When You Gave Me Flowers

“Listen,”

She kisses my face and whispers through my hair, her skin is soft, lips warm.

“I have something for you.”

Ribbons tied in her raven curls, white gown, she smiles.

He stands at the top of the wood plank stairs, he is young again. Eyes sparkling with light, body holding anticipation. I have never seen him this way, sandy hair and thin frame. He is holding a bouquet of flowers,

“Will you finish this for me?”

I reach out, receiving the bunched stems, wild greenery and spring blooms cascading from my hands.

I wake up to the first February snow, his voice still in my mind. I dream of him often in late winter, my due date was his birthday, the twenty-second, I was born four days later. Reaching for my small black notebook beside the bed, I look out the window, at a landscape in white, and I write,

Grandma met me outside the house, under the cedar tree. She was young. She was wearing a wedding dress. She spoke to me about a gift—

The sword ferns bounce under the melting weight of ice, a bare branch of the lilac drops an arm of snow onto the ground,

Grandpa was standing outside his bedroom door, waiting for something. He looked to be in his late twenties—

I continue writing the details from my dreaming, moments as stark as the morning. My journal is nearly filled, it holds years of nights, stories lived beyond the veil of time somewhere within the dark. My heart aches as I finish recording last night’s memories. Their faces so alive in my mind, their continued presence a mystery in the daylight.

I get up and dress, warm wool, double layers of socks, pour my coffee and slip into boots outside the door. I meet the cold face to face, steam from my cup weaving around the deep exhales of my breathing.

How do I do this? I don’t know how to let them go, the life they made, the life I lived with them.

Silence responds, and I hear the stillness speak of softness, the tender fleeting nature of a season. I walk through the fresh layers of snow, each step leaving it’s deep print. Narcissus heads and tips of green tops peek from the blanket and I remember the violets flowering below all the ice.

It has been two years since I went back home, to the cottage on the creek with the blue shutters, the house that my great grandfather built after immigrating to America. He settled there in that valley encompassed by mountains, and what farming began with potatoes, became rainbow fields of flowers. Daffodils and tulips in spring, gladiolas in the summer, dahlias and sunflowers in early autumn. By the time I was born, I only knew these colorful images through story, and I never met the man who planted those first bulbs and sowed the seed of my father, and his father, a man who fell in love with a Cherokee woman, who was my grandmother.

There is so much I never asked, god, why didn’t I?

The pain twinges in my chest.

It’s not what it was then. I won’t find her clipping her favorite rose under the cherry trees, and he won’t be walking across the bridge in his heavy leather boots.

I think about what has changed since they died, how parcels of their acreage have been divided and sold to developers—five acre lots, two acres, a quarter acre. I remember when buyers chainsawed down the walnut tree and built an apartment complex in its place. We would collect the harvest from those grand spreading branches, spending hours cracking shells at the kitchen table together. The wetland is gone, with the marsh grass that would turn amber, the dogwood twigs that burned red, where the blackbird would chime its call from the cattails each summer. Now a subdivision floods every year because the city built over it.

What is left?

The house, stone floors and white framed windows. Her roses, the wild plums still bending in secret coves, the fennel’s airy stalks waving in the breeze smelling of licorice and figs, pungent and ripe in a swarm of bees. The creek meandering behind the back porch, is now the only sanctuary, where wild plants still reappear every season. Mock orange blossoms delicate sweetness. Water skippers racing, rabbits nesting.

I consider how much life can be contained in something so small. One acre of ground is left of my childhood, and it is still breathing and growing and transforming,

It isn’t finished.

I feel my heart begin to beat in quicker rhythm, blood moving, energy coursing through my body, my mind playing scenes like a reel of moving film, visions of what could be. Feeling a little dizzy, I take a deep breath, holding the cold of winter in my belly, and let it out like a rush a spring air.

I hear you. I’m listening.

I try to run, sloshing heavily through the snow back toward the house. Throwing off my boots and coat I swing open the back door, making my way to the old wooden desk, I grab the brass key and unlock the top drawer filled with files. Shuffling through them, I see it, the large yellow envelope with my name on it, in her writing. My hands tremble and my eyes soften and blur. Tears begin to fall, and my heart feels like a river moving as I carefully unfold the papers. The words are printed bold at top: LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT. My eyes scan the following paragraphs with the details of their remaining estate, I reread what I have read before.

I wasn’t ready then.

I pick up the other envelope, and slip my nail through the partly sealed fold. Inside is the money she saved, twenty-thousand dollars in cash, and her letter to me. Tears flow, I cannot stop them as they blot bits of ink.

She knew. She knew me.

Thank you. Thank you for living life the way you did, for your care for your family and for the earth. Thank you for looking ahead and doing what you could to save it. Thank you for believing in me, trusting me with this gift.

A small illustration is printed at the corner of the stationary, a bouquet of periwinkle blue forget-me-nots tied with a ribbon. I wipe the salt water from my eyes, and gently from the paper. And I receive this inheritance. It is a legacy of love.