July 15, 2014

Through Tennessee and Virginia, most of the radio stations were country, and as the return trip was on Sunday, most of them played Gospel, and every single artist was a man or a men’s quartet.

Without consciously making the decision, I dedicated yesterday morning to the garden, rumbling to Reems Creek for a truckload of mulch and soil, and spreading half of it before the noon sun was in the sky. Also, a variegated white and pink hibiscus, which could not be resisted. My shoulder, which cannot lift the sheet off itself in the morning, still can haul bags of mulch pretty well.

This is the first recollection of which I am sure:

It is high summer. I am a child, a baby, and I cannot be alone. But I feel alone. Behind me is a dark house, cool and empty. Before me is a brightness that cannot be fathomed unless one is inside it. I am at the Border. My tiny hands are pushing at a screen door, unsure whether it will open or not. It opens. I step out under a curt porch roof that shields me a little while longer from the light. I wait for a voice to call me back where it is cool and safe. No voice calls. The inside is my mother’s place, but she is not there now, or she does not call. I move a step, and another step, and then I am in the light. What was invisible through excess of brilliance is clear now. It is my father’s garden at summer noon. I do not know the names of the flowers, but I name them somehow anyway: cosmos and gladiolas, bleeding-heart and sunflower, touch-me-not, tiger lily, petunia, zinnia, all jumbled together in clashing colors, the strong blooms of full light, nothing exotic, nothing taking any care but to sow and water and to look on in their glory. A working man’s garden. In a while I’ll recognize it as a stern no-nonsense Depression garden, sown in the spaces between the necessary vegetables. But on that day it was different. It is possible that I had never been alone in the outside before. It is possible that my mother was napping or talking on the phone, and lost track of me for a moment, and there I was in the blast of gold that I recognized even then as male, and dangerous.

Red wooden steps lead up into the tiny forest behind the garden. The steps keep back a tide of alyssum. Dare I climb? I want to climb. The interior of the forest is difficult to see behind the blast of noon light. It’s not that I’ve never been there before, but someone took me. Someone shielded me from what I would meet there were I alone. I step deeper into the yard that has the flowers for its walls. I realize a voice is speaking to me from the center of the light. I realize that something my father has done with the flowers, and that they have done to this space of earth, has made it a holy place. Someone is speaking to me from the center of the light. I walk toward it. I walk out into the center.