To Be a Perennial by Jade Nicholson Eliasson

To Be a Perennial | Jade Nicholson Eliasson

I never gardened with Grandma Jean. When I was a child, I delighted in holding the soft, round potatoes from her vegetable patch and being next to her in the greenhouse as she plucked the rosiest tomatoes off their upright vines, but I never touched the flowers. Whenever I arrived at her Yorkshire home, tired and aching from the journey from New Jersey, the flowers were always already in bloom, already beautiful, ready to be photographed with the Canon point-and-shoot Grandma got me when I was twelve. A lot of work probably went into making the garden so Edenic, but I only ever enjoyed the resulting blossoms.

In early March of last year, many years after I left New Jersey, when I was thirty-two and no longer a child, the weather in Boston was still preparing to usher spring’s blooms out of the earth. The grass was exposed but still brown, the bushes wiry. Perhaps that’s why it was hard to square what my dad told me then, the fact that she had died, with all that I knew about all that she could make come alive. On the doorstep of spring, her favorite time of year, she had been taken from me.

And yet: how could a person be taken if they’d been alive for ninety-three years? How could ninety-three years not be enough? She got more than Grandpa got. She got more than the vast majority of people in the cemetery where Grandpa was buried got. It occurred to me that, soon, she’d be buried there, too. Maybe she’d win some kind of award for how long she was able to last. Not even Brexit could kill her, though I do think it tried.

Naturally, I started wondering what did, in the end, kill her. She had been fine; her memory started to get thready a few years back and she had suffered the occasional urinary tract infection, but for her to have simply not risen from bed one day really bothered me. It bothered me that, without warning, without her permission, without any sort of apology or offer of a last meal or phone call, God took her and left us a body.

During all those moments that followed – as I landed in London with my sister, as I boarded the train, as I tried and failed to connect to the Great Northern Railroad’s WI-FI, and as I ultimately just sat there with my eyes closed – that body was lying in wait for me. The soft-spoken undertaker in Yorkshire had taken her into a little house at the back of a well-groomed property just up the road from where she had been born, and he had left her there as though she were sleeping and didn’t want to be disturbed. Later, when I was next to her, trying to understand why her nose looked so small, I wanted to say thank you, but my mouth wouldn’t open. She was right there, skin stretched painfully over wiry fingers, but where did she go?

***

When I was sixteen, I enrolled in a photography course at my school. I clutched my Pentax K-1000 to my chest in the security line at Newark Liberty International Airport, where I had grown up seeing the signs warning travelers to alert security if they were bringing undeveloped film through the X-Ray machines. Finally, it was my turn to grow up and say, Yes, I am, I have some, and could you please treasure it like I do, because it is the method by which I will remember the world’s beautiful things before they disappear. On that trip, I got down on my belly in the garden, and I snapped and I wound, snapped and wound, and I pinned the Aubrieta and the Penstemon and the Bergenia to the film. No one could take them from me if I had them right here, in my camera, and in the dark room, and on the bulletin board in my classroom, stapled there by my teacher.

To capture the best photographs for my final project, we went on walks down Water Lane just like we did when I was young. Like we always had and would continue to do. Like when I was four and Grandma showed me the sheep dip. Like when I was three and she gave me a little net and pail in which I could catch tadpoles. I wrote my college essay about that. Dad talked about it in his speech at my wedding. This time, like so many others, there were lambs in the field, and when we walked among them we didn’t look up but rather looked down so as to avoid the various piles of excrement camouflaged in the grass. There was so much to enjoy and see, so I took my photographs with the anxiety of a young woman who believes perennials are fleetingly gorgeous and yet doesn’t realize that she takes the same photographs of the same blooms year after year after year.

***

When I sit still, my stomach burbles just like hers used to when we sat on the couch, side by side, looking out the window and not saying a word. The mourning doves perched atop the trees always made enough background noise for our perfectly contented, tummy-rumbling peace.

If I ever hear mourning doves now, my head snaps up and I am briefly confused about where I am, who I’m with. I look around for Grandma Jean and am always bitterly disappointed that she’s not right there, swinging a stiff arm as she marches to the shops to pick up a loaf of bread. The mourning doves just sit on the telephone wires above my head as my face crumples, my shoulders sink, and the acid in my belly turns sour.

***

The day of the funeral, I thought the church smelled particularly old. In this church, Grandma and Grandpa were married. My dad was christened. My sister and I were christened. My college friends and I sang in the apse on a post-graduation trip abroad. And now here I was, standing around, looking a little bit lost, wondering what to do with my hands. 

“Thank you for coming,” I murmured to Sarah as she clicked past on low heels. “I’ve been thinking of you and your little boy. When’s his surgery again?” 

She replied with a hand on my shoulder, “I think you have me confused with someone else.” 

Right. I had meant to say that to Kate, but Kate was in London and had sent her regrets.

The undertaker arrived in a pressed suit with coattails and a tall, narrow-brimmed hat, and I realized we were expected to walk in after the casket. Grandma was inside of that closed box, a box that seemed way too small to contain her, but I also remembered that she’d been shrinking since she was eighty and therefore maybe this box was the appropriate size for a person who’d been contracting for thirteen years.

Atop the casket, it seemed that a heavy bouquet was growing right out of the oak, the flowers nearly spilling over the sides. I stared at them from my seat in the wooden pew, wondering where they’d come from and who’d planted them in the first place. I wondered if Grandma had picked them out or described them, drawn a picture or taken a photo of a wildflower she’d seen in one of the rapeseed fields and said, These, these are the ones I want on top of the box that will contain my body when you all come to see me for the last time. I wondered what would happen to those flowers after she’d been lowered into the ground, and it concerned me so much that they’d be taken somewhere just to die as well, so I picked several when the crowd had dispersed and gone to visit other graves and put them in my pocket.

***

When I was fifteen, my cousins and sister and I made little people out of gourds. “Courgettes,” Auntie Katherine prompted me after the fourth time I called them zucchinis. We carved little eyes into the tops and gave them lips made of flower petals. When we’d given them long stalks of grass for hair and made little clothes out of hankies, we posed with them by the shrubbery and smiled ear-to-ear. Grandma chuckled when their clothes fell off.

At some point on every trip, and perhaps on this trip it was right after we dressed the courgettes, we had to take family photos. The adults would swap out to make sure that everyone was in multiple photos, which meant that the kids were in all of them, which numbered in the millions, and our cheeks always hurt at the end. I’d ignore the various comments about my head being at a weird angle, because at fifteen, my acne was in full bloom. I was desperate for it to disappear, so I kept my face angled to the sun at all times, trying to sear off the spots with UV damage.

For dinner, we gobbled up the gourd people and leaned back in our chairs afterward. We had the photographs of them, of their bulbous bellies and thoughtful eyes, so I wasn’t worried when Uncle David took the last bite and declared them finished. As Grandma doled out sticky toffee puddings, we goaded her into telling us about the devil-possessed geese at the farm where she grew up, just one more time, please? It was never just one more time, and I think she knew that, but she would always tell the story anyway.

The photographs (of the gourds, of all of us) ended up in mighty photo albums built to outlive us all, and it was like I needed those photographs to remember my own life. Every time I looked at the pictures of gourd people afterward, I’d say, invariably, “Wow, I forgot about that.”

***

Because I never gardened with Grandma Jean, I never participated in the becoming of her beautiful things. Her garden was just there, fully formed, similar to how she was already fully formed and full of a life more than halfway-lived by the time I really knew her. I asked for pictures of her when she was younger, stories about the geese at the farm, and recipes written in her own hand because I craved knowing all of her and could never shake my disappointment that I couldn’t bend time steeply enough to slide back down it and see her gliding home after a school dance or warming a kettle over the fire in the farmhouse. She was there when I was born, when I was one and two and all the numbers I’d ever experienced, and she could remember those times in my father’s life, too. But by the time I arrived in her life, I was already late and wishing for the clock to wind back.

When I miss her now, I miss the person I knew, but I also miss the person other people remember, and I miss the person she was long before she ever told me about the geese. She was all of these people, and I only got to have her for a season, but she remembered all of me and I guess I miss that, too.

***

After the funeral, we went to the cricket club in town and bought each other beers. Half pint here, old photograph there, a clap on the back and a laugh and a reiterated, “What a lass she was!” I had been talking about Grandma in the present tense for so long that I had to think about my verbs before I opened my mouth.

I took a few pints out into the sun and distributed them to my parents and sister. The warmth on my back in late March was intoxicating. I wondered what time it was at home. Auntie Katherine admitted into her glass of orange juice that she’d added a hymn to the funeral service. “Added?” we asked, perplexed. Uncle David leaned forward, imitating Grandma looking down at her service: “Tick… tick… tick… wait, hold on. What’s this? What’re they doing? Those naughty devils!” Hands slapped the octagonal picnic table. Pints sloshed. Eyes brimmed over. We used the word “particular.” 

The sun was just starting to swing low over the tile roofing when we finally stood up and dusted off the seats of our pants. I wasn’t sure when I’d be back, but I did know that this place would be here whenever I was ready. Maybe souls, like time, are borrowed rather than taken. And if they are borrowed, then they can be given again. She will be too, I think – given, I mean. Given in the perennials in the yard and in the mourning doves atop the telephone wires and in the geese that fly away only to return again and again and again. 

As the last ripples of sunlight shimmered on the daffodils at the edge of the cricket field, I held a hand up to my eyes and wondered at the pale-yellow blooms. I did not reach for my phone; I did not take a photograph. For once, I looked and I noticed and I held my empty pint glass still. 

The daffodils danced in the breeze. 

I watched, then turned to go.

Bonus audio of Jade reading from her piece…

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