Black-Eyed Susan with Ben's Purple-Leaf Sand Cherry in background.
This year's chaotic, confused calendar tells us it's November: we see evidence of advancing autumn all around us, and we feel it in the air. As I've walked the garden over the past few weeks, assessing what needs to be done before hard frost... closing beds, cutting back the spent foliage of spring and summer, moving select plants to winter shelter, I've had time and opportunity to ruminate on an extraordinary year... the vagaries of pandemic life, a political season that's been alternately head-scratching, brow-furrowing, eyebrow-raising, jaw-dropping, and stomach-churning... public pain and social strife coupled with private grieving and painstaking adjustment following the loss of Ben. I've found myself rummaging for words, reaching for language that captures the The Way Things Are Now. I've thought, momentarily, that I've hit upon adequate ones, only to reach the very Twenty-Twenty conclusion: It's all beyond words.
Autumn Past: Ben sits by the Burning Bush.
This year's Burning Bush.
Beyond words: how can that be? As long as I can remember, I've been a collector of words: gathering them, savoring them, tucking them away, calling them forth when needed, and then filing them away again for future use. I remember sitting in a late-1970s South-Central Pennsylvania High School English class led by Mr. Shirley, late-1970s South-Central Pennsylvania English instructor and Varsity Baseball coach, as he attempted to whip up academic enthusiasm for Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales. I remember the instructor-coach, all earnestness and all red-in-the-face, struggling to deliver an authentic literary experience, reading passages from an epic poem in Old English, reciting excerpts from a prose poem in Middle English, to a classroom of fidgety, patently unreceptive late-1970s South-Central Pennsylvania teenagers. Feeling a rush of empathy and strangely inspired by this brave-albeit-bumbling oratory exercise, I raised my hand and volunteered something resembling insight apropos mead halls and the monster Grendel... or maybe it was something about satirical pilgrimages and The Wife of Bath, prompting the guy who sat in front of me-- ironically, one of my future husband's friends and a teammate on Mr. Shirley's Varsity Baseball Team-- to pivot in his desk and growl in neither Old English nor Middle English but in distinctly late-1970s South-Central Pennsylvania sotto voce, You are a brown-noser and a walking dictionary. I remember taking issue with the former but feeling flattered by the latter.
She was a primrose... from The Canterbury Tales.
Yellow Primrose from Mom and Dad Lebo's garden meets Clematis from Mom and Dad Massam's place.
A walking dictionary: I met Brad in middle school typing class. We were seated alphabetically-by-last name, and we typed lots of words, dutifully pecking The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, to the rudimentary rhythm of Simon and Garfunkel's I'd Rather Be a Hammer Than a Nail and under constant mid-1970s South-Central Pennsylvania threat of knuckle-rapping if we peeked at the keys while typing. Brad and I became friends in high school, in Advanced Comp and Speech class, once again seated alphabetically-by-last-name, where he, like his baseball teammate, believed me to be a bit of a brown-noser, if not a walking dictionary. To this day, I consider his three-point essay entitled Salt to be one of the finest examples of expository writing composed during the high school era, certainly the most compelling about the harvesting of sodium chloride and its subsequent preservation and seasoning of food. No doubt about it, I fell in love with Brad for reasons including, but not limited to, his way with words and his mastery of our native tongue. Moving beyond alphabetically-by-last-name, we dated, got married... built a life, a library, and a little-yet-loving, laughter-filled family. It's been a decades-long conversation; mostly in prose, although we have composed some clever-if-off-color limericks along the way.
Mother's Day Coleus from Ben.
It's not surprising, then, that Ben would be a collector of words. He spoke in charmingly rhetorical sentences well before he took his first steps. During leisurely mornings on Longwood Avenue, lounging in footy pajamas, parked on the kitchen floor, taking lusty swigs of apple juice from a sippy cup, Ben would raise topics for discussion, minus the sibilant s sound: Light bulb burned out. Where id Connecticut. What id a Great Horned Owl. Won't we never hee that again. All through elementary school and in the course of rigorous speech therapy, Ben published The Broadview Post, a venerable tabloid-style almost-daily, produced with magic marker and colored pencil at a Little Tykes desk, delivered bright-and-early to bedside or kitchen table. There were shocking, exclamatory headlines: Marina Blast Kills 250,000! It's All Bill Clinton's Fault! Broadview Terrace Gets New National Park! High school student, undergraduate student, graduate student, writer-editor in a dream-come-true job at The Thoroughbred Daily News... in the time that he walked and and ran across this earth, Ben collected words and used them well and wisely.
Ben with a Great Horned Garden Owl.
And so, all through this year like no other-- across winter and spring, athwart summer and early autumn-- I've tried to collect words. A few weeks ago, I pulled a volume from the book shelf-- my tattered, tried-and-true Roget's Thesaurus, a cherished birthday gift to South-Central Pennsylvania teenage me from Grandma Wolfe. I've used it, used it a lot over the years. When its alphabetical tabs fell out and its binding began to disintegrate in the 1990s, I lovingly glued it and re-covered it with thick, glossy garden-themed wrapping paper. Leafing through it in 2020, I've wondered at how the world and the words have changed since its 1977 publication.
The well-used Roget's Thesaurus.
In recent days, too, I've caught myself pausing in the garden, rake in hand, watching leaves from our old White Oak drift through brisk air and settle, silently and gracefully, on the ground. And I've thought, What do we do when the story is beyond words? When language is inadequate to express the temper of the times, when vocabulary fails to capture the tone of the season? When a walking dictionary is at a loss for words, when the cherished thesaurus offers no synonym or antonym for the story? It's been a year since we said goodbye to Ben. We sat with him in the hushed, dimmed light of early evening, and there were no words-- simply an eloquent squeeze of the hand, the briefest brush of a kiss, a knowing look across the room. Through the hours and days and weeks and months that followed, I wandered the garden, continuing to place one foot in front of the other, and walked with Brad on winding, worthwhile trails, carrying on with the journey. And every step of the way, I've considered the conundrum: there are words for all of it, but there are no words.
Japanese Maple, one that Brad and Ben rehabilitated as a sapling.
Self-seeding Morning Glory, Goldenrod, and New England Aster meet in unplanned harmony.
Beyond considering the conundrum, I've reaffirmed this year that I'm a connoisseur of garden soil, a bit of a nature paparazzi and blogger... equal parts pragmatist and poet, frustrated farmer and former English Lit major. Indeed, digging and delving in the dirt, holding camera at the ready in the garden and on the trail, and keeping pen and paper handy at home, have been tremendous sources of comfort and healing through arduous days and have expanded a woefully inadequate vocabulary of grief. Not always, and not on all days... but sometimes, just sometimes, the words and images mingle with memories and messengers, achieving a synthesis, an expression of what the heart and mind are holding in this season beyond words.
An Eastern Tiger Swallowtail visits our Lantana.
Memories: the garden that wraps around our stone-and-yellow-clapboard Cape Cod is full of memories. We've called this place home for nearly three decades, so each shaded nook and every sun-splashed cranny evokes a remembrance of lazing and laboring, love and laughter, loss and learning... in short, of our shared lives.
In the Garden.
Quince blooms along our retaining wall.
Look back and remember. Look back at 5-year-old Ben in the backyard, suggesting-- absent that sibilant s-- Let take a rate, Daddy-o. Remember him vanishing around one corner of the house, soon to emerge from the opposite corner, running with exuberance, circuit after circuit. Look back at 7-year-old Ben rolling diecast cars down the Bilco cellar door, hour after hour, issuing colorful race calls that I could hear through the open kitchen window. Remember 9-year-old Ben, football tucked in the crook of his arm, taking flying leaps from the retaining wall, tumbling across green grass and fallen leaves in the yard below, brimming with unreserved joy on an autumn Sunday afternoon. Look back at high school Ben, returned from a summer training run, grinning and slurping an ice pop, soaking those long-long legs in a garden hose-filled and ice cube-bobbing garbage can. Remember how he watered the garden with the water after his soak... It's good fertilizer, It'll make the garden grow, still grinning. Look over there at the Purple-Leaf Sand Cherry and remember how college Ben rescued it from beneath an unceremonious dumping of autumn superstorm debris. It bloomed beautifully, poignantly, this year.
Wine and Roses Weigela, Variegated Red Twig Dogwood, Rhodendron, and Shrubby St. John's Wort line the Bilco Door, aka Ben's diecast car ramp.
Ben rescues the Purple Leaf Sand Cherry from a jumble of White Pine limbs.
The Purple Leaf Sand Cherry blooms in April.
Look back and remember this: Ben walking the garden last summer, slowly, slowly... deliberately, determinedly, with dignity... walking, looking, occasionally pausing to snap a photo with his cell phone camera. A tree. A flower. A bird. The sky. Look, and remember gifts from Mother's Days past:... Geranium, Coleus, Asiatic Lily... still flourishing in the garden this year, still sharing memories, delivering messages that elude translation, something beyond words.
A Mother's Day Geranium from Ben blooms in a garden nook.
Raindrops rest on Asiatic Lilies, another Mother's Day gift from Ben.
Pay attention.... There were messengers in the garden this year: they arrived unannounced and unexpectedly, delivering missives to guide us through a season beyond words. These were, of course, metaphorical messengers: it's no secret that I have an aversion to anthropomorphism, to talking animals, in literature and in life. I know, I know... what about Charlotte's Web? Winnie-the-Pooh? Frog and Toad Are Friends? The Cat in the Hat? I read them... and moved on. Butterflies on branches, Robins splashing in the birdbath, Bumblebees in Ben's Bee Bush, Hummingbirds with whirring wings, Dragonflies demonstrating ancient agility, and a Frog thinking deep amphibious thoughts on a mossy rock by our petite pond... no words, but messengers nonetheless.
A Message of Serenity: Monarch pauses on a graceful Japanese Maple branch.
A Message of Joy: Slightly disheveled Robin makes an afternoon stop at our birdbath.
A Message of Purpose: It was business as usual in Ben's Bee Bush.
A Message of Resiliency: Hummingbird visits feeder on our Old Dogwood Tree.
A Message of Wisdom: Common Whitetail Dragonfly rests on a wall stone.
A Message of Mindfulness and Reflection: Resident Northern Green frog perches on a mossy rock.
One midafternoon in early June, I glanced up from my digging and delving and saw the moon set serenely in a sky as blue and wise as Ben's eyes. It was a waxing moon, floating high above the horizon, capturing and reflecting sunlight through wispy cirrus clouds. While I know there are mundane, temporal reasons for an afternoon moon, in the moment, the image struck me as poetic, mystical even.
Mid-Afternoon moon in June.
Meanwhile, on the ground, I was watching and waiting-- late spring, summer, early autumn-- for moonflowers to bloom. I soaked the seeds and sowed them, watered regularly, fertilized fervently. Through hours and days and weeks and months, I watched and waited, waited and watched. I longed to gaze into the inscrutable, silky depths of a one-night-only bloom, to take in the heady, unmistakable fragrance, the culmination of a season of tending and care. Seeds became seedlings; seedlings grew into twining vines. The vine produced a profusion of promising buds, buds that would, I believed, produce lovely blooms. But the Twenty-Twenty calendar had a different plan: several precipitous thermometer dips and gusty storms in September sent bud-after-bud drooping and dropping to the earth.
Ben beneath the arbor where moonflowers grow.
Moonflower buds.
The Spiraling Sphere of Possibility: Moonflower bud, 2020.
The tandem truths of the moon and the moonflower give me pause. The moon: enduring, everlasting, immutable, pure reflected light. The moonflower: ephemeral, evanescent, inscrutable, soon passing from sight. The juxtaposition of the two is at once heartbreaking and hope-filled, and it describes so much of our shared story. And so, as days grow shorter and autumn advances, as a full moon bathes the last night of October in alabaster light, I receive and accept the message from this year's elusive moonflowers... sometimes we are meant to bide with memory, destined to dwell in a spiraling sphere of possibility. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, what we hope for cannot be. The moonflower will not bloom-- but the moon still hangs in the sky; the tides still roll in and out; the earth still turns; the seasons change-- and we continue on, placing one foot in front of the other.
Moonflower, circa 2018.
As we put the Twenty-Twenty garden to rest, bracing for the bare bones and sharp edges of winter, we mark a difficult anniversary, honoring Ben's story and preparing for another spin around the sun in Uncertain Times. The world, we've learned, will always hold grief and offer up sorrow-- and it will sometimes devolve into chaotic thought and utter confusion. But in the wake of grief, we find gratitude for memories. And beneath the burden of sorrow, there are messages of solace. And there will be moments, when the light is right in the sky, when a breeze moves almost imperceptibly through the old oak tree... there will be moments when we're gazing upward, feet planted firmly on the ground, when we realize that gratitude can fill a fractured heart, that solace leads to moments of joy... that it's possible to find comfort amidst chaos. Past, present, all the time yet to be: so much of the story is beautiful, and most of it is beyond words.
Late day, light, our big old White Oak in silhouette.
