfway to town. I knew she had considered the thought.
“My wanting this baby isn’t enough, is it?”
I weighed my reply. “It is very hard for me to counsel you on this issue. My heart has a tendency to run ahead of wisdom at times. But we have to think carefully about this. Talk to Pastor and Mrs. Kinney . . . and to Dr. Noel. But ultimately you need to follow what God tells you to do.”
“He isn’t being very clear about it.”
“He will be.”
She laced her fingers under the roundness of her belly. “I’m not sure my parents will take me back . . . or if I want to go.”
“I understand.”
“I could go live with my Aunt Rhoda, I think. But she’s too old to have me and a baby underfoot. I couldn’t ask that of her.”
“A lot to be considered in the next couple of months.”
But it wasn’t months. It was days. And it was almost more than I could bear.
Elizabeth’s screams woke me from a deep cavern of sleep. I clawed my way to the surface and found her standing doubled over in the hall, holding her swollen belly with both hands while a river of blood and water flowed down her legs and between the floorboards.
I ran to the end of the hall that faced the backyard, banged the window open, and yelled at the top of my lungs for Puff to come help us.
Elizabeth fell into my arms when I reached her. I stroked her fear-matted hair and held her tight while we waited for Puff to help me get her into bed. It wasn’t more than a minute before his strong arms were carrying us both, it seemed, and the girl was laid onto the already blood-soaked sheets.
I did everything I knew to stop the flow, including a dose of ergot, while Puff went for the doctor. The look that passed between us as Puff left on his mission acknowledged that, devoted as they were, our efforts would not be enough. But we had to try.
I was holding the stillborn child in my arms when Puff and Dr. Noel arrived. A tiny boy-child. Perfect and beautiful, but too small to survive.
As was his mother. Perfect and beautiful, but too weak to survive.
I could have understood Elizabeth’s parents’ anger. It was their indifference I couldn’t fathom. They came for her body, but left the baby with me. Not a word spoken. Not one word. They simply drove off with the broken body of their broken daughter.
Puff and Dr. Noel and Pastor and Mrs. Kinney and I stood in a circle of grief over a miniature grave on a windswept hill behind the orchard. We cried for our loss. And we cried, too, knowing this would probably not be the last time we gathered this way.
If I could go on, that is. If I could let myself love and lose so deeply again. The debate would not let me rest. It screamed its arguments—for and against—commandeering my thought-life.
Until little Robert Matthias—Elizabeth’s predetermined choice of names—was buried, I’d not allowed myself to seriously consider whether I could go on. But the last shovelful of dirt had not been pressed into place on the achingly small mound before the doubts began to torment me.
Who would now entrust their daughter into my care? Would I trust myself? Was there more I could have done? What was I thinking to tackle such an enormous project? How presumptuous of me to think I could care for other people’s children and their children!
I slept more than I should have in the days that followed. I woke late, troubling Puff, I’m sure. He often fixed and ate his own breakfast before I roused. I had to be reminded to eat.
My chores were done without thinking, which caused some consternation. Puff followed behind me, cleaning up my messes and mistakes, catching potential disasters before they happened, closing the ash door on the woodstove before I set the house ablaze, and latching the chicken-yard gate before our eggs and suppers escaped to the woods.
Pastor and Mrs. Kinney’s loving words floated high above my head. I needed them deep in my heart, but couldn’t seem to retrieve them from where they hovered. Their kite strings were just beyond my reach.
Puff tiptoed around me. Offering few words, but always a steady presence.
I visited the tiny grave too often, I imagine. It was probably not wise of me, but I needed the reminder that there was a logical reason for my pain.
It was the snow that taught me that I could—and would—go on.
For some unearthly reason, the first snowfall that year was not a light dusting but bucketsful that lay like downy quilts over all of nature’s defects. Wrapped in my wool coat and a scarf so long it threatened to trip me, I trudged through the wet white to the top of the windswept hill.
The little mound was flat. It lay even with the top of the snow. I knew the grave was still there, under the white, but it was covered as with a thick, healing ointment.
After many snows, spring would come. Wildflowers would find the mound a most accommodating home. And life would go on.
By God’s grace, so would I.
13
Becky—2012
The first snow of the season made Becky squint through the windshield as she drove Lauren and Jackson to school. Jackson was Lauren’s show-and-tell. Not really, but Becky entertained the thought for a twisted, immature moment.
Career Day. The guidance—and she used that term loosely—counselor thought it would be a good idea to illustrate the concept t
hat motherhood is a career, which it is, by having one of the teen moms bring her child to school. Just the fact that the counselor had to choose one of the teen moms was grief enough, in Becky’s book. Was it on Good Morning America where she’d heard that 46 percent of current fourteen-year-old girls worldwide will have a child out of wedlock? Wait. Was that worldwide or just in the United States?
She remembered hearing her sister Eva, the birthing center nurse, moaning over the changes in hospital dynamics since she’d started her nursing career. Husband-and-wife team was no longer a given. Married, no longer assumed. That the male birthing coach was even the father of the child emerging from the laboring woman, not a given. It changed charting, birth certificates, language, and—according to Becky’s compassionate sister—the atmosphere. How could it not?
“Almost there, people.” She heard no response from the drowsy pair in the backseat as she signaled her intent to swing into the drop-off lane.
With Jackson all cute and adorable, and Lauren relieved of most motherhood responsibilities by the one—currently playing chauffeur—who waffled between enabling and hyper-enabling, Becky wasn’t sure the Full-Time Parenting booth at Career Day would have its desired effect.
But it offered her a day to herself for the first time in months.
Becky considered calling Monica and inviting her to lunch at their favorite café downtown. No agenda. Just normalcy for a change. But how would she convince Monica that she wasn’t either looking for or preparing an apology? They’d left the unclaimed pregnancy test in limbo while they waited for somebody—please, somebody—to tell the truth. Or for the passing of time, like the changing seasons, to make the truth obvious.
Lauren’s PMS was as regular as digital clockwork, even allowing for daylight saving time, which led Becky to believe her daughter’s story, sad as that sounded in light of her previous deception, currently sealed lips about Jackson’s father, and the upheaval it would mean for Monica’s family.
Lunch? Maybe not the best idea.
So with the snow accumulation covering the last blades of grass, Becky decided to spend her free day reorganizing the basement storage shelves. The “re” of “reorganizing” hinted that the shelves had once enjoyed a state of organization. That might have been true two decades ago. Since then, she’d aimed and tossed in the general direction of the shelving units.
On and under the narrow table near the basement door, she’d collected a fair number of items to take to the basement “the next time I go down there,” which in hindsight might not have been the best plan. She needed three trips to haul the last six jars of homemade applesauce, the paint supplies from touching up that spot behind the bathroom door, and an odd assortment of little things like cardboard boxes and the baby food jar of morning glory seeds.
When she got to the seeds, she set them in the middle of the kitchen table instead and poured herself a cup of coffee the color of the seeds.
Quiet. She hadn’t heard it for too long. It made her think.
Why do I do this every year? Why go to the trouble of saving these ridiculously small and insignificant seeds? How much would a new packet cost in the spring, even if they didn’t reseed themselves one year? Two dollars? Why this compulsion to reclaim the seeds from each year’s spent blossoms?
Because Grandma always did. And Mom did because Grandma did.
And that was reason enough?
Tradition. A lot to be said for tradition. Tradition means memories, and memories mean somebody cares.
Reason enough.
Cornbread stuffing at Thanksgiving. Hot cocoa at midnight on Christmas Eve. Oyster stew on New Year’s Day. Breakfast at sunrise, lakeside, on their anniversary. Pick a lake. Any lake.
Becky’s heart warmed at the memory of a sunrise breakfast in front of their computers with lake scene screen savers the year Gil was grounded in Detroit. As they talked on the phone, he ate continental breakfast—scrambled eggs and a bagel—while she sipped orange juice and nibbled an over-toasted English muffin with honey, missing him and knowing that a guy who would go to that kind of effort to hang onto a tradition was a guy worth keeping.
For all his quirks, Captain StrangeSocks was a keeper.
She twirled the jar and watched the seeds tumble over one another. In another setting, they would have been swept into a dustpan. Or tossed onto the compost heap. Or left on the vine through the brutal winter. A shiver rippled up her back.
Why did it mean so much to her to plant those seeds each spring, watch the impossibly fragile vines find their way up the tripod iron trellis, and wait for the day when the first tightly twirled blossom unwound itself and turned, unblushing, with petal-arms outspread to the sun? And the next day, another blossom. Finally, in early summer, a jungle of vines and a floral fireworks display of gossamer-thin, glistening flowers showed their faces on a strict schedule. Wound tight until the sun coaxed them open, shining for a while, then refurled for siesta in the heat of the day.
Some inexplicable draw—was it just that odd connection with the lifting of her postpartum depression?—made the morning glories her favorites among the flashier, pricier, hardier, more luxurious flowers in the garden. Simple in their elegance, with an untold tale buried in their centers, they seemed to whisper a history she had yet to discover.
The basement could wait. She’d spend at least part of her free day on the Internet, searching for a logical reason for the morning glory’s appeal. Ah, the joy of a good rabbit trail, something artsy to keep her from her underdeveloped left-brained organizing efforts.
“Morning glories can grow fast,” she read aloud, “reseeding ten feet in as little as two months.”
Sounded like Jackson and his race to outgrow baby clothes.
“Morning glory blossoms often look like they’re glowing from within.”
The comment she read stopped her. Maybe that was it. That was the appeal. Tightly curled-upon-itself buds that looked as if they had no potential for beauty untwisted under the sun’s light and warmth to reveal startlingly charming blossoms that looked as if they glowed from within.
A poetic concept.
If she were still working for Ellison, she might assign a writer to explore that idea for an article. Or an illustrated quotation. She envisioned it. Saw it on the layout board in what was once her office. But she no longer had the clout to dole out assignments or turn visions into reality.
She did, however, have the capacity to love needy children, and with an extra dose of God’s grace, glow from within.
“Morning glories don’t need soil that is too fertile or moist.”
Good to know.
“For best results, scarify the seeds prior to sowing or soak overnight.”
Scarify? Another way she identified with the flowers. She’d been scarified plenty over the past couple of years.
She did a side search for the definition of scarify. “To slightly nick.” She needed a bigger word, then, than scarify.
The phone rang just as Becky had read a fine-print note about the state of Arizona considering morning glories noxious weeds.
“Mom?”
“What’s up, Lauren?” Even Becky’s loosely formed plans disintegrated in the split second that she waited for a response.
“Can you come and get Jackson? He’s, like, mondo-crabby. I don’t know. He might be cutting a tooth or something. How would I know? Oh, great! Mom, he just puked. Hurry, will you?”
Career Day. Parenting 101.
Between Jackson’s flu, followed by Lauren’s, followed by Becky’s, followed by Gil’s—all four of which involved Becky as caregiver—they’d missed three Sundays before Becky gave serious consideration to her earlier reaction: We have to change churches.
She’d entertained the thought before—when the world discovered that the extra weight Lauren gained was an embryo named Jackson.
Gil talked her out of it that time, insisting the church should be a bastion of forgiveness, a forerunner in the race to show mercy. Yeah
, right.
This time Becky’s reasons were a combination of embarrassment and altruism. If Lauren was lying about one too many pregnancy tests, the family could start over at another church that didn’t know their history. If they were careful enough with their introductions, others might assume Lauren was a very young-looking new mom whose husband was . . . was . . . teaching English as a second language in a small but strategic-to-the-national-interest country. And how sweet of Becky and Gil to take her into their home until he returned.
If Brianne was the one keeping a secret, the kindest thing Becky could do for Monica was disappear from their daily lives.
Right?
Remove a layer of their embarrassment. Let their family handle it without the added guilt and remorse from the way Monica had treated Becky and Lauren.
And . . . without Becky and Lauren’s unconditional love.
Okay. Bad plan.
Silence wasn’t working. Assuming new identities wouldn’t mend a relationship. Monica, I wish you’d just talk to me!
God, I wish You’d just talk to me!
That, Becky could do something about.
With Lauren back in school, Gil on the road, and Jackson napping—not quite his cherub self yet—Becky located her Bible—under too many things.
Somewhere in there was a verse about the danger of planning to be deceptive—a new church, a creative story about Jackson’s daddy serving his country in a makeshift classroom. God bless America. Too bad she didn’t know where that reference was. And who would believe that after they told them about Mark and Iraq?
In the pages somewhere was a verse or two about casting stones.
And chapter after chapter about a God who loves those who don’t deserve it . . . and instructions to follow His lead.
I want to, Lord. But how?
The pages that fell open to her seemed unrelated to the cry of her heart until she read them a second time.
When the Morning Glory Blooms (9781426770777) Page 12
