My Story-Chapter 1

My Garden and Cal  

I’m hacking away at the dry, spindly branches of an old rosemary bush that didn’t survive the winter. It had framed our patio for years until it got too cold for too long, and the winter took its life. I waited for buds to appear in the spring, but when the branches snapped like dry spaghetti, I knew it was gone.  

My arms are aching and shaking as I saw at the ashen branches, trying to get down to the stump so I can dig it out. There’s a new rosemary bush perched on a retaining wall next to me—plump, viridian green, and aromatic, ready to replace the dead one. I dig deep, past the red clay, and then hit the sand. I want a hole big enough to add some mushroom compost to the soil before I put the new plant in. My Hispanic landscaper calls it “tierra negra,” black dirt. The pain in my arms reflects my bitter-sweet thoughts—loss of life, replaced by new growth. I wonder if I should plant something else in that spot, but I love the smell of rosemary. It reminds me of so many little parts of myself scattered across the globe. Something familiar. A memory of home. A home I never had.   

I hope this rosemary bush makes it. They say the last freeze was unusual and won’t happen again. It probably will. I’m just hoping plants can adapt fast enough to survive. My maples may have started in East Asia, but they’ve evolved for millions of years and seem okay with the Alabama heat and humidity. I wonder if it’s scientifically possible for them to keep up with warming temperatures and unpredictable cold snaps. I decided to look it up. A headline on the internet read: “Adapt, Migrate, or Vanish.” I think I’ve been doing all those things all my life, but I don’t want to vanish anymore.   

One of the few books I read as a child was The Secret Garden. I can’t recall most of the story, but the images of Mary Lennox in her garden are as real as if I read the book this morning. I think I recreated that garden over and over in my head through the years, and mixed in the imagery of gardens I visited in Europe until it had grown into the perfect balance of wildflowers, antique roses, water fountains, weeping willows, berry bushes, ivy, and chickadees. Growing up, I always wanted to have a garden, but we never stayed anywhere for long. First, we lived in a van and a tent, then a trailer, then we rented. We were always moving. Sometimes traveling at night. We woke to a new world in the morning, opened the van doors, and set out to explore—and find a place to pee. I never had a garden, but I shared so many. In fact, with my mom popping out a new sibling every year and a half, a quiet place outside where I could hide and hope no one would miss me just long enough for me to gain my center was a rare treasure. 

It wasn’t till we moved back to the States seventeen years ago and could finally afford to purchase our own home that I had my first garden. I don’t know if I would call it a garden; it was a small plot of land in front of our condo that was all mine. It didn’t get a lot of sun, so my options were limited. Now I have a patio garden filled with an array of plant species. And there are options: half sun, full sun, morning sun, afternoon sun. I love options and diversity. Some of my plants are native to Alabama, like the hydrangeas and azaleas, but there are also Japanese maples, Asian jasmine, Caribbean yucca, Mediterranean rosemary, and roses originating in North Africa. My garden is like me, a jumble of cultures. I hope it can cohabitate better than my inner self.  

Gardening gives me a measure of control over a natural process entirely out of my control. I can prune, weed, and water; if something dies, I can always replace it. Plants are easy to replace, but it’s not the same with a child.  

My son’s ashes are still in a drum in my closet. I wish I could plant them, and he would spring back to life. I’ve learned about the difference between annuals and perennials. The annuals are bright and showy, mainly flowering plants, but they only last a year or less, maybe just a season. They seed, flower, and die quickly and must be replanted. When I walk into a nursery in late April, they’re the first plants to get my attention, but I always look at the tags. I mostly buy perennials because I want my plants to come back, at least for a few years. I think my son Calvin was an annual. He burst into the scene of life and held our attention. He expended all his energy like a shooting star, burning up after hitting the earth’s atmosphere, and then he disappeared into the night sky when he was twenty-five years old.   

He was a star before he could even talk. As a toddler, he would get so excited about telling his dad everything we had done while he was away that he told the entire story using motions, gestures, grunts, and animal sounds. He’d neigh like the goats we saw on our walk in Viterbo, Italy, eating everything, even the plastic bags. Then he’d shake his head because they weren’t supposed to eat that. He’d talk about their poop droppings by motioning to his diaper and squinting his face up tight like it was yucky. He’d describe the pinecones that fell from the big pine trees by reaching up as high as he could and then saying “ow,” ’cause the pinecones were prickly. Then he’d squeeze his little fingers together real tight to show the tiny pine nuts we’d dig out of the pinecones and how they tasted so yummy by saying, “mmm, mmm.” He went on to the theatre. I guess it was meant to be. 

I have his ashes in a drum in my closet. Just a cheap drum I found at TJ Maxx. I only had a day to find something to put his ashes in, and I felt a drum would be fitting since he always beat hard on his drums. It was his release. His drumsticks splintered in hours. He beat hard enough to disturb our neighbors on multiple occasions.   

The last place I wanted to be a couple of days after the death of my eldest son was in TJ Maxx, surrounded by everything that meant nothing. I thought if I could find a drum, it would be a good omen. I was grasping for one last shred of his presence. If I found the drum, maybe there was some meaning to it. Meaning to what, I don’t know. I just didn’t want him to be gone when my last thought was to call him in the morning to have brunch. I fell asleep on that note and awoke Sunday morning to that fatal phone call, the number I didn’t recognize, “Are you with someone? We are terribly sorry but...” In TJ Maxx, I moved into an aisle cluttered with copper vases and black marble statuettes. There were cutlery sets piled on top of each other, all missing one fork, and a wooden side table made in India that was scratched. A clearance sign hung over it. There, amongst the piles of dust catchers, was a drum. (describe the drum.)    

That drum still sits on a top shelf in my closet, and on nights when I cannot sleep and I’m lingering somewhere between the real and the imagined, I get out of bed and sit in the dark closet with him. I feel terrible that he’s still in there and think he’d love to be sprinkled in exotic places. Maybe I could leave a little of him in Yalta, where he was conceived, and he could float in the thick black salty sea on a still summer day. He could eat fresh cherries by the kilo and a plump cut of lard over crusty bread washed down by spirits. Or I could sprinkle him in the Danube, and he could drift past the island park he visited as a child. I have a picture of him and his sister sitting amongst the roses. I could take him down to Sicily, like our road trip, and cover him in gelato. He could taste the homemade pasta with bluefin tuna and dip his bread in freshly pressed fluorescent green olive oil. But then I wonder if he will even know, and if I would do all this just for me. Would it matter if it was just for me?  

I also think of planting him in my garden so I can be with him whenever I like. I can’t think of leaving him in all those places when I only want to keep him safe and with me forever. I had to bury his sister in Hungary and have not returned, but I’ll get to that later. If he’s in my garden, I can think of him in the spring when everything is blooming and remember the awkward smile that made him look like he wanted to cry, and his sandy wiry curly hair. Or I can look at the massive white oaks and imagine him young and strong. The embalmer said he had the body of a Michael Angelo sculpture. I loved hugging him as my head rested firmly on his chest, and his arms covered me so completely that I felt cocooned in my son’s love. For now, he’s still in my closet. It’s dark, but he’s safe and warm. I think.  

When spring comes, I’m out on our flagstone patio every morning, cappuccino in hand, peeking into little corners of the garden, searching for new growth. I get all giddy when I see something sprouting, like a young child with a new toy. Or better yet, the discovery of an old toy that was thought to be lost. There’s familiarity mixed with newness. A powerful combination. The ordinary with the extraordinary. “It came back,” I say to myself. I wish more things could come back. I wish I could bring Calvin back. I wish I could bring his sister back. I wish I could go back to the beautiful memories and forget the bad ones.  

I had a dream once that I got to talk to him again. It was so real that when I woke, for a moment, I felt the way I used to feel before he died. Before, the weight of guilt and pain took residence in my body like an insidious virus and entwined itself into my existence. His story had a different ending in my dream, and I wanted to hold on to how I felt forever. Cal was working on a project with a group of young people. They built something out in the country on a bright, breezy day. There were piles of lumber and animated conversations. As I was taking all this in, Cal came over and excitedly began to tell me about their project. He was all smiles and gestures. Towering over me like he used to. I kept wanting to interrupt. I had so much to say. This was my chance to tell him all those things. You know, the ones we regret not having said. I kept opening my mouth, but he wouldn’t stop talking. The sun was low in the sky behind him, so it was hard to see his face. He was silhouetted in rays and sparkles that jabbed at my eyes if I moved out of his shadow. He finally said that he needed to go “cause there was so much to do,” and all I squeaked out was, I love you. But that was enough.