garden
by gwenda ledbetter [ one of our short short story winners ]

Here I sit, my stomach knotted, in traffic stalled for miles. The light goes from red to green and back to red with nothing moving except hands on horns, heads out windows, angry mouths and directional fingers. Straight up.

Something...I don’t know what...turns my head from angry pulsing metal to see a wall, right beside me. Old gray stone, mortared with moss, wine-red roses, spilling over the top, raddled with a blue flowering vine. Clematis, I think. Then I notice the small wild white kind; it’s scent strong enough to pierce through car exhaust. It takes me back to a wrought iron fence covered with the stuff in the backyard of my growing-up. Bla-a-a-t! All right, all right, I’m going.

I can’t believe it. Another traffic jam at the same light. I look, out of the noise, at the stone wall and see the gate. Gray weathered, much like the stone with moss growing in the cracks. An inside voice says, “Go there.” The light changes.
A week later, a tire goes flat in that same place. Thank God for cell phones.
While AAA works, I walk to the wall and bury my face in the roses. A breeze stirs the clematis. I move along stone, moss and wood. A slight pressure of my hands opens the gate and I’m in the garden.

Color! An artist’s palette, filled and spilling. Some flowers I know. Creamy white flowers with red centers crawling with ants, their warm-weather scent intoxicating.
Roses, climbing trellises, covering bushes, stretching up to the sun on strong free-standing stems. I follow a path edged with delphinium and friendly faced pansies. Purple, yellow. Looking down at them, I don’t see and almost trip over the old woman, on her knees, weeding. She looks up with a face straight out of dreams. Scary ones. I think of fearful long-toothed old women who give gifts and curses in ancient fairy tales.

Now, her buttery-pear face wreathes in a smile. She creaks to her feet as tall as a small tree and beckons. Her fingernails are dark with dirt. I follow her to a stream, flowing over a treasure of colored stones. She reaches under a hollowed out stone and brings out a teapot and a hibachi. She measures out herbs, gives me tea and I forget everything but the need, that is nearly a scream, to be here.

I keep thinking I should leave but there’s so much to do. Watching her, I’m learning the rhythm of weeding, watering, fertilizing, pruning. I‘m learning the times of planting, rising with the sun, noting down the time and its place in the sky. The moon is waxing now. The flowers are like children dependent on me for their nurture. On rainy days, I sit on the porch and listen to the different sounds the rain makes on their leaves. When it’s cold, and they’re out of sight, I put my ear to the ground and hear...stirrings.

I dream at night. The dreams, nightmares, really, are full of familiar sounds, things I dreaded. The old woman is teaching me the names of flowers: both common and Latin, like Asclepias tuberosa, Butterfly Weed and Astilbe grandii, Great Astilbe.
I asked the old woman about the tea she gave me when I first came to Garden.
She shows me how to make it. Bilberry, barberry, passion flower and seeds from a flower down by the stream. You have to be careful measuring. I should leave. Cineraria, Dusty miller. Foeniculum Vulgare, Fennel.

Today while trimming the white clematis on the wall, I notice a car nearby. The tires are all flat. The hubcaps are gone. The other cars out on the road are a great noisy blur, best left alone. The white clematis is winding around my finger. I laugh and slapping its persistence, cut it back. It would take over Garden if we let it. We’ll eat our lunch by the stream today as we do on all warm days. I’m getting better at making bread.

When its cold or rainy, we eat in the hut that shelters us as the earth shelters the flowers.

I asked the old woman about her life before Garden. She said it was like mine. I don’t remember mine. Images appear then vanish. The nightmares have stopped. Garden is enough. I’m working on the names of trees. Magnolia stellata, Star magnolia.

We went over the last of the Latin names of perennials today. Veronica incana, wooly speedwell and viola cornuta, tufted pansy. She said, “You know everything I can teach you. Where has the time gone?”

I don’t know where the old woman is. Her rake is here in the compost. The dahlias we raised from seed are waiting to be planted. She’ll be back. Surely.

I’m down on my knees planting dahlias where they’ll get the most sun. A shadow moves over my hands. I look up expecting to see her...but a younger woman stands there. She sees something in me that puts fear in her eyes, then a longing I recognize.

I creak to my feet, tall as a small tree; beckon with a dirt-stained finger and lead her to the stream to take the the teapot out form under the hollow stone and measuring carefully, make her tea.

Gwenda LedBetter was known as the Storylady for years working as storyteller for Pack Library then across the mountain at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn and across the country. She’s been a participant in Tommy Hays’ workshop, Hanging In There, for five years.