The Peonies

My father dug up my mother's peonies.

To be more precise, I should say he dug up the granddaughters, great-great-great-great (although I am not totally sure how plant lineage goes) ones of my mother's mother's peonies.  From their first seeded spot, they were uprooted, replanted and survived somehow.  My mother, though lacking tangible roots to pull from the ground, moved herself with them: from Fairfield to Oyster Bay, with minor pauses in between, to see what this great  idea of family really entailed.

I don't remember what the peonies looked like in full bloom when they were loved and tended to.  I was too young and too self-satisfied to wonder or even notice what our front garden really looked like.  I knew there were bushes, flowers alive, that I could crouch to and smell and have my mother take pictures of me smelling.

Today the front garden is a naked rectangle.  Only a few determined and resistant (even to towering, heavy, six-foot-six-skirting adversaries) growths of small weeds, pointy reaching leaves, remained.  Only the smallest patch of green, the can-survive-the-apocalypse kind of green, hints at the suburban ideal it once was and the mess it became.

"When are you going to dig up the peonies for me?" she says on the phone in her apartment ten minutes away.  Those peonies are Very Important, she said.  They are from Fairfield.

I know, I know, I said.  But I don't dig.  I wanted to help my mother, to salvage something sacred from the wreckage of divorce.  She wanted to be reminded, maybe, of who she was Then.  She needed to see proof that it existed.  And though I walked past that slowly tangling mess every day, I could not bring myself to dirty my knees, my hands digging into that malleable heart and search for something I couldn't identify by sight or touch.

In ten years, the colors grew less vibrant, the flowers died.  Skinny legs of crabgrass and those scraggly, looming peony stems persisted.  My father let the garden go, and I'm sure the neighbors who didn't know gave us names:   The Family Unable to Keep Live Things.  The Ones Who Fell Apart.  Instead of flowers, stacks of aging newspapers grew among us in the living room, sharp voids took root as my mother packed away her things.  I could hear my father come home late at night when I should have been asleep, could hear his dragging movements up the staircase to see that we were still there, breathing, under his roof, before drifting into his own dreams on the couch.

But I don't understand what prompted the events of last week - the pulling, tearing, the ripping out of earth.  Ten years ago and my father decides to do this now.

I was supposed to save the peonies, I said.  Mom will be mad.

"It was all weeds.  I threw them out."

(copyright 2008 jill capewell)