TW: this piece touches on elements of mental illness, trauma, and death.
Summer
Summer is the season of abundance, of joy, of laughter, of life. Summers in the Cascades feel never-ending. Where the sun dips behind the mountains so eager to rejoin us that dusk and dawn are a breath apart. I love the playfulness of summer. I remember as a child being entranced by the butterflies flitting through the warm afternoon air.
I’m transported by the sweet smell of fresh-cut grass, hearing the hum of a lawnmower in the distance as our father makes his passes across the greensward in haphazard lines. He’s at it for hours, only for the clovers to tease him a week later, sprouting up quicker than the 3 of us: my loving sister, strong-willed brother, and me. My sister and I, twins, July babies blooming with tenacity and cleverness. My brother arrived all but 2 months after our 1st birthday, falling on the equinox, akin to our shift from bright bubbly summers to solemn and pensive falls.
But I love summers most because they remind me of our mother. We were taught about the flora and fauna not through books or nature documentaries but by her. A naturalist at heart, she shows me the value of pollinators as she tends to the bee hives up the hill. While I retreat, wary of their power to sting, she shows me just how loving nature is as the bees dance circles around her, as if she were their queen. I am perplexed by her existence, addressing the world with power and prowess. How can one woman do it all? Tall, dark hair, strong features, broad shoulders. My mother is a worker, knowing how to birth a calf, sow the soil, and put up fence posts. Will I be like that one day?
Yet simultaneously she is soft, delicately admiring the beehive forms, ensuring the health of the hive. Her hands are cracked and calloused but feel smooth as they rub my back as I drift off to sleep after waking from a nightmare. I can feel her pressing my tiny fingers into the soil to create perfect pinhole rows for squash and bean seeds, in anticipation for fall. She teaches me the gifts of the earth, and to never take for granted the food and resources that we have. Because between the soil, sun, water, and labor that went into it, there are a multitude of jobs done to grow a single stalk, or for my mother 3.
I look up from the garden bed onto a mesmerizing horizon. Infused with the joy in the simplicity of life. I am 3-years-old, but this feeling is coded into my DNA. The puffy clouds filter the high sun onto my skin, just enough that I don't quite need to squint when I look west towards the mountains. The baby blue canvas sets a backdrop for the staggered peaks that muscle memory prompts me to trace onto any surface. This view, seared into my mind, garden in front of me and our sandbox just behind me. Surrounded by ruby red poppies and twisting vines of watermelon that protrude effortlessly from the ground. A gift from our mother’s green thumb that I have yet to replicate. A garden that I never really stepped foot in after she no longer tended it: The life she left behind.
Fall
Hours of raking and re-raking have passed as my siblings and I run through poplar, oak, and aspen leaves. Mounds twice our height that we cannot fathom were once dusted across the front lawn. Our laughter masks the drone of the metal spires sighing as they move monotonously back and forth scritch, scritch, scritch they comb through the fall grass working tirelessly, just like you, my father. You are aged, but strong, probably wearing that funny flannel hat, tending to the yard work that will never be complete. For this 84 acres of family property will always have problems. Irrigation pipe to be moved, a pump to be fixed, leaves to be raked, snow to be shoveled. But I know it keeps you at bay. Keeping your mind off providing for 3 kids, 2 failed marriages, court orders, custody battles. The chewing tobacco tucked in your lip is a vice that you pretended to hide from my siblings and me.
At 7 I was ignorant enough to only recognize the leaves changing color from green to gold and orange. I scream next to my brother and sister as the last bucket of leaves is showered on top of us in the bed of the pick-up. The leaves roar like a crowd, we are the final act they have been waiting to see. The hum of the engine ignites our excitement. We sit in the bed of your 2002 Toyota Tacoma. Your pride and joy. Not for the roar of its engine or fading silver paint job, but because of its hard work fall after fall, hauling these decaying leaves. Up the driveway we go, nestled amongst the leaves thump, thump, thump we make our way to the burn pile.
We giggle, feeling like we are breaking every rule. No seat belts but just the security in the embrace of the leaves and knowing you are looking out for us in the rearview mirror. We lurch to a stop. The gears rest as the clutch drops from 1st into neutral, the crank of the parking brake. We peek out of the truck bed. We squeal at the excitement of 3 months' worth of leaf piles. 3 months of distractions, of late-to-daycare pick-ups, weekends spent working outside, and school lunches even if we begged for homemade ones. But forget that, at this moment I am enjoying the leaves.
To us it was Christmas. The same rustle of wrapping paper is in the swish swash as we jump into and climb out of the burn pile before it is set aflame. Interrupted only occasionally by the metal of the rake, like nails on a chalkboard, as it scrapes against the truck bed, a warning that it will soon be time to head back down. But I don’t want to head back down.
Here I feel happy, what a kid should feel like. Careless, distracted, selfish. Running and jumping through the leaves, with you laughing at us in the background, for once thinking of us as kids, rather than a burden. I want to stay here and create a home in this leaf pile. Because in this home there would be no yelling, there would be no tears, no fighting. Here I am not scared of you. Here you are a superhero. At home, you taunt me as the villain. Asking me to grow up too quickly. To take care of myself, to take care of my siblings. Don’t have big emotions, why are you crying? you say. Pick yourself up, not that you were there to watch me fall down in the first place. Figure it out, do it yourself, this isn’t my job. Except it is?
But for now, you can provide the leaves, and I will be happy that I can have this moment of a joyful childhood.
Winter
There is a scary proximity between the elements of hibernation and death. While in a peaceful slumber, hibernating black bears will slow their heart rate by 50-60 percent and lower their body temperature by 7-8 degrees to conserve energy over the winter. But while hibernation comes once a year, death is for eternity. While the still, cold, stoic body of a hibernating black bear may seem lifeless, the mother bear will still stir, waking to protect her cubs, and will reenter the world ready to teach her children about life's wonders and fears.
I often wonder if you, my mother, also dipped into a period of hibernation. When the weight of it all: delusion, paranoia, mental illness, got to be too much and it felt like you had to slow down and conserve any energy that you had left. But as your breathing slowed, like that of a black bear, you instead made it stop. When spring came the mother bears awoke from hibernation, but you did not. It was then when all the years of fighting against yourself got to be too much that you lost the energy to keep it all together, leaving your cubs behind.
And now, on the 17th of every December, I’m reminded that life was more painful for you than it is for most people. And I sometimes fear that some of that pain is also inside me.
Schizophrenia. A word that I couldn’t even spell, let alone understand when I was 8 years old. Instead, I was overcome by the blurry vision of tears and the forever-altered path of what my life would be.
___
I remember entering my version of hibernation – the winter when I was 17. When the depression was no longer seasonal, but persistent. I always assumed winter was just hard because it was a reminder of your death. The short days and frigid evenings sprinting inside from the car to escape the chill biting at my fingers and toes, like a monster creeping outside the den. It was easy to convince myself that I’d be better once winter passed, that I could wait it out till spring. If I filled my life with enough people and distractions I wouldn’t have time to think about the painful darkness that sat in the pit of my stomach and diluted the serotonin in my brain.
I lay on the floor of my bedroom sobbing. I felt winter overwhelm my body. Cold, dark, empty. I didn’t know why. I convinced myself that I was the black bear. There was no reason to cry, to be sad. I had prepared for winter by feasting off summertime blueberries to carry me through to spring. I should have been ready to relax and enjoy the tantalizing crystal snowflakes illuminated by the moon, but all I felt then was closer to death.
Deep down, all I truly wanted was for someone to care about me enough to notice the laundry piling up on my floor, or my straight As begging for an “I’m so proud of you.” Instead I just lay there, paralyzed by the soul-crushing severity of navigating the road map of life while the world flew by at 100 miles per hour. Blurry scenes of getting everyone to school on time, registering for sports, and don’t forget to do the same for your siblings. I can hear you in the back of my mind. Why didn’t you have time to study for your exam? Keep your room clean, oh and the house too.
Did you make yourself dinner today? Why did you skip lunch? I panic, answerless. Watching any element of a candid childhood fall to the wayside.
I wished my carpet would turn to snow and I could melt into it. To disappear swiftly as a snowflake does when it hits your tongue. Maybe then we could rejoin one another and you could teach me how to be a kid again.
Spring
A season of trust. The garden begins to dethaw, showing signs of life but threatened by a mid-season freeze. As the sun comes out, staying a little longer each day, the flowers must trust that the land and sun have come together to support them, as they begin to bud out of the soil.
New growth, new life. Same roots, reinvention, a chance to try again. A chance to choose myself.
It has been several years now working through life's trauma. I too was like a spring garden, wary of when a winter freeze would come to strike back. Terrified that I would spiral back into a depressive episode that held me back for so much of my life.
The beauty in a garden however is the strength that builds season after season. Every darkness that struck gave me a new lens to see the beauty in hardship. I reminded myself of the weight that losing my mother put on to me, my family, and the world around us. I had to get to the other side, I chose to get to the other side, because I did not work this hard to leave it all behind.
In my garden there are decomposing pasts, feeding the plants for the new year. My life experiences have given me a sense of sustenance and purpose as I move forward. Lessons of love, and broken hearts from boys who no one told me better about. Friendships turned to manipulation because no one instilled within me the confidence to find better. The art of taking on more than I can accomplish just to have the weight of providing for others suffocate my roots. But if I harvest the fruit of my garden all at once it surely will rot. I cannot give to others without reserving time for my own sustenance.
Still I have become the legume that passes nitrates to their neighbors in the act of fertilization. The way that I have taken it upon myself to make the gift of life special for others, paying attention to friends and strangers, and always being a touchstone of comfort for those in need. In my garden I am the worker bee, providing endlessly for those around me, vigilant of anyone slipping through the cracks. But who is looking out for me?
The garden of my life would not be bountiful without the love and tenderness from my siblings. The only 2 people in the world who I can understand without speaking a single word. My sister has been the water to my garden, both in the tears we shed together and the flow of boundless love she provides for me. If I’m questioning what I am feeling, or where my life is going, I know that she will have the answers. And my brother, the protector of the garden. Warding off thunder claps of our father’s shouts that still cripple me in fear. The love from my sister and brother keep my garden alive. In turn I tend to their crops by holding together the remnant of what feels like family. Holidays, vacations, checking in on our dad. I am the mediator standing between the drought and root rot of our father, keeping their gardens healthy and blossoming.
I used to only see the world in black and white. Where someone or something was safe or dangerous, right or wrong, healed or broken. But a garden, like the vivacious gardens my mother grew in our backyard, and the one I grow now within myself is no good when seen in black and white. The same way that my relationship with my mother has not remained fallow. I still feel her poking my fingers into the soil to create perfect rows for the squash and peas. I know she is tending my garden from afar because her wisdom is within me. In my broad shoulders and callused hands.
I now have a life blooming with patches of wildflowers that pollinators come in a frenzy to rejoice. I have a rich bed of fruits and vegetables to provide for the people who tend to my needs in turn. I have a beautiful garden blooming inside my heart, my head, and my hands, ready to take on the challenges life has continuously offered me. I know that my garden is not without drought, storms, and cold nights that test the integrity of my bean sprouts and cause my poppies to curl up tight. But I have weathered enough winter storms to know that eventually, the sun will come back out to provide a sense of healing. To help me grow.
My garden is not without its imperfections, but I was taught that the love you put into a garden is the life you get in return. And I have chosen to love my garden.
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