OUR KITTY-CAT WAS SICK THIS EVENING—NOTHING SERIOUS, she’ll be fine tomorrow—but I went out to Miles and taught anyway. Without incident. But that is not what I want to write about. I’m sitting up in my bed at my aunts’ to write to you. Everything is quiet, and I have been looking forward to this moment. I have plumped up two pillows and have them at my back. I write in a kind of still heat. I hope you are painting, at least small watercolors. Lots of green. An ocean breeze.
What I want to write you about are my mother’s flowers, when I was five. Not her flower garden, for she didn’t have one, but just the flowers that came up perennially scattered around the yard in their designated spots.
I start with the yellow of the New Year. Beside the front steps, when I lived next door, at the top, on either side were scraggly forsythia bushes. They were never allowed to grow large, and I always felt sorry for them, pruned into little square footstools. But on the side of the house was another forsythia, growing on the bank that led down to the sunken, red-clay driveway. And that bush grew in a lovely golden arch, close to the ground. Once when I was mad at the family, I hid inside that golden cave, and no one could find me. So strange to see their feet go by on the little dirt path, not twelve inches from my eyes. I was both in the world and not in it, for they had no consciousness of me. Is that like being dead?
I don’t know, but it was thrilling.
In a way, I died when my family died. Sometimes the driveway is like the Lethe River: having crossed over from one house to the other, I forget what it was to be alive.
Also, on our bank were irises, deep purple, lavender, and white. They came back strongly each spring (still do, from my vantage point now on the other side of the driveway). I loved their stalwart stems and the spearhead buds as much as the unfolded flowers. Yet surely the shape of the iris flower, with three upright standards and three falls is among the most satisfying of all flower shapes. The fleur-de-lis. Why is there such satisfaction in shapes? Perhaps you, as an artist, can tell me. And in the case of iris, the large size makes the beautiful structure more accessible.
You left Norwood for Tonga so quickly after our engagement that, of course, we scarcely know each other in terms of the deeper recesses of the mind. I treasure our one opera outing, though, and how we identified with the bird catcher. I imagine you now among orchids, their lavender petals lolling obscenely at your bare shoulder. I like our agreement not to know one another and to write only once a month. That thrills me! That we are committed and yet barely acquainted, except through Cat.
It is the indulgence of writing this letter that thrills me. That you are with me, listening, and yet of course that is illusion, since time must be bridged and transport accomplished before you read, and then I shall be in another place and time, not sitting propped up on pillows, on a loosely woven, lime green cotton spread. Yet we seem to be together in this moment. And I make you up. Yes, I know I do. I have imagined you. Now! You’re not real! Boo! (That’s just a playful taunt. If you, whoever you are, read this: then you are real.)
Such magic in language, as much as in painting!
From the flower kingdom of my childhood, I’ve given you forsythia in two locations and irises in three colors, dear friend. Almost Monet! Also imagine on the top of the slope between the house and red clay driveway, three weak pink rosebushes. They struggle for enough light, their soil is thin, and they’re never given fertilizer. We are proud of them when they bloom each summer; Mother and I (age five) are pleased with the few puffy blooms that we do get, and they, with stems almost too weak to hold them upright, are lovingly snipped and brought inside for the dining room table.
These roses are not like the small, superabundant ones of the tennis court—the Norwood tennis court where I play, sometimes, with Nancy, my friend since age three. The tennis court roses are fantastically robust, multitudinous, the stems sprouting billions of stiff thorns. At home, our pink roses have spare thorns, big limp, loose blooms. We prop the chins of our roses on the rim of a tall, clear drinking glass.
In kindergarten, a teacher brought glasses with thick bottoms to class for us to decorate with sharp holly leaves and berries as Christmas gifts for our parents. How thrilled I was to get to create something beautiful and useful for my parents. I guess I thought they would share the one glass. It amazed me that the teacher brought in the glasses by the carton. We looked down into the open box and saw the cardboard partitions and the open rims of the glasses looking up at us, like so many fish waiting to be fed. Which to choose? They were without individuality. I chose the one from the middle of the grid—that was where I myself wanted to be: in the middle of things, surrounded by kindred spirits.
Anyway, one child pulled out a broken glass (from a corner position) and badly cut her hand. It was a terrible baptism of blood over all those pristine glasses. Not over my box, but another, and I saw the blood on the glasses.
What an awful image. Why do I write to you of the joy of forsythia, iris, and rose and then of blood?
Because I must display myself to you. We must be known to each other, and we have made a terrible mistake to think that mere acquaintance is enough. Because I must display my mind, like a bouquet of stalwart irises, emerging forsythia, and weak-stemmed roses, if you are to know me and thus care about my fate. Isn’t that what we all ardently want? To be known? And it is possible.
I learned it at Miles. (Sometimes I call it Courage College.) There is no “other.” We are all the same. Knowable. Last night at school we had a threat, but tonight everything went smoothly. No shattered glass, no bloody melee.
Don, I want to pray tonight for safety and wisdom. How far to go in working for change? When to stop? And I need to stop writing.
Dogwood! That was the tree my mother loved most. Ours was scrawny but glorious with white blossoms.