Tending Roses (37 page)

“I’ll take care of it,” I said. It was like Grandma to be giving instructions to the last.

“Good girl.” She let her eyes fall shut. “Go bring Karen and Jackie and Jeane now . . . and my baby.”

I stood up to do as she had asked. “I love you, Grandma.”

“I love you too, Katie. You’re a good girl.”

Leaving her there, I hurried to find Dad, Karen, and Aunt Jeane, and sent them and Joshua to Grandma while I went looking for Dell. I wanted her to be able to say good-bye to Grandma while she was awake and could talk. I felt it would make things easier for Dell.

I found her coming in the door, carrying a large willow basket filled with dozens of flowers in every color. I helped her as she struggled to fit through the doorway.

“Grandma asked me to bring in her flowers.” She looked at me with wide dark eyes filled with joy. “She wants to take them to heaven with her.”

The joy in her face lifted my heart, and I threw the door open wide, welcoming in the scent of green grass and roses, maple trees and early-summer sunshine. Carried by the breeze, Dell and I took the basket to Grandma’s room.

Through tear-filled eyes, Karen looked at us from the bedside, and Dad shook his head slowly. Even Joshua was silent in Aunt Jeane’s lap, as if he also knew that something somber was happening. Grandma’s eyes were closed and her breath was coming in rapid, shallow gasps.

Dell came into the room and laid the flowers on the tables, windowsills, and at the corners of the bed. Watching her, Karen covered her face with her hands. When her basket was empty, Dell stood close to the bed, the last few roses still held carefully in her hands. “I brought the flowers like you told me,” she whispered, holding them close to Grandma’s face.

Grandma’s eyes fluttered open, and Dad sat back in surprise. “Good girl.” Grandma Rose looked lovingly at Dell. “You heard me.” And I knew that in those silent moments when they lay together on the bed, thoughts had passed between them as clearly as any words ever spoken.

Grandma’s lips trembled into a peaceful smile as her gaze reached lazily around the room, taking in the colors and the perfect soft shapes of the flowers she had cared for with such devotion. “Oh.” It was little more than a breath exhaled. “They look . . . like . . . heaven.” Closing her eyes, she seemed to drink in the scent of summer and roses, drifting slowly away, skyward, above the house, above the rose garden, above the fields filled with yellow bonnets, until she floated like a dove from the bluffs of the river.

 

Grandma Rose was buried on the eighteenth of May beneath a blue sky in the plot beside my grandfather. Never before had I noticed the loaf of bread engraved on the headstone between their names. Now I knew what it meant.

Family and neighbors crowded around Grandma’s resting place, as numerous as the roses blooming on the old iron fence. Because the weather was perfect, we set tables outside and held the wake on the hillside by the family graveyard. Below us, Dell and the other children ran in the shallows of the river, forgetting the somber occasion. In my mind, I saw a girl with tawny golden curls and sky-blue eyes, barefoot, running with them, laughing.

A week later, Dad, Aunt Jeane, and Karen had left. Ben was back at work, and for the first time I was alone in the house. It was a strange day, too quiet, too lonesome, but I was comforted by the news that Dad would return to visit in a few months, and Aunt Jeane and Uncle Robert were making plans to build a retirement home on the hundred acres they had inherited down the road. Grandma would have liked that. I wondered if, eventually, she would convince all of the family to come back.

During the cleaning and sorting of Grandma’s belongings, I never found the wildflower book, and I think I was more saddened by that than anything. I wished I had kept it that last night when I read it in the kitchen. I could not imagine how she had managed to put it where I could not find it. I didn’t want to believe that part of her was gone forever, and I held on to the hope that the book would turn up somewhere.

Overwhelmed by the emptiness in the house, I decided to fulfill my last promise to her and dust the roses. While Josh crawled after butterflies in the yard, I opened the storage room off the side of the house and stepped into the dim interior to get the rose dust. Leaning against the can was a brown envelope with my name on it. Chuckling to myself, I picked it up. Instructions, no doubt, on how to care for the flowers.

Bending back the clip, I turned the envelope upside down, and something heavy slid into my hand. I knew the feel of it immediately.

The wildflower book.

My heart soared as I lifted the cover, turning from one story to the next—yellow bonnets, roses, fragile things, breaking horses, broken bread, Joshua at Christmas, snow dancers, fireflies—all of the stories were there, carefully bound between the pressed-flower covers, tied with the blue ribbon. At the end was one last entry:
Hymns and Lullabies
.

A sense of peace came over me as I laid the book on the porch and went to care for Grandma’s flowers. The farm wasn’t empty, I thought, watching Joshua on the lawn. It was being filled with new lives, which was as it should be.

Toward evening, Joshua and I drove to the graveyard to tend the flowers there. When the work was finished, I stood by the gate, closed my eyes, and breathed in the scent of coming summer. On my face, I felt the last rays of the descending sun, and in my hand the warm softness of Joshua’s fingers. Inside me, the baby fluttered like a butterfly—my daughter, Rose, waiting to be born. Below I heard the music of the river passing by, and above the hush of new maple leaves rustling against the sky.

The light around me dimmed slowly as another day surrendered its grasp on the land. On the hillside, the roses nodded on the breeze, as if inviting the fireflies to come out and dance.

 

 

 

This Conversation Guide is intended to enrich the individual reading experience, as well as encourage us to explore these topics together—because books, and life, are meant for sharing.

Q. Tending Roses
has such a wise and universal message. What inspired you to write this book?

 

A. The seedling for
Tending Roses
was planted along with a flower bed my grandmother and I tilled in front of my house ten years ago. As we worked, she gave instructions about simple things she had learned through long years of experience—how to wind the roots around an iris bulb, how to prune the branches on a rosebush, how to cut the blooms without harming the plant.

 

When my newborn son was fussy, we had to go inside instead of finishing the garden. My grandmother settled into a rocking chair, bundled him on her shoulder, and patted his back lightly—quieting him with a special sort of grandma magic.

 

Closing her eyes, she rocked slowly back and forth and told me about the time in her life when the roses grew wild. When she finished the last words, a tear fell from beneath her lashes, and she let out a long, slow sigh filled with sadness and longing.

 

Something profound happened to me then. I understood so much about her and about myself that I had never considered before. I had an almost painful sense of life passing by. I had a sense of life being not just a trip from here to there, but a journey with lots of good stuff, maybe the best stuff, in the middle. I realized that I was so focused on goals down the road, I was missing the value of where I was.

 

Q.
How did this epiphany evolve into a novel?

 

A. That night, when the baby was asleep and Grandma had gone to bed, I sat down and wrote the story longhand in a notebook. Over the next several days, I added more of her stories. They remained in the notebook for several years, but I never forgot them. I shared them occasionally with other writers and got a powerful response, but beyond that, I had little idea of what to do with them. They weren’t appropriate as stand-alone works, and there were not enough of them to make a book.

 

So I just left them in a drawer and waited. The idea to use my grandmother’s stories in a novel came at a time when I was beginning to feel a strong sense of meaning in my life, about four years after I wrote them. I was now the mother of a newborn, as well as a four-year-old. Because of my husband’s career, we had moved to a place deep in the countryside. Life was quiet, and there was much less of familiar noises and busy schedules, shopping trips, dates with friends, phones ringing. I had a great deal of time to reflect on what I valued and what gave me joy and peace. Peace, I determined, was centered around my faith in God, my children, my family, and a desire to do something good with my life.