Matrescence

It is morning and my dewy bare feet step over the gossamer thread. Somewhere between the last round of rain and right now, a spider’s body, lighter than the smallest down feather, floated just above our overgrown grass, their silk anchor becoming taut once they reached a surface over 10 feet away. I am visiting the tunnel, an archway where lilac and honeysuckle meet.

I find myself gazing at the tunnel this time of year. It appears as a safe haven. I could stay dry there during a light rain. From where I sit and write this in the dining room, I can smell the lilac and honeysuckle.

Phenologically, when you smell the lilacs is when you can find the morel mushrooms. When you smell the lilacs, the blue birds are laying their first clutch of eggs. When you smell the lilacs, it is time to plant the garden. When you smell the lilacs, the trillium don their dresses. When you smell the lilacs, the first round of dandelions go to seed. When you smell the lilacs, the bats and lightning bugs emerge. Shortly after you smell the lilacs, it is time to celebrate your mother.

My mother
is purple lilac,
my mother
is the haven of honeysuckle vine on the fence,
my mother, of course, of course,
did not always love herself,
carrying her purple, fragrant florets
and red trumpets from life-to-life.
I don’t forget her.

I carry her
in every vase,
in ever basket
grimy with dirt.

I tug at the stem and petiole
of her, begging
for morsel and word.

Typically, our families come to visit us in our modest 135-year-old home during Mother’s Day weekend. The men go fishing and the ladies go to the nursery. I treat the mothers to flowers, my mother-in-law usually choosing something purple. My mother, a green thumb, chooses a variety of annuals. Her hands are beautiful. She would scoff at my saying this. Her knobby, stiff knuckles render her hands feeling like they’re made of wood. But I know what those hands have done and continue to do, which is nothing less than beautiful. At 72, her hands continue to press root into dirt, roll dough, chop vegetables, pull me close, and work.

I take photographs of the purple lilac flowers so I can send them to my mother-in-law later. The overcast sky graces the flowers with the moody message of things aren’t so bright but they’re still lovely. I will send these to her later considering that this year she may miss out on the lilacs. My husband Brian—her wonderful son—requires another surgery and he’ll be recovering over Mother’s Day weekend. He is and will be okay. We have been living at the beck-and-call of medical mis-practice for about a year now, but that’s his story, and only somewhat mine. But despite all of it—despite medical maladies, missing out on time with family—the lilacs still bloom and the bluebirds are nesting in the first nest box.

I am not and will not be a mother in the traditional sense. But love and its pull is still there as all those reserves of energy and time go into other things that I refuse to see as trivial as I navigate and make this little life. Ironically, but not very ironically, I learned yesterday that a poem of mine will be published in a literary magazine that publishes maternal, mothering poems. In my early twenties, I wrote a small manuscript of poems written to/about the child I did not and would not ever have. Each poem came to me from overturned rocks, the way light travels across the kitchen floor, through binoculars, and from the hollow eye sockets of skulls.

In honor of our mothers, I planted our garden yesterday. It took me back to the time they watched me plant tomatoes, reminding me to discard the bottom leaves of each plant. I continued planting the garden as they sat on the sunny patio and talked. Yesterday, the only chatter I heard was the birds. It was the fifth of May and already 71 species of birds had chittered, warbled, and bitched in our yard this month. Brian and I installed two more bluebird boxes. Brian joked about the current residents’ dismay at the neighborhood expanding.

The sun has come out. The parasol mushrooms that grow overnight in my garden beds will soon wither away only to be replaced again. There are so many ways to live and define a life. I remind myself of that every day. I am human, so I become agitated when I see the red hats and believe that if we were at a bonfire or by a stream in the woods, we’d find a seed we both could amicably plant together. In the bathroom, my hairy legs or chin mean absolutely nothing compared to the birds outside the window, defending their livelihoods by singing.

I will say their names:

Setophaga fusca.
Sialia sialis.
Cardinalis cardinalis.

Black, blue, red feathers I will carry.
I collect—one, two, six—in a fist
that opens and then flies away.

May it find a hollow and build something there.
May it make an egg that stays an egg
until it isn’t.