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ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

Chapter 11

Trilliums

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME


Chapter 11



True Spring


Just when we were convinced it was safe to begin digging around in the dirt and rototilling the garden space, when we thrilled to birdsong before dawn each morning, and migrated to short sleeves most afternoons, the temperature suddenly dropped into the low teens by dinner time and that night several inches of heavy wet snow fell, bowing the tree branches already thick with budding leaves, and sliding off the roofs and railings into heavy piles of mush.

Louise stayed in bed all day, vowing to sleep until true spring arrived. The birds acted dazed and sat by the feeders puffed into round balls to keep warm. I bundled up and walked to the mailbox, squinting against the gloppy flakes. To my left, in the snowy ravine, frogs frantically peeped in amphibian dismay.


1930 Stella is the best sister. We went to a dance and danced with each other. Bill sends his clothes home every week to wash.


Breaking out of the trees on my trail construction, I entered what Kipling called my "prairies," once a five-acre field where Uncle Mike had grown corn, now only partially open, thick with locust and sassafras, sedge and quack grass. So there was my trail in its many moods: the trees and the field, the shadow and the sun, slipping past water and through giant old oaks, the yin and the yang. The woods opened to a sweeping view of the sky and the corn fields across the road. I continued the trajectory of my path into the open by tapping in sticks along the twists and turns I intended to beat down into a trailway with my feet.

At last the single, complete circuit was finished. I set aside my hoe and loppers, removed my gloves, dropping them on the ground, and set off on my inaugural walk. It took me seven minutes and I was elated, so intently drinking in its sights and sounds from this new vantage point – not looking for roots that I’d stumble over or low-hanging branches but as a tourist and creator – that lights flashed in front of my eyes before I realized I was holding my breath. At the end of my first circle, Kipling stood at the edge of the orchard, holding two glasses of red wine. “To a job well done,” he said, toasting the trail.

I traded the old circle around the house for five to ten circuits on my new trail, first clockwise, then counterclockwise, changing the views. Each trip around offered new perspectives, a rich mixture of scenery and light I couldn’t imagine ever taking for granted. The trail was all I’d hoped it would be. Aunt Louise daily asked me, “What’s new on the trail?”

“I’ll take you around with me,” I offered.

“When I get my legs back,” she said.

“I saw fawn tracks in the field,” I told her one dewy morning after I’d completed three circuits and stopped to be sure they’d eaten the breakfast I’d left on the table.

"This is the time when the deer have their young," Louise said, "isn't it, Mike?"

"I don't know what time they have their young."

Her voice rose in irritation. "In the spring. You know they have their young in the spring."

"I know they have their young in the spring," Mike agreed, with a touch of impatience, "but I don't know what time."

He had spent the morning searching for the accordion he used to play with rollicking ease. I knew he’d sold it at least ten years ago but to tell him that caused more stress than his looking and not finding it. Haltingly he talked about making music at the Lithuanian Hall, and about dancing half the night.

"Mike was a good dancer," Louise said. "A good singer, too."

"Were you a good dancer?" I asked her.

She shook her head. "I wasn't, because convention wouldn't allow me to lead and I can't stand anyone pushing me around."

Somehow our talk about music and dancing grew convoluted in Louise's mind and by that afternoon she’d convinced herself there'd been a wedding the night before, "a big shindig," Kipling and I had attended and which she hadn’t been invited to. I was tempted to go along with it but I couldn't. I simply didn't have it in me to fabricate such an elaborate story.

"But didn't you have a good time?" she asked.

"I didn't go anywhere last night, Aunt Louise."

"What about the wedding? Was it fun?"

"There wasn't any wedding."

"I know there was. There was going to be dancing and lots of food. How much did you eat?"

I felt like I’d fallen into quicksand. She couldn't let it go and became more and more confused. "There was a wedding, a big party," she insisted and began crying.

"If nobody wants us to be there, then the hell with them," Uncle Mike broke in angrily.

I was a coward but I had to get out of there. I hugged her and told her I loved her and fled, hoping she'd take a nap and forget the phantom wedding and dance.


1930 Nothing happens here on the farm. Very cold. I went to the fields and brought Dad some coffee. Tiresome.


Spring finally burst on us for true. The mud dried and shot out tender, pale grass. Not a chance of a freak snowfall now, we assured ourselves. Louise and Mike stirred with the season, napping less, staying awake later and moving their lives outside. “There’s too much to see it all,” Louise said from her favorite blue metal chair on her patio. I agreed.

Their pleasure in the warming world and relative peace temporarily banished thoughts of nursing homes. Like Scarlett O’Hara, we’d think about that another day.

During a single night, as if by conjuring, trilliums opened along my trail, white petals shining beneath the trees, the heads bending toward the light. They were protected by Michigan law now, but I remembered a school field trip shepherded by nuns in black-and-white habits to a field dense with the fragile flowers. “Don’t pull them up by the roots,” they vainly warned roving students as we ecstatically filled our arms with bouquets, ripping up the roots in our exuberance. “They’ll die. Not by the roots.”

In the shade I spotted the glossy leaves of wintergreen plants, marking the spot with a stick so I could return to pick the white-fleshed, red berries, my mouth watering at the memory of the mealy, slightly medicinal-tasting fruit.

Exiting the woods onto the “prairie,” I discovered that two box turtles about eight inches long had positioned themselves on the trail, blocking it, touching nose to nose, not moving but intent on each other, oblivious to my presence. Nature had painted their shells in decorative mottling, similar but not identical, hints of red and orange among the grey-green. I ran to the house to fetch Kipling to come see. When we returned, the turtles had turned tail-to-tail, and stood as still as they had when I first discovered them. I was struck by an embarrassing shock of intrusion. “I think we’ve burst in on a private moment,” I told Kipling.

So after marveling at the intriguing signs – albeit slow – of turtle love, we left them to resume their romance.

When Louise asked me what was “new on the trail,” I described the two turtles and this reminded her and Mike of catching and cooking snapping turtles. “That meat is a chore to get out of the shell,” Louise said.

“Did you catch them in the river or on land?” I asked.

Mike laughed. “It’s easier on land.”

“But how did you catch them?” I persisted, imagining a snapping turtle’s steely jaws and mad-dog twists of the head.

He laughed again. “How do you think? You’d better know you’re a lot faster than a turtle.”

I’d been fixing them a snack and our conversation had distracted me. I stood in the open door of their refrigerator, unable to recall what I was looking for.

“I can’t remember what I wanted,” I said.

Both Louise and Mike laughed. “You’re getting to be just like us,” Mike said.

“You fit right in,” Louise added.

“Yeah, we’re just a bunch of kooks,” Mike said.

The laughter subsided and Mike said haltingly, with great effort, “Sometimes it’s not so funny when you forget.”

“It must be frustrating,” I said.

“Yes, it’s terrible,” he agreed softly, nodding and looking away.

Times like these, when Mike was aware of his slipping consciousness, were searingly painful to witness. There was little comfort and no reassurance we could provide that soothed him when he had moments, minutes, or even hours, of clarity. We forced ourselves to step back, to halt our hovering and watchfulness, and give him the space and respect we’d given him before the onset of Alzheimer’s.

We knew the clarity wouldn’t last, that the flat, dull confusion would slip back into his eyes like a curtain falling. Each moment with the old Mike was all the more precious for its increasing infrequency and fleetness of passage.


1930 Bill drove all night to get here and can only stay one day. He and Frank went rabbit hunting and shot two rabbits, then pulled stump in the new field. Got “cough syrup” for my cold.


Although it was still too early in the season to mow the lawns that stretched between the buildings and back toward the barn, the grass had turned the vigorous green of springtime, the turf dense with tender new growth. “I’d better check out the lawn mower situation,” Kipling decided.

“I know there’s a mower in the long shed,” Louise told him.

I’d read once that the first thing we humans do when we take possession of land, no matter how small, is name its properties. I’d done it to the features along my trail: the woods, the prairies, the S-curves. Louise and Mike had christened the little house, the long shed, the little woods, the old field, and many more, each site pronounced as if it were a title or written within quotation marks, like “the White House.”

Kipling returned from the long shed that was attached to the barn, perplexed. “There isn't a lawn mower; there are lawn mowers. You have to see this.”

He was right. Nine push mowers with engines, two push mowers without engines and one riding lawn mower. All regimentally lined up against the back wall of the shed and all kept dirt-free by coverings of old jackets and blankets.

We inspected the troops, noting the numerous brands and styles. Several had faded paint or rust spots but a few appeared brand new. “Maybe Uncle Mike salvaged old lawn mowers for parts,” I suggested as Kipling pulled off the ripped jacket on the last mower: a sleek yellow job with oversized wheels that brought a goofy smile to his face.

But no, after a few pulls every single lawn mower started and steadily idled. The shed reverberated with their roar, the air clouded and fumed with exhaust. All of the blades were sharpened, with shiny clean edges. No dead grass clung to the undersides.

"Why do you have so many lawn mowers?" I asked Mike at dinner that evening.

"I don't have any lawn mowers," he insisted.

"Why does Uncle Mike have so many lawn mowers?" I asked Louise after Mike left the table.

Aunt Louise shrugged and fussed with her spoon and knife. She raised her shoulders, looking embarrassed. "I just like to buy Mike tools."

That explained the four chain saws, one of them still in its case, three sanders, several electric drills and the new, packages-never-opened, router, circular saw and jig saw.


1930 Billy is here! Things became very bad in Chicago so he came home to live here for a while. I’m so glad to see him. He had a letter that his mother died in Holland – a month ago!



It rained, a warm spring rain, and Ray phoned, "This is a mushroom rain," he said. "You'd better come out tomorrow and we'll hunt mushrooms."

Morels. The Michigan truffle, the gourmet's delight. Entering the woodsy areas on the way to Ray and Barbara's we passed cars parked every half mile or so. Mushroom hunters. "They'll park a mile away just so they don't give away their favorite spot," my brother explained.

We rode with him in his truck down two-tracks to a forest of red oak that had been logged, and tromped through standing water and tangled logging debris searching for the dark brainily-faceted fungi. They were invisible until Ray triumphantly found the first one just peeking above rotted leaves in the shadow of a stump. We gathered around it, studying it for reference.

Our eyes suddenly became morel-conscious. My nose twitched at their earthy fragrance. One after another, tucked in around the bases of stumps and just surfacing under last year’s oak leaves. We raced each other for the telltale bulges of leaves normally matted flat in spring, uncovering the newest, most succulent morels. We pinched off a few fiddle head ferns and added them to our bags. Ray found an owl pellet, an oval mass of hair and tiny bones: likely a mouse. We studied coyote scat. Ray handed me a perfectly round ball the size and weight of a ping pong ball, but smooth and fragile and polished brown.

"It's an oak gall wasp ball," he told me, pointing to a miniscule hole on its glossy surface. "The wasp lays its larvae on the oak and a chemical interferes with the tree’s growth so the oak forms a gall over it to protect itself. When the larvae hatch, they feed on the cell tissue until its ready to emerge."

The ball was light as air and I carried it carefully in one hand for the shelf above my computer, saying the name aloud, like one of the old tongue twisters we loved as kids: oak gall wasp ball.

There were enough mushrooms for all of us for dinner. Louise clapped her hands in delight when she saw them. “Boil them in salt water to remove the bugs and then sauté them in butter,” she instructed me. They smelled heavenly on the stove but it was appalling how much they shrank. But still, each of our plates held a generous serving.

"These are perfect," Louise said, eating one mushroom at a time and savoring it before swallowing, her eyes closed in pleasure. “Heavenly.”

Even Mike ate them as eagerly as he ate sweets. Louise reminisced about the year she and Mike picked grocery bags full of mushrooms, so many she pickled them and canned them to eat all winter long. "Do you remember that, Mikey?"

"Yup," Mike answers.

"Just like Gary Cooper," Louise teased him. "Yup."

But only an hour later, after I’d packed up the dishes in the basket to take home to wash, when I told her I hoped to pick morels again, Louise asked, "How many did you find the first time?"

"A gallon pail full.”

"I wish there would have been enough for us to have some," she said sadly. "I love morels and I haven't had any in years."


1930 Frank killed a horse for Thompson. Bill is going to make dried beef from it. “Why waste it?” he wanted to know. They caught 8 rabbits, too.


Orchards, commercial and on family lots, went wild with blossoms. Cherries, then pears, followed by a profusion of apples. “Old” apples that would bear the small, intensely flavored but difficult-to-store fruit, blossomed along roadside ditches and abandoned farms. Their silvery bark glowed. The blossoms were fragrant and brief, perfuming the air and quickly drifting free.

Either Louise or Mike had at one time planted poppies in the orchard and now they circled several of the fruit trees: blooming brilliant reddish orange. Florid, rich and sumptuous.

Honey bees languidly buzzed the blooms, the sacs on their back legs heavy with orange pollen. Kipling had a trick of gently “petting” the bees’ backs, and each time Louise witnessed it, she laughed in amazement as if she’d never seen such a feat.

Thick spears of asparagus shot up from the asparagus bed each morning, erupting from the dirt like miniature poles. Every night for weeks we ate asparagus cooked every manner I could conceive of. And each time I set an asparagus dish on the table either Louise or Mike inquired in amazement, “This asparagus is from our garden?”

Even the air was tinted with green. Flowers I hadn’t seen since I was a child emerged: not only yellow and purple violets and trilliums, but spotted trout lilies, spring beauties, Jacks-in-the-pulpit, marsh marigolds.

In Louise’s gardens surrounding the house, which hadn’t been cleaned out in two years, hyacinth, tulips and daffodils poked through last year’s dead mass of leaves. Kipling found a leaf rake among Mike’s garden tools and carefully began to free the flowers from the detritus, finding two plates, an old TV Guide, and a pair of reading glasses that had been thrown at the blue jays.

Louise, whose flower gardens had once been her pride, watched Kipling clean them from the patio or the living room window, gazing after his easy movements of bending and rising and tugging at old weeds with sorrowful eyes.


1930 Frank, Bill and I went rabbit hunting in the night. A full moon. Beautiful. I bang pans around the brush piles or at their holes and scare them toward Frank and Bill and they catch them when they run out. Bullets are too expensive.



Next Tuesday, Chapter 12: Morris the cat loses a battle.


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