Memorial Day

 It's going to rain...the forecast for the next few days.  My hard ground and the plants struggling in it will be happy, and I will be happy for them.  In celebration of Memorial Day, I've asked a few friends in on Monday, rain or no.   I've got plenty of the first summer's foods ready to be fixed into watermelon salad with mint, roasted potato salad with thyme, baked corn (or cornbread...haven't decided yet) with cayenne and green onion tops, chicken tikka, shrimp the same. (Mary Ellen has her desserts in progress already).

I always enjoy fixing holidays, but frankly this time it's given me something to do to lift my spirits.  As if it knows a different definition of Memorial than this weekend honors, memory has been assaulting me lately.  I am, as we all are, missing Aunt Sadie, and with her passing the passing of all others come to light.  Our griefs, as Hopkins reminds, are our own reflection in the mirror of mortality.  I know that, but it seems these past two years have riven us of more than death's share.

The assaults come from strange places.  Mostly I sleep pretty soundly at night, start to finish, but last night I woke from the clock in the other room striking 3, and wondered.  I must have been dreaming, but the visions there seemed real.  Waking, they continued, one after another...ancient ones from childhood, silly ones, foolish ones from the years since, dangerous, heart-breaking ones, too.  It occurred to me, before I drifted back to sleep again (the same films running in my head), that they must be trying to tell me something, solve some problem I may or may not have known needed solving.  

During the day, a walk down the hall to my workroom stops me short.  A collection of old photos I am meaning to sort and reorder, I give up on after a few vain attempts.  Memories on walls and in boxes, or floating invisible in the air, shake my resolve, even for simple tasks.

What they're after I haven't figured out yet, though at this age I had better accept the challenge.  This morning, darkening, cooling, moistening into the weather to come, portent with change, may bring some enlightenment.

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Meanwhile (here's a switch and change), in an hour, Joseph and I are going to pick up a small settee I found yesterday at ReStore, the Habitat for Humanity thrift place I troll for finds. A few weeks ago, my favorite chair I'd had since the late '70's collapsed on one weakened leg.   I'd already sent it out to Dan, the chair fixer, but the emptiness of the corner by the window where I'd spent countless hours in its comfort seemed to be needier than that chair occupied.  

My living area isn't big; nonetheless, as is my wont, I have crowded it with sitting and dining furniture (there's a visiting piano, too) until there is not much room left to walk.  So relaxing space is at premium.  I began searching for something that, though small, would at least add an extra place to sit.

I meant to go down to Pittsboro, where their ReStore has a whole building full of good furniture, but I thought I'd try the nearby one first.  When I walked in the door, the very piece I could have imagined was facing me, looking new and bright, calling my name from that persimmon color I have on my walls and the small white dots that spelled cheer. I pulled out my measuring tape, checking the size, dismissed the 8 inches extra I'd assumed, and went to the counter to buy it.  It's going to fit, I insisted to myself.  At home, measuring again, the space appeared, nicely, to accommodate it.

 I think that there is a twist to that purchase which entwines memory and change.  My old chair, which I loved and still do, its leg dangling precariously from the worn fabric, might be the end of something bigger than itself.  It's fixable, the chair, at some not insignificant expense, and I might still want to try.  But if it comes back to me repaired, it will be enwrapped in a different sort of affection, the kind one can shift off to the side, usable still but with its mortality tried.  Like mine, with that rush of memory, culling the past to make possible the future.

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N.B.  Nothing goes simply when anticipation is in the mix.  We left for ReStore in light rain, so I'd brought a tarp...but it was the wrong one I pulled hastily out of the shed, the one you may have seen earlier in the season under all that mulch I was shoveling.  A once-perfectly-clean couch rode home dry, but lightly dusted in shredded hardwood.

Still, it vacuumed off, as Joseph said it would, and sits in place now, where I am about to settle for a while.

For settling I need.  Fortunately, on such a day, it's easy to do.

Generations

 My Aunt Sadie passed away last evening.  I know I should say our Aunt Sadie; she was first of all Barbara's mother and Nancy's mother...I should say that, too.  If you will forgive me, though, this remembrance is about what her life and passing has meant to me.

Yesterday, I spoke a few words to her over the phone, and heard the sound of her voice...harsh, short sounds...if she intended words, they were indistinct.  After all, she was hard at work trying to die.  A few weeks ago, she and I talked:  she'd gotten a cough and her chest hurt...likely, she said, it was pollen, especially thick in her area (as in ours) this year.

Another phone call:  she'd been to the doctor, and was given more medicine to take.  "I don't think I should take any more medicine," she told me firmly.  "I'm ready to go." 

 Something she had said to me times before.  She was 100 years and 8 months old, after all.

Did I respond the right way?  I don't remember.  I hope I was sympathetic, not dismissive (even if fondly dismissive).  I hope I said,  "I know."

Anyway, it turned out her symptoms were more complicated than that.  Her heart was failing, she whose heart was as wide open as the ocean, which she loved.

  It took her a long time to finally leave us...over a week, while she was so intensely  willing herself to go. 

"Those sisters!"  My sister Ann said.  "Their bodies are so strong."  She was thinking of my mother, Gilda, the first of the three to go...healthy for 93 years, until she lay two weeks in hospice after strokes, unable to talk or to take sustenance, listening to us sing, talk, pray our way around her.  (What could she have been thinking the meanwhile?)

And their middle sister, Vi, who fell one day here, and, though at 98 she'd been living with heart diseases and blindness, finally succumbed...weeks later, fighting death all the way.

Strong, yes.  Loving, yes, each in her way, all through our lives.  Resilience born of strength and care (care of all kinds).

Now they are all gone, that whole generation.  

While Aunt Sadie was with us, we could still be the younger ones we'd always been.  Now, what?

Here comes the selfish part of this reflection:   even while the sorrow of my aunt's death washes over me, I think to myself:  

I am the eldest of the young...or was.  Now I'm just the elder.

And I wonder:  have they managed, in their passing, to pass to me that strength, that care, that resilience that keeps going?  (All those years, I could be so resistent!) Can I even in a small part, live up to what they were?  Can I?

A strong west wind

 It's been a while, I know...but words come when they come. 

I have been away to San Antonio after a long absence. So much to say, of course, about my time there. Really, I tell myself, a week's stay is way too short.  There are too many people, places, directions to catch up with and explore. I used to live there, and in a few ways, I still do.

But I didn't have time to write right away, because the garden here at home has taken my energy...not only because of spring, but in good part because of my San Antonio visit.  Gardens, gardens, public and personal, borrowed and scrutinized, walked through and relaxed in.  What do I travel for, it seems, except for gardens and museums?  This time, alas, the museums took short shrift.

Visits with friends...nice, long ones, gratefully often more than one meeting...took up my days. It is so easy to slide back into their stories, lives, doings.  

Knowing streets, seeing their sameness and changes, following old tracks and finding new ones does the same.

There are old favorites to meet at...Twin Sisters, for one, in the heart of New Braunfels Avenue...and new ones, Scratch Kitchen, on San Pedro, which I could walk to each morning or bring friends along. Gardens there, too!  In an old house so native one sank right into its charm, it has  terraces with tables of all sizes settled among shifting shade. 

Succulents in vintage cans along the rock walls set their own mood.

 The food was fresh and wonderful, the coffee and teas good. Each morning, pastries from their commissary arrive; you have to be quick to grab your favorites...often they are gone by noon. The proprietor, Becky Medellin, whose father, a Navy cook, inspired her love of catering, with recipes handed down from family, and her helpers are cheerful and accommodating.  Begun in Edinburg, Texas, she has owned the place here for six years, and clearly the neighborhood of houses and offices is grateful, not only for the cafe in just the right spot, but also because she and her husband have been slowly restoring the historic property.

The weather in San Antonio was its gift to me...gorgeous blue skies, temperate air...and those breezes...the same each day except two, when one day welcome rain came to lift  things a little and another rose to over 90 degrees, though it began and ended with a nice chill.

With friends and on my own, afternoons found me in one garden or another, beginning with the Botanical Garden, just north of Fort Sam Houston, gated as of old.  It seemed to me that things had become a little more formal there than last I saw it...plots of seasonal blooms on one hand, laid out within rock walls in the sun; mazes of high stonework along more stone walks holding shadier blooms.  I found myself wandering more quickly over the bridge through the small Japanese garden to find the paths into the gardens where the real natives crowd each other like lazed sunbathers.

The town is getting ready for Fiesta, an April event going back forever, it seems.

At Maggie's ( "Welcome to Mexico," she says of her garden pots and house) San Antonio's colors come alive, but she's planning more.  

So, one afternoon we squeeze in a visit to Shades of Green, the garden store on Sunset that I always liked.  We consider options, but I am the one who finds plants...she has to wait on her choice to come in.  

What's that, you ask?  You shopping for plants in Texas...why?  Because...

I haven't told you about the house I stayed in that week, an Airbnb hosted by a young couple, Reina and Adrian, in a part of town I am fond of, it being near everything, walkable, explorable, homey.  And old...one of the secret older neighborhoods San Antonio has, not on the tourist maps.

The house is an old bungalow, built in 1910 by Reina's great-grandparents, where her grandmother was born and other relatives have lived all these years.  Reina and Adrian have been leasing it from the family, and hope to own it themselves one day to return it to a home for a family.  Meanwhile, they live in the back part of the house, and have turned the three rooms in the front...spacious, high-ceilinged, thick-walled spaces...into the calm, peaceful, comfortable and comforting guest quarters I was lucky enough to find.  

But back to plant-buying 1,500 miles from home.  Driving to my airbnb the afternoon I arrived, I looked at the house and wondered whether anyone lived there.  The double squared yard in the front was almost empty of growth,  a few plants left to hold ground.  In the last years, South Texas has had some unusual freezes, which you can see in the brown edges of the ubiquitous palms along the streets and yards.  Things will grow back, of course, barring a terrible drought this summer.  In the temperate weather of my trip, they had begun to green.

Per directions, I parked in the back of the house, and rolled my suitcase down the carriage-wide driveway and up onto the front porch, where the house suddenly wrapped me in its spirit.  Inside, Reina's clear, clean, artful style and Adrian's renovations both took me by surprise and bade me home all at once.  I began to love that house.

You have to know about houses and me.  Either I fit into them or I don't.  It doesn't matter whether it's my house or your house or a rented room, therein I nest, or soon fly unsatisfied. (I've been known to rearrange furniture in a hotel room.)

The inside of the house was perfect for me...high ceilings, cool color on the walls, walls which sent air from below the house up into the rafters.  I turned the air conditioners off and enjoyed the freshness through the front screen door.  At night traffic and train hummed and bumped along the nearby streets, but I slept through.  In the old kitchen, the table by the window gave me a space for coffee, my journal...and a sketch pad on which I drafted designs for that front yard.  

Yes.  Because that house needed its garden and I needed that garden there.  I wandered the neighborhood and looked at the possibilities.

Now, I knew perfectly well that a young couple working hard on a house they loved, while working their own jobs as well, didn't have time to get to a garden yet, though the bones of the old one was clearly evident.  I considered a way to minimize what they'd have to do and still have a garden the house would appreciate.  So I laid out a plan, got out one morning to pull out dead plants, and then, to get Reina and Adrian started, Maggie and I chose a few they could ease in with.  The resident expert at Shades of Green helped by sharply pointing out the errors on my plan.  "Everyone thinks that water is the problem with keeping a garden.  It's not.  It's sun...plants need to be in the right relation to the sun."

When all this planning was revealed to them at last, Reina and Adrian thought me an odd guest, to be sure, but seemed more amused than offended, and talked about their own plans over a spring dinner together on the porch on my last night.  The evening was fading when we gathered ourselves together to part.

There were other gardens in my wanders, too...the sculpure garden at the McNay disappointed a bit, though the walk through was peaceful.  I took back roads to get everywhere, driving or walking, so the yards both plainly and elaborately landscaped were lessons in the way to flower a dry climate.  (Grass isn't the way to go.)  Spring is (mostly) kindness itself in South Texas, bluebonnets still here and there, and pinks.  On the highways I didn't get a chance to travel, I imagined the Mexican hats and spikey orange wildflowers I can never remember the name of taking their turn to dazzle.

Slices of the heart otherwise remain in San Antonio.  In due course, I drove out to the cemetery.  Cleaned off Michael's grave, put down stones...some for me, and some for others not able to be here, I tell him. It is his birthday, so I talk  about the garden I am fixing for him at home, which, after nearly two years, I have finally settled on (indeed, I got right to it when I returned...that's what's taken my time this week).  I talk about the day, beautiful, with cool breezes...and sorrow, the sharp edge to life.  I walk around to see that others I have known have come to rest here.

Near the last day, I ventured with difficulty down to La Villita...street construction blocked nearly every road...where I found Ron in an artists' coop, a portraitist who drew on, of all things, fine sandpaper.  He showed me why it worked so well for him.  Walking through the old village, then along the river, filled now with eating establishment and tourist shops, I looked in vain for the galleries that were once  among them.

Instead, the walk led me, accidentally, to a museum of Western Art, where curiosity drew me.  Though I am not a fan particularly, of what's usually called western art, the three floors over two buildings lent me its sense of history, its art on walls and podia, its carefully preserved collections on floors, and its family history in videos...another lesson in the lives which built the region we know so differently.

Tired by then, I remembered that Bonnie had told me to come see Grant's ceramics, his work for decades.  At the driveway, I looked at his totems and masks and creatures in the front yard...goodness!  I thought.  I am already in another museum.  Inside, even moreso.  In the foyer, a wall of beautiful, delicate, starkly faced masks stopped me (I neglected to take a picture of them, though they were my favorite.) They'd redone their house some years ago, and made it a showplace for his art, as well as the African art they had begun with.  

From Maggie, too, whose paintings and drawings make a museum of her house, though they shift from space to space, I felt surrounded by a culture that blooms as richly as gardens. 

 In the same way, Susan and I talk books and whole worlds open from her reading.  She leaves me with two I would not have found, perhaps, on my own, and writes me about another, which I immediately order for home...Gail Caldwell's A Strong West Wind, a memoir of a life in the west; it arrived yesterday. 

In the morning, my last in the town, I drive back to Maggie's to return a cloth she lent me to carry those plants back to the house, and end up in her back garden, chatting, looking over its layout, planning.

Quite a vision of gardens, or gardens of visions, to put together into a whole, isn't it, this trip?  You can see why it's been difficult to relate it to you here.  Even with all this (I wish you the patience for it!), there is so much more in the spaces between left unsaid.