Written by Haley DiRenzo
I should have upended the garden that winter, tore it all up, and made us rebuild. My
mother’s years of cultivating meant everything would otherwise still be there when spring came,
and I see now that gave her too much comfort. The raspberries came back every year, the arc of
hops only needed to be trimmed when they overgrew, the red of the apples blushed across their
green base until they turned completely. The rose bushes had been shaped like a sculpture and
would bloom with their buds toward the sun.
She spent every spring and summer morning in the garden, kneeling with flowered
aprons tied around her waist, an extra pair of gloves tucked in the pocket in case the ones she
wore became pockmarked with thorns. She’d dab the sweat with the back of her wrist before I
escaped to watch cartoons in the basement. I brought her lemonade I sold to the neighbors for
twenty-five cents from the driveway, not telling them it was just the powdered Country Time from
the gallon barrel. In the morning, I’d wake to bowls of rinsed berries on the kitchen table, my mother
still weeding and turning the dirt. With my small hands, I’d sprinkle the berries over the pancake
batter that she trusted me to make and cook on my own.
But if I had doused the raspberry bush with a blast of hose water, drowning it so the roots
flooded and the bees fled, it would be like I never came through the front door that day when
swim practice got canceled, and my dad thought no one was home.
And if the thorns caught in my wrist as I cut the roses to shreds, the pain would have
softened the memory of finding him there with a woman who was not my mother.
If I ripped out any fledging bud of an apple, hard as a stone before they were ripe, and
scattered them in the grass for the squirrels, it might have been easier to bury that memory and
forget my dad asking me not to tell.
And if I knocked down the wooden trellis that the hops were woven through, their mini
pine cone buds sticky in my fingers, maybe my family wouldn’t have been what collapsed when
I told my mother anyway.
Because then, when she came out there on that frozen winter morning to whisper
goodbye, the ground crunching beneath the frost, and saw someone had destroyed her heart
again, she couldn’t have left. Right? Fixing the garden would be simple, something she knew
how to do. I could have given her the gift of the reason to stay.
Instead, I watched from the window as the rose petals shriveled then fell that summer. As
the hops overtook the trellis until it lifted from the base and toppled against the house. As the
bugs devoured the raspberries, and the apples littered the yard, and the grass turned brown and
yellow and died in rorschach patches. As the contractors came in and tore it all out to pour a
concrete patio.
I see now, the upending was inevitable. Of the garden and the marriage. My mother knew
that sometimes to survive, you had to tear it all out from the roots and replant elsewhere, and
that’s what she did. But she forgot one thing.
She forgot me.
.
Haley DiRenzo is a writer, poet, and practicing attorney specializing in eviction defense. Her poetry and flash pieces have appeared in Flash Boulevard, Eunoia Review, and Bright Flash Literary Review, among others. She lives in Colorado with her husband and dog.