Left It With The Fire Lily

Hardwood floors radiated cold through my feet, eclipsing the black of closed eyes with six years of memory. Six cold winter mornings that dashed away sleep when warm feet met the unheated floor. Six years of early morning sunrays, tugging at consciousness, begging for praise.  

Sunlight spilled in, highlighting the various bible scriptures and quotes written on the tan-colored walls.

I didn’t have to have my eyes open to remember where each was written, I had done them myself, traced them a dozen times over with my finger tips. Right now I was content to let the early afternoon caress my eyelids as I memorized the feel of it within this room. It was the brightest room in the house, finding favor with the sun due to its east facing location.

Slowly, reluctant to leave the red haze created by the light piercing through my eyelids, I opened my eyes to a room that had shrunk without all of my possessions.

I padded over to the wall that faced the door, let my fingers trace rugged holes there, nearly a foot above my head where I had messily drilled in screws for a shelf of my own making. Feeling like a small figurine in a music box, I turned gradually, a slow, dawdling spin, allowing myself to remember all the positions I had placed my furniture over the years. The memories bloomed like a gentle fragrance in an early spring shower, despite the bruising of the petals, the fragrance lent out comfort.

Finger tips glided over the uneven surface of the walls as I made my way from my room and into the hall. I skipped past my brother’s space, completely ignored the room once shared by my parents – those were the rooms where the good memories were much too diluted by the bad, and found myself in the living room.

What once had felt small while inhabited by furniture, felt too large, too open and echoing now. The big window, its seat often occupied by the canine members of our family, sat vacant and lonely, seeming to weep sunshine on the blank room as if seeking out what had once made it full. I settled there, tucking me feet beneath me.

Glass warmed by the afternoon sun met my forehead as I leaned into it as if seeking comfort. I could remember such a time when it was as ice to the touch, allowing a glimpse of the winter wonderland created by the 2008 winter storm. I could envision the bruised sky opening up and splitting apart in flashes of bewildering yellow, remembered the one summer storm where the lightening had met our driveway in an intimate collision that had left the crumbling cement scarred with a ring of black.

I sighed and began to trace the window with feather-like strokes.

My best friend once said that my most prominent language was touch. It was her reasoning to why I had closed off and locked myself away. She believed I touched to validate; that I refused touch because of the betrayal. But she was wrong. I touched to remember, because I knew that anything that could be touched would be as fleeting as the caress.

And now sitting here, trying to touch, to memorize six years of my life before they were swept from my grasp, I realized just how quickly the moments that define our lives are erased and then replaced by new moments. Since my father’s abandonment, my time line had changed. Once my memories had been focused on seasons and grades, planting, swim meet or dog shows. But upon the betrayal, upon the departure, my internal time line had reset. Ground zero had become the night my father came home drunk, on her arm, the seasons ordered themselves around his absences, months around the many nights I listened to my mother cry herself to sleep.

My baseline became riddled with new ground zeros with all of his fluxes – gone and then home, and then gone again. After the sixth time, there was no longer a reset, the shock had worn away. Over the last few years, my baseline had seen many zeros, changes, heartbreaks, and betrayals enough to carve a canyon with, none felt quite as heavy as the one I could feel looming now.

Needing a distraction from darker thoughts, I moved off of the window seat and to the lip of the hearth, dropping to my knees on the carpet before it. Finger tips brushed lazily over rough, jagged brick where my young pit bull puppy had thought to relieve her need of teething by chewing on them. The phantom heat of a fire wove around me, sparking memories of cold, frosted days and the languid contentment of a soothing, chattering fire. I could nearly hear the annoying slam of the garage door, could envision my mom in our tiny kitchen cooking away. Could remember the Thanksgiving where the living room and dining room had hosted one long, interconnected table as family and friends celebrated together.

Slipping on shoes I had discarded upon my arrival, I approached the door. How many more doors would close on the things I clung to? How many more slams would shake the foundation that only barely held my head above water?

The front porch of our small, one-story house was guarded by flower beds. Beds ran along the street, around our mail box, hid a lamp post, and then were stationed in front, a colorful banner that glowed to the world. Yellows, purples, reds, and pinks dappled and accented the green hues of the grass. My yard was a tapestry. In the fall, the large oak and the tall maple would shed their leaves in a thick blanket, forcing us from our chaotic life to rake and play and soak in the smells of change.

The backyard was even more wonderful, a paradise tucked right in the center of chaos. Herb beds drenched the air with lavender, rosemary, and curry. Netting the awning into its own enclosed room were searching grapevines and cascading wisteria. In the spring the air was rent with the potent perfume of lilac and honeysuckle. Early April through the summer, saw the upper half of our yard forested with sunflowers, corn stalks, tomato plants, crawling zucchini and cucumber and bushels of bush beans. Creeping thyme coated the ground beneath rose bushes that were planted in honor of each one of my mother’s miscarriages. Small maple trees were encircle with volcanic rock that was the boarder for a bed of chickadees, and other cascading fauna. Ferns waved their way out of the wall that lined our garden, providing rich shade for the plants that least liked the sun.

I came to a halt in the vegetable bed, dug my fingers into the soil and closed my eyes as I committed the smell and feel to memory. Cool, rich, and like velvet to the touch; it had once been farm soil, reaching out for nearly fifty miles in every direction, seeing to cattle and tulips. Now it saw to a family’s produce,  and pleasure, to fire lilies and snapdragons, to columbines and blue bells. The smell was what I had come to think of summer smelling like – the rich, earthy scent that wafted up after a good long day beneath the sun. Sun-baked earth and lavender had always clung to me, had been a second skin in the wake of all my time in their presence. I would miss it most.

I was pulled from my reverie by the sound of a car pulling into the drive. Feet filled with led carried me out of the back and brought me face to face with a man I knew was going to set in motion the last act that would remove this place from my life. There was a moment of quiet exchange, although no pleasantries were traded. I had no will for them and he seemed to have even less patience.

Watching him, something stuttered beneath my skin, built in my chest, ungraspable so that I couldn’t release it. The summer wind blew my hair away from my face, a bitter mockery of a comforting caress, as the man from the bank secured the heavy contraption on the door of my house. I refused to move, just stood there watching, praying that by my lack of movement my time line would refrain from changing. It didn’t; it sifted through my grasping fingers like sand on a beach, one grain unidentifiable from the next.

Ground zero was yet again reorganizing, was etched deeply into my baseline by the click of the lock on the door,  mutilating any attempt at building from anywhere but this moment. Fists clenched at my side, I beat down the hiccup of despair rising in my throat, fought back the lump of hysteria attempting to choke me, and trapped it in my chest where it took residence in my lungs. Despite my control, the hysteria beat the bars of its cage, sending wave after wave of pain.

The man turned to me, all suit and tie and sweat at his brow. With uncaring eyes, he uttered an apathetic apology that bridled my hysteria with a rough hand. He continued to study me with dull eyes. “Things like this happen all the time,” He said.

Something jarred, rattled, and broke, the despair burned and morphed, the man’s bland apology and brutish words transforming the pain to anger in a torrent of flames. Jaw locked, body rigid, I was trying not to lunge at him, to beat him with my fists and scream at him that it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my choice so how could he take my home from me!

 But I didn’t. I froze, nails biting into my palms as I battled for control. He swept by me, his job done, not caring in the least that he had reset a foundation that had just been stabilized.

Once the car was gone, the sound of the motor no longer distinguished from others, I fled to the backyard. At least that had yet to be taken from me, if only until tomorrow. The creak of the old wood fence doused the flames down to simmering coals, but burned with an urgency that had me running up to the garden where I dropped to my knees in the soil. With movements bordering on panic, I set out to weed the garden; to,  in my own way, stake claim and care for what I considered mine. One last time.

The words became a chant that took up residence in my thoughts as every minute weed was pulled: one last time.

One last time.

One. Last. Time.

I cared little for the dirt staining my knees and hands, I could only think of what I was doing, putting to practice a routine I had always carried, knowing I would not have it again. I didn’t realize I was crying until the tears landed on my hands. I attempted to brush them away, deny the evidence, but with every tear that fell, with every tear I attempted to hold at bay, a pressure grew, bloomed, and expanded until it wedged itself in every corner of my being and echoed until it ripped out of my throat as a cry. I didn’t fight it then. I couldn’t really. The agony had taken on a life of its own.

I stumbled out of the isles of corn and tomato plants and barely caught myself as I came off the raised part of the yard. My only destination was the garden swing that sat beneath the small maple tree and in front of the home-made fire pit. Curling up, face hidden in my hands, I gave in, and let the pain clatter from my lips in ragged sobs.

The traitorous part of myself that had hoped, hoped this wasn’t real whimpered, cried, and accepted the pain of defeat.

I knew the process was nearly complete. I had memorized - images and memories that I now knew would linger, unforgettable things that would take root in my mind and wait patiently for my summons if I chose to do so. Now was time for mourning. Now was time for grief, a purging that was as much needed as wanted. I was thankful I had the time to do this alone, thankful that I did not have to put a mask over the ache that demanded action.

I was more thankful for not having to explain; how would I have explained to someone that it wasn’t walls or plants that I was mourning, but it was the feelings they inspired? How was I supposed to tell them that I was mourning my labor; I had put hours, sweat, and love into the plants around me. What had started as grass six years ago had flourished into a haven that was mine and mine alone. Every plant was my work – chosen specifically, placed carefully, and aided tenderly.

The house was responsible for seeing to so many of my ‘firsts’. It was under the audience of these walls that I had a first space I could rightfully call mine, first dog, first major responsibilities, first night alone, first love, first heart break; all my firsts and those walls had had front row seats.

I was mourning security, definition. I was mourning a perspective that had come far too late.

For too long since my father had left I had viewed this house as a prison, remembered only for the darkness that had been bred within it.

But the earlier part of this summer had given me a hard-learned lesson that had been the new foundation of my time line. It had been a healthy ground zero, though difficult to understand at first. I had just grasped the lesson’s meaning. Now understood and cherished what home meant, had set aside and washed clean my opinion of the place and reclaimed the peace that had been shattered. Only now I had circumstance testing my understanding in the most brutal way and asking me to let go thing that I now cherished.

It was cruel and I was powerless.

It was nearly dusk when the tears ceased and dried in tight trails on my face. I laid there, gently rocking myself and watching the play of the waning sunlight on the utopia that was my backyard.

“I will be alright,” whimsical despite its nature, it was little more than a trial of thought given breath. I needed to know how it sounded, needed to see if I could convince myself with the words.

And found I could.

Slowly, with a body that felt numbed by grief, I pulled myself from the swing and made my way into the small shed that sat humbly to the right of our porch. It took two trips, each with armfuls of wood, to leave the shed completely gutted. It was while standing there, emotionally exhausted, staring at the unlit fire-pit, that a compulsion hit.

Stumbling, racing to achieve the goal, I went to every plant within the backyard and then made my way to the front yard, taking one leaf or sprig from each and laying them in a small basket that I had brought to collect the last produce with. I set the basket at the foot of the swing, lit the fire and waited for the flames to take hold.

As I felt the fire grow warmer, watched the sun sink lower, I realized my compulsion hadn’t been mindless need, but stricken enlightenment, a reluctant acceptance.
Plants, I had come to realize, any cultivated thing for that matter, a home included, was never absolute but could blossom into existence anywhere. It wasn’t the location, although that did have some standing, that dictated growth, it was care and acceptance.

The fire blazed as dusk turned to night and the moon replaced the sun in the sky. I set every one of those leaves, those sprigs aflame. I was relinquishing what was, accepting that what lessons are learned must be put into action and that there were things beyond my resolution.

Sometimes the plant just died. Sometimes, they defied all expectation.

This place was mine, the memories were mine, the touch was my claim, and no one could take that away. But after the rose has been crushed, after the perfume has bled away, there comes a time to let go, to replant, to grow anew.  

The last to lay in the embrace of the coals was the most recent addition to my garden – the lily. Bright pink and dappled with brown, I had picked the whole flower. This had been the plant that had been purchased before the prospect of losing our home had become solidified. I had picked the lily because it was a symbol of cleansing and at the time I had believed it was this house that had needed to be cleansed. I knew better now.

It was me.

So I tossed the symbol into the flames and watched it razed to nothing but ash, a promise that life would come again, relinquished to the fire what I had now in the hopes that there would be beauty from ashes later.

Later that night, after my ‘goodbye’ had been spent, my mother picked me up.

The car was warm, inviting in the face of the chill that had buried itself in my muscles after sitting so close to a fire. As we began to pull away I could feel the tension mount in my chest. It was an ache that begged me to run from the car and return to what I had known.

 “Mom?” I choked out abruptly.

“Yeah?”

“What are you doing tomorrow,” There was a battle warring within myself, a wrestle for dominance in the face of all that I had come to understand in remembering, in grieving, and in accepting.

“Nothing. What did you want to do?”

“I want to go buy some flowers,”

Something flickered in my mother’s gaze at my plea, something fragile that bordered on sorrow, but missed it and brushed against something else. A tremulous smile – she hurt too. “We’ll make ourselves a new garden.”

“A new haven,” I corrected softly.