By Jefferson Weaver
I didn’t have much hope for the bulbs.
They survived being baked and forgotten in a car, after having been rooted out, then forgotten, by Sam the Pig. Then they languished in a bucket until one day I decided to toss them into a sorry excuse for a flowerbed, cover them in compost and hope for the best. The bed was drowned during the hurricane, and I guessed they were gone. Then a handful of green stalks cautiously poked their heads through last fall’s compost.
I was surprised, to say the least. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, since those were Mother’s flowers.
Miss Lois could grow things; it’s a trait I missed somewhere, although my brother Mike and sister Becky can grow all things green. I’ve always been more of a hunter and forager, at least in philosophy if not actual practice. I just can’t sit still and be as patient as one needs to be to grow things.
Mother, on the other hand, had that patience.
Peanut cans of sprouts were prone to line the windowsill, and flowerpots found perches everywhere. Her biggest problem with the house on Divine Street was the lack of sunlight in most of the yard. Still, there were patches here and there where things could grow, and she made good use of them.
Bricks from the foundation of a forgotten building circled a blooming bush that sheltered iris and jonquils like a mother hen guards her chicks. Concrete planters flanked the front steps, and pots were sometimes organized, sometimes chockablock, on the stoop facing the alley. The mint lovingly tended since before I was born in Oxford flourished quietly long into my teenage years alongside a mossy wall at the big house.
My attempt at a garden when I was a little kid was met with much enthusiasm by Miss Lois, even when I got bored with it and she and Brother Mike were left to tend the rows. Zucchini squash is always prolific, but I think my mother’s touch made it moreso. Miss Lois grew things where people said they couldn’t be grown, and grew them well.
When Mother and Papa finally moved into their home in Clinton, Miss Lois was ecstatic. She had good soil, a yard with the right light, and even a few ready-made flowerbeds. On top of that, her second home, the nearly-forgotten Small House Arts Center, had been known for its flowers for decades.
Mother’s plants happily joined forces with the old residents. In a good year, the yard was a riot of hosta, day lilies, roses, daffodils, jonquils, and iris that were even older than the mint, as well as things whose names I never knew. Miss Lois loved and nourished them all.
Sometimes they didn’t work, but most times, Mother could make things grow. She always had hope, and she always tried. She might get frustrated, or angry, or break down in tears, but she never quit.
The handful of stalwart bulbs now sprouting in our front yard came from when we left the house on Cutchin Street in 2004. Miss Lois went to her forever home on Valentine’s Day that year, and in September, we said goodbye to the earthly home she loved for the last time.
We dug up a bunch of the bulbs, plants and other things Mother loved. Naturally a bunch of them stayed. Miss Lois was always good about leaving something for the next person. We didn’t move often when I was growing up, but Mother tried to leave enough flowers and plants behind to let the next resident know what could be done in ground that others might see as worthless. Indeed, even though nothing but a big pine tree and some fragments of glass and brick remain where our house was in Keener, the native daffodils are not the only flowers that will riot there in the spring. I have no idea if the later residents appreciated the determined roses and out-of-place irises, but several of those plants have somehow survived the years of tilling that followed the final collapse of the little farmhouse.
Miss Lois always looked for things that could grow, and would make them better whenever she could. She always had hope, even for the driest, saddest hanging basket tossed beside the curb. Brother Mike is famous for resurrecting green things – but he got that healing power from our mother.
Miss Lois’ flowerbeds looked sad and bedraggled on that cold, sunshiny day when we buried her; if flowers could mourn, they had already been crying for months. Among the cruelest things about Parkinson’s is the nibbling away at the patient’s ability to do things they love.
After her last bad fall in the yard, Miss Lois was the one who decided, with tears in her eyes, that she couldn’t tend her flowers any more. Yet after her mind was gone and her spirit free – and she could slip sneakily past her caregivers – she could sometimes be found puttering about her flowerbeds. Shoot — at least once she was found puttering around someone else’s flowerbeds.
Even though the ground was in Clinton, Lois Weaver’s dreams of things that grew green may have been in Dunn, Oxford, Erwin, Colonial Beach, or a little hardscrabble farm where her mother taught her about things that grow. Whatever the ground, she wouldn’t quit. If there was a hint of green on even a sickly bud, she kept trying.
There was very little green visible on that icy day we said goodbye, Feb. 14, 2004. Unlike the Old Man, who quietly went to sleep, Miss Lois fought til the very end. She didn’t quit, not until she went to a place with no weeds or bad soil.
I have said it before, and likely will say again, that I think Heaven is not reached via a cloudy walkway, but in an old truck that rattles as you pull off the paved road onto a long dirt lane that meanders through green fields where the critters are fat and the grass is sweet.
Dogs, cats and chickens scatter among friendly trees shading the front of a comfortable old house with a wide porch. The folks I love are there waiting — and more than likely, Miss Lois will be standing by a flower bed.
Until then, I’ll have to be happy with the soon-to- bloom survivors in our front yard, a reminder that there’s always hope, if you’re stubborn enough not to quit, and can take a little pleasure in growing something green.
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