Category Archives: Family

Beauty, Family, Flowers, Gardening, Serenity, Sobriety, Spirituality

The Power of Pansies and The Peace of Wild Things

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I AM PUSHING a rickety garden cart through Pepper’s Greenhouses in Milton, Delaware, following behind my 91-year-old father as I have done in plant nurseries and gardens my entire life.

(Once when I was six, I tagged along on a fancy garden tour, shadowing my Dad so closely that I caught the wrath of a bee’s nest he awakened as he forged ahead of me through a narrow gap in a privet hedge. One sting on my tummy under a loose-fitting summer sleeveless blouse and one on my bare freckled arm earned me a place in his arms for the trip back to the car.)

Today it is cold and drizzly, a maddening reminder of the fickle fate of March vacationers. My husband and I have been luxuriating in the past three days of 60- and 70-degree weather, using our little respite from real life to explore the Delmarva peninsula during the day while visiting with my Dad over coffee in the mornings and family meals in the evenings.

From the wild ponies and windy dunes of Assateague Island to the salt marshes and Loblolly pine barrens of Prime Hook Wildlife Refuge and Cape Henlopen State Park, the hours of walking outdoors have been thoroughly restorative.

Yet the turn in the weather provides a good excuse to go plant-perusing (and shopping) with Dad.

I have filled the top basket in the cart with six-packs of pansies. Pansies were the first flower my Dad let me pick from his gardens when I was young, and I loved to bring them to my teachers at school, my fist nearly crushing the fragile stems wrapped in wet paper towel and aluminum foil before I ever reached the classroom.

Here I spy my favorite Frizzle-Zizzle mix amidst a sea of color. Flats and flats of pansies line the long corridor that connects the maze of greenhouses at Pepper’s, each a domino of treasure: one housing perennials, another annuals; herbs to the left, vegetable seedlings to the right; woody perennials and deciduous shrubs around the corner, fruit trees further on down the line. But the pansies merit a special spot in March — the plant nursery’s equivalent to Easter or Halloween candy in the grocery store.

Some people scoff at pansies, or worse, ignore their ubiquitous presence in early spring, thinking them mundane. But I will always love them and their little viola and johnny-jump-up cousins, especially now that I know how many truly beautiful varieties are available if you look hard enough (or decide to start them from seed).

Curly petals, sweet scents, unusual colors, artful veining and Jackson Pollock blotches – their charms are many. Not to mention their habits: They tolerate the cold, show up early in spring, and bloom profusely as long as you keep picking them ( a win-win). Plus, the petals are edible!

Erin Benzakein at Floret Flower Farm (my flower hero) even grows them as cut flowers, lengthening the stems to up to 15 inches by growing them under row cover. I might try that. But even without long stems, the shorties make long-lasting posies in a creamer or small glass jar.

Dad and I have come to a crossroads. To the right is the hellebore and snowdrop greenhouse. To the left is a wooden door leading out to a small yard filled with dogwoods. I follow Dad out to the dogwoods and the drizzle, my cart rattling now with a ceramic flower vase I’ve nabbed as we passed through the vast houseplant wing. The owner of Pepper’s stops to greet Dad, who is a frequent visitor. Everyone knows him there and treats him warmly.

Theoretically we are just browsing, but as Dad begins to tell me about the merits of this and that dogwood (his current favorite is Appalachian Spring), I start looking at the tags on the Kousa dogwoods (Cornus kousa), the pretty Chinese dogwoods that are less susceptible to the anthracnose disease that has attacked and killed many native dogwoods (Cornus florida). Dad mentions he has been looking for a Kousa called “North Pole” as a possible replacement for the Japanese maple at my mother’s grave. I bend down and look at all the tags, moving pots around on the puddly tarmac to peer in. But no North Pole. We turn to leave and I notice a handsome dogwood set aside on a bench with a “sold” sign on it. Dad asks me what the variety name is on the tag, and I report that it’s a “Snow Tower.”

“That’s it!” He says excitedly, laughing, realizing that in trying to recall the name of the variety he’d read about, he’d settled on North Pole when really the name was Snow Tower. Quickly I see that he is disappointed though, as this one is sold. I tell him I’m sure that I’ve seen another Snow Tower in all the tags I looked at a few minutes ago. I go back into the sea of pots and soon we have three Snow Towers to look at. We debate the merits of each and discuss how each might be pruned, finally choosing our favorite. I tell Dad I would like to buy it as my contribution to the gravesite landscaping (Mom is in with a bunch of other relatives!), and soon we are stuffing it, along with the pansies, some Thai Basil, the flower vase, and a few bottles of deer repellent (for me, cheaper in Delaware than on the Island) into the car.

Not our biggest haul ever, but a good day. A stop at the Food Lion to pick up a can of baked beans to go with the BBQ pork Dad has in the slow-cooker for dinner, and we’re home.

Photo of Dad taken back in November before the wedding by fabulous photographer Maria DeForrest.

This is a day I want to bottle up and bring back to the Vineyard with me along with the pansies. Is that possible? Can you carry over the good feelings from one day, one week, to the next? I wonder, can you actually bank the comfort and joy of these days, storing them up to fall back on when you need them, here on the sharp side of reality where pure evil looms?

I think so.

One morning in Delaware I toppled out of bed early, grabbed my coffee, and found a quiet nook to squinch up my knees, rest my laptop on my pajamas, and dial into a virtual meeting of my fellow travelers in sobriety. One of the first things I heard that came bounding through the fog of sleepiness was the phrase “spiritual armor.” I smiled at that and knew right away what the speaker was referring to – the idea that all the work we do on a daily basis (from doing the next right thing to letting go, from praying to forgiving, from checking our motives to practicing acceptance) makes us better able to handle the wonky stuff when it threatens to throw us off the beam.

#pansiesforUkraine

There is such a thing as building up a spiritual reserve, keeping our spiritual muscles flexed. Not only has this idea been hammered into me, but I’ve experienced the benefits of it again and again.

In the same way, I’m using those days in Delaware – both the relaxed time spent in nature with my husband and the precious time spent with my Dad, as well as my sister – as a deep well of comfort right now. Dipping into that well is a tool, a deliberate practice of gratitude, that feels especially important to use right now. I (like all of us) must focus my energy on what’s good and delightful and joyous in life — or despair, as Wendell Berry says in The Peace of Wild Things (below), will grow in me, and in us all.

The Peace of Wild Things 

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

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Family, Sobriety, The Garden

Skipping Generations – Or Not

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My grandmother Nana (seated), with her three daughters – Barbara (standing, left), Ann, and Pauletta (my mother)

MY GRANDMOTHER NANA DIED on Good Friday, 1964, after a week in the hospital suffering from burns over much of her body. What I know of that week and of the day of her accident is a trickle of details filtered through my Dad and my sister years later; no one (most especially not my mother) told the toddler in the highchair what had happened that night, even when the toddler grew into a rambler. But Nana left me a legacy, one I would unwittingly embrace years later.

This is as much as I know of what happened that night: Nana was cooking dinner for my grandfather, who would be home late. He was chief surgeon of Sibley Hospital in Washington, D.C., and worked long hours. Three daughters grown and married, he and Nana had moved from the big stone house in Wesley Heights to this apartment high above Massachusetts Avenue. It was April, so the south-facing window in the narrow kitchen off the formal dining room might have been open, the scent of cherry blossoms or early azaleas wafting in on the damp city air.  

Somehow, Nana accidentally caught her dress on fire, whether from the gas flame on the stovetop or the oven, I’m not sure. My mind can’t configure what a gas stove in 1964 was like, how a flame might have leapt out to grab her as she lifted a casserole out of the oven or bent over to stir a sauce. I imagine she might have been wearing one of those house dresses, maybe made of synthetic material which would have been terribly flammable. She was an elegant woman, so I don’t know what she wore in the kitchen. But somehow it is important for me to imagine this, and to wonder what she was cooking. Maybe it was pot roast or creamed chicken. Or maybe something fancy like spinach timbales or one of those recipes she’d mastered from the Fannie Farmer cookbook.

There was a phone in the kitchen. But when she caught on fire, Nana did not call anyone. She had been drinking, was likely drunk. Instead she went and laid down on the bed in her bedroom, passed out, and rolled off the bed. My grandfather found her on the floor.

At the hospital, there were calls to the Universtiy of Texas burn unit to see if it was possible to treat her there, calls to every colleague my grandfather knew who might be able to save her life. But despite all his resources, my grandfather could do nothing; apparently it was clear from the start that she would not make it. She was cared for to reduce her suffering, while my mother and her two older sisters took turns sitting by her side. I have been told that she knew her daughters and husband were there.

My mother was home feeding me when the end came. The end to the life of a beautiful woman, sad and tormented by a disease she was never treated for, but had tried repeatedly to manage herself. It was also the end to a painful, complicated, life-shaping relationship for my mother, who had taken on the role as a teenager, after her sisters were gone, of both protecting her mother and keeping up the false social pretenses that all was well — all the while filling up her own deep pool of anxieties that she would draw from for the rest of her life.

Nana left a heartbroken husband. Nana left a little granddaughter – my eight-year-old sister – who adored her. And she left my aunts and uncles and cousins. I could never know how painful this must have been for so many people.

To me, Nana left her disease. Not just her alcoholism, but the legacy of my mother’s anxieties, also passed down to me and my sister.

But she left me one other thing, too — something joyful: flowers. In news clippings and photographs, there is Nana in her garden, Nana with a vase of flowers, Nana as president of the garden club, preparing for a garden show. I know Nana must have found so much joy in flowers, that flower arranging was a creative outlet for her that must have quieted the voices for her as it does for me. The flowers surely buoyed her in good times — the stretches of time when she managed not to drink, before the obsession would take over again.  

I thought about Nana a lot when I got sober, and I still think about her constantly. If she had gotten help, what might have been different? I wish she could have lived and been happy. I wish my mother hadn’t had to shoulder so much of the burden of hiding her secret. But mostly I wonder why I got the gift of sobriety when Nana didn’t. My father’s father was an alcoholic, too, and died in mid-life. I lost two cousins on my father’s side to addiction. I hold out hope that one or more of my many cousins on both sides is in recovery and that I just don’t know it. But so far, I’m the only one I know about.

Left to right, sisters Pauletta (my mother), Barbara and Ann

Recently my sister gave me a stack of old photos of our mother and her sisters and Nana (in topmost photo with them), all taken at the same time in the mid 1930s. My mother is the little one.

My mom, Pauletta

Among those photos was this later photo (above) of my mother as a schoolgirl – she was so sparkly and adorable. I would have loved to have known her then. Actually, she was sparkly and adorable all her life to many people. But she was something different to me – someone I never quite disconnected from on a steamy July night in 1962 in Columbia Hospital for Women in the city of Washington. Still haven’t, though she’s been gone for four years. It was a life-long tug-of-war. I loved her very much, but I was incapable of understanding her completely. Over and over I tried to align with her but couldn’t quite get there. I imagine she felt the same way about Nana. And that Nana’s death didn’t so much end their relationship as it did leave it suspended, forever.

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