Vases

VASES

The front door asks me in. No one is home, but I let myself in anyway, reaching through a cracked pane of glass. A tortuous angling of my arm, a strained fingertip turn of the lock, and I am in. That's how it is in country houses: a key under a flowerpot, an open back- shed door. The huge swaying pines encircle this place in safety: fragrant green sentinels. The neighbors watch your place too, just as you watch theirs; sort of an unwritten code of out- in- the- country honor.

But nothing feels safe now.

I open the porch door again, but not to leave. I'm driven to press the old doorbell. I need to hear its 'plunk-plunk' sound. All these years that plunk-plunk would quickly be followed by a change in light, in the hallway, as she'd open the kitchen door at the hall's end. 

And then I'd hear her voice.  Melodic. 

"Coming doll!" Even though she had no earthly idea who might be on the other side of that door. 

And then, through the bubbled glass, I'd see her face peering through, her eyebrows arched-with happy expectancy. "Who goes there?"

She'd slowly swing the door open, as if opening a gift. And then that real, wide smile. She'd hug me and pull me in over the threshold.

"Oh, Honey!  It's so great to see you! Come on in, I've got the kettle on!"

Plunk-plunk. I'm messing with my own head; daring myself to face the awful facts. Preparing for the worst-the day when she is completely, irrevocably gone.

My eyes fix on the old dry sink at the end of the porch.  Mom's vases are there, lined up on top.  They stand silently, an odd assemblage of shapely old ladies, their glasses glowing in hues from bottle green to Vicks jar cobalt blue.

There are thick ones with heavy bottoms-the kind that a florist expects you'll throw out.  There are old jelly jars with calico flowers pressed into the rims, charming with a handful of daisies sprouting like a hat.  There is another, really an antique creamer, but now happily changing its career for a chance to display treasures from the yard or the field out by the barn.

I want to go back. I want it to be just like it used to be. I want a sleepy summer morning, here at my old house.  Wait...

I can hear Mom rustling about downstairs. I am lazy abed upstairs. I just roll over and savor the decadence of sleeping until I want to get up.  Mom slips out the back door.  She has already had her second cup of coffee, swept the kitchen floor and hung a load of wash out to dry on the line out by the old pear tree.  Its branches sag with wormy fruits.  Bees buzz around her head as she pinches another clothespin, hangs another sock. She swats them away.

As I linger in that luscious place between dreaming and waking, I hear her whistling as she meanders through the yard in search of the day's floral bounty.  The sweet ferns that grow along the base of the house are always starring in her bouquets. Dandelions, hated by most, are tenderly plucked and hailed for their gorgeous yellow heads.  In May, Mom has a steady bounty of lilacs from old bushes, planted a century ago.  Mom loves how the lilacs bow their heavy, curly heads as they are bounced about in a breeze. Her peonies are barren ladies.  Each summer, they valiantly try to send up exotic blossoms.  Deep green stems always send up a promise, but no silken flowers ever unfold.  Not to worry. Mom uses the leathery leaves as the spine of many a bouquet.  Lily of the valley, daylilies, forsythia, and old-fashioned climbing roses from the trellis-all seem to await the pinch and snap of her fingertips.

Mom carries her armload of flowers into the kitchen and lays them down onto newspapers which she has spread on the kitchen table.  She chooses a vase fitted to the day's haul and fills it with icy cold water.  Then she snips off the leaves and gives every picked blossom its due.   The talls go in the center.  A blend of shorter stemmed beauties is nestled in a fistful of ferns and peony greens.  Mom always likes to arrange a bouquet in her hands first, not in the vase.  She suspends the arrangement over the vase and then gently lifts and drops the bouquet-so that each flower can find its own legs- fall into its own happy place. All the while, she is whistling.  Her bracelets and bangles tinkle happily-a silvery accompaniment to her song.

But the song has stopped.

Mom is in a nursing home. It's likely she'll never come home again.  Strokes have robbed her of her smile. She is unable to move, except for one arm and hand.  She cannot see.  It stuns me each time I see her in that bed. She lies too quiet-the inertia of her paralyzed muscles weighing her down-like sand. She answers if we speak to her, but more often she just listens. So we sing to her, stroke her hair and tell her all the little details of our days.

She only lives by the awful grace of that feeding tube-installed after her first stroke. Back when she wanted to try...to come back. We put the awful question to her about the feeding tube. She couldn't see him, but the surgeon looked at us all with that let her die look. She couldn't talk- so she wrote it on a yellow pad laid across her lap. "Mom. Do you want this tube? Do you understand?"

"Yes. I'd rather be disabled than a corpse." That spirit-so wildly alive-running amok inside of her.

But with each passing day, she dives deeper inside of herself, like a sounding whale.  And just to make it worse somehow, she keeps rising to the surface of herself to let us know that she is still very much here.  And there's the rub. 

I asked Mom, the other day, if she had heard the booming of a huge thunderstorm, the night before my visit.  She said, "Sure. I walked around in the house last night. I kept looking out the windows at my pine trees. I worry about them in a big storm".  

We are left to wonder if any of this is right. Would she understand our intent if we asked her about turning off the tube feed?  Here and now-as she talks to us about storms and pine trees and walking around in her old house. 

Something clicks. The vases stare dumbly at me in their dusty limbo.  Little webs form a crocheted shawl connecting them in a sad kinship. Here in this dust- on this silent porch-I somehow feel the loss of Mom more strongly than if I were standing by her bed. 

I cannot stand the dust, the webs and the quiet, the dead quiet anymore.  I grab the clouded vases and dust each one, wiping them on my tee shirt, as if doing so might restore some sense of normalcy to this home. I run outside, through the crack- paned door, and scour the late summer field for blooms.  There are floppy hydrangeas, dandelions and the ever-loyal ferns, aplenty.  Like a lunatic in a dirty tee shirt, sobbing like a child, I bend and snap the woody hydrangea stems and pluck the fuzzy dandelions from their ragged green mats.  I lose track of time as I pick an armload of wild things to fill every vase. 

Dad has left the inner door unlocked, wedged closed with the usual wad of newspaper.  Inside the house, the quiet stuns me.  I feel a hollow ache as I walk down the hallway with my own armload of blooms.  No whistling.  No sounds but the rumbling of the ancient fridge and the annoying tick- tock of time passing- too quickly- from the kitchen clock.

I gather the vases and fill them all with icy clear water.  I do as I've been told, as I've seen a hundred times.  The heavy-headed hydrangeas challenge me and threaten to swallow the tiny golden dandelions.  But the ferns bring order to the floral chaos.  My hands tremble in my frenzy to bring about suitable sprays of flowers for each lonely vase.

I try to whistle-to fill the house with that sound.  But my lips fight joy, draw down at the corners.  Damned if I can't emit even that single simple sound. 

I make six or seven bouquets.  I gently lift each handful-let each flower find its legs.

Maybe now, by some grace, she is not in her bed. She is transported here to her old house.  And she's picking wildflowers with me-right now-on this lazy summer morning.

With my palms together, I point them to heaven, and pray that this is so.