Mother's Day Frost
Amy Erdman Farrell
On the Saturday night before Mother’s Day I stood over the tiny tomato plants, watching them shiver in the wind. They looked so cold. Scared. “I’m sorry,” I told them, draping towels and sheets and boxes over the bright red tomato cages I had so hopefully purchased a few weeks earlier. “Good luck tonight. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
It was always safe to plant things by Mother’s Day where we lived in South Central Pennsylvania. In the last years of very mild winters and very early springs, it was actually fine to plant by mid-April, but I had prudently waited until the first of May to plant these little babies. I had bought them from the Leaf Project, a small organization in our area where teens worked together on a local farm. Carefully masked and hands gloved, the teenagers had carried the plants to my car a week ago. I had purchased an eggplant, three different kinds of peppers (jalapeno, hot yellows, and red), basil, parsley, and four tomatoes—Pink Lady, yellow cherries, San Marzano, and Big Uglies. It had been years since I’d planted vegetables, not since our kids were little and we were home for most of the summer. But this year, Covid upended all our plans. So, I bought the vegetables, as well as ten different packets of zinnia, nasturtium, marigolds, and sunflowers that came by mail. I was so excited when the seeds arrived, I placed them lovingly on the dining room table and gazed at those bright reds and yellows. The weekend I planted the vegetables, I also scattered many seeds, especially the zinnia. I couldn’t wait for their tall shoots, their medley of color.
It had been good to get out in the dirt after months of lockdown. We had spent so much time reading the New York Times and watching the news. My husband sequestered all day in the living room, on Zoom, teaching his students scattered across the country. Kicked out of my office at work, I tried to continue writing in the makeshift space outside our bedroom, struggling not to waste my fellowship. Our daughter was home from New York, in shock to be back in her childhood bedroom after living on her own for years. Zoom calls with our son in Austin, Texas, broke the monotony. “Are you being careful? Are you okay?” we would ask, peering into the screen. For the most part, the days never seemed to wake up. Endless sameness, endless rain.
It was as if the entire world shifted to the place I had been inhabiting for the last year, since Mom died. Nothing moving, unmoored, free floating. Silent. Empty. Frozen in place.
But spring did not care if Covid was ravaging the world, if temporary morgues sat outside of hospitals, if we had no leadership to deal with the panic or the pandemic. And spring did not care if I was still flattened by my mother’s death. And so, spring pulled me out of our petrified, too-crowded house, to gaze at the overgrown garden.
I had completely ignored the garden for well over a year. Without Mom to visit, who cared if it looked good or bad? What did it matter without her eyes to witness, to tease, to judge? When she and my dad first moved to Carlisle—a second retirement after their initial move to Florida—she would come over in her pastel blouses and khakis, kick off her flats, and kneel with me in the garden. She especially loved to pull out long vines and deeply rooted weeds. She never got dirty, not even a smudge on the pressed seams, maybe just a little dirt under her long nails. She always suggested I might try some weedkiller. “I know you love organic, Amy, but a little Round Up could really help.” Mine was a wild, experimental garden, fitting for our eccentric 1850 townhouse. It made her a bit nervous, and I knew she’d like it if we mulched. One time she pulled out—“by mistake”—all the strawberry plants that meandered through the garden and onto the brick patio. “Mom, those are my strawberries!” I exclaimed when I saw the pile of plants on the path. She looked hurt, though, and since her eyes were starting to fail, I really couldn’t be too mad. Maybe it was a mistake.
Even after she became too arthritic to kneel with me in the beds, we’d still head to our neighborhood garden center to buy spring plants. She’d buy me trailing potato vines and petunia for our hanging baskets, bright red geranium for the clay pots. And she’d still come over, unannounced, to check out the garden. I’d see her rounding the bend from the alley between the townhouses, ready to sit down and talk while I poked and pulled. And, later, widowed and too frail to come over for a visit by herself, after she broke her hip, one of the kids would walk over to get her, or my sister would accompany her. She’d walk slowly down the brick path with her cane, sit down at the table, and happily sip her martini. We’d tempt her with one of John’s plates of pasta; it was such a good feeling when she actually ate a full meal. She would compliment me on how good the garden looked. I took this as more evidence of her failing eyesight, because the garden had grown way out of hand in those final years of her life. I spent so many hours at the office, and then we were gone so often visiting the kids or traveling, and every evening when I was home, I walked over to Mom’s house to visit.
Sometimes John and I went before dinner. “Would you like a drink?” I’d ask Mom, pouring her a vodka and a wine for myself. John would bring his own beer over. Mom would tell us about Fish Face, her name for Trump, reporting all the news she’d gathered from the endless hours of TV news—CNN, Fox, MSNBC. She hated Trump. She’d actually dropped the Republican party years ago, when they lived in Florida and Jeb Bush worked hard to destroy the public schools. We’d talk, disagree sometimes, our ideas still far to the Left of Mom. A lot of evenings I’d go over after dinner, or after an evening event at my college, maybe bringing a dessert to share. There she would be, sitting in the uncharacteristic LaZBoy she had bought after the hip surgery, smoking a cigarette that she would stub out quickly when I opened the door. I’d bring her a glass of water, urge her to drink more. We’d watch trash TV--Pawn Stars, America’s Most Wanted—or maybe a British mystery. Usually we would move to the living room, and talk about our days—her bridge partners, her errands with my sister, her visits to doctors. I’d tell her about my colleagues, and my students, and we’d talk about all the grandchildren. I’d needlepoint. Sometimes I’d be especially tired, or maybe a little irritated if she even insinuated something a Republican did was reasonable. She’d say, “You don’t have to come over every evening, Amy.” I’d say, “Oh Mom, I wanted to come over.” I knew she would wait up for me, wondering, if I didn’t come.
But I wish I had said: “I want to soak in as much of you as I can while I can. I love you so much.” I wish I had asked: “How will I ever be able to live without you?”
But I didn’t. I couldn't imagine a life without her companionship, her conversation, her presence, her warmth. Before I would leave, she’d hand over the ironing she still did for me. We’d say goodnight, I’d give her a little kiss and close the heavy door behind me, reminding her to lock it after I left.
All this time at Mom’s, though, meant the garden, like many things in my life, had to tend to itself. I would speak kindly to the perennials as I walked by, thanking them for the way they drew in the bees. I’d admire the orange poppies and the daisies that came up every year, so much on schedule that I knew the dates of anniversaries and birthdays by their arrival. I’d scatter a few packages of sunflowers and zinnia in May and plant a few Canna Lilly bulbs I’d dug up in the fall. They grew tall through the weeds, pulling hummingbirds out of the sky. I’d push back encroaching vines with some firm clipping a half hour before anyone would come for dinner. But nothing more.
That May weekend in quarantine was the first time I had spent any length of time in the garden. For two full days, I pulled out invasive plants, including the kiwi that that threatened to take over the house. I emptied the compost and wheeled barrels of the dark, sweet miracle over to the beds. I planted the tomatoes, the eggplant, the basil, the rosemary, the lavender. John helped me figure out the new cages and we placed them carefully around the little plants. I wouldn’t make the mistake of waiting until they were long and rangy before I staked them. I picked out my favorite zinnia seeds and sunflowers and dropped them strategically in the soil. The biggest sunflowers I chose for the front of the house; I loved hearing the neighbor kids stopping to wonder at their size. While I bent and pushed in the dirt, a grey catbird darted into the wisteria, placing one stick after another into a cozy spot deep in the vines. At one point, she sat in her half-made nest and just sang. At the end of the two days, I took pictures and even posted them on Facebook. I was dirty and happy.
But now, I was out there in the wind. On the night before Mother’s Day. Everything looked so miserable, leaves turned up, trembling. In the morning, I lifted off the boxes and sheets. At first everything seemed to have made it, even if they did look shocked. But the next few days and weeks proved me wrong. The basil turned black and wilted. The peppers seemed stunted. The tomatoes turned an odd yellow color. At first the petunias started sprouting nicely, but overnight something—slugs?—got to them and they were just gone. The poppies, so trustworthy over the years, were nowhere in sight. Even the zinnias never sprouted. It was all so discouraging, I made a quick visit to the garden store. My glasses fogged with my mask on, though, and I bought the wrong ones, orange midget plants nothing like the pinks and reds of the tall zinnia I was imagining. The gray catbird abandoned her nest in the wisteria. None of the canna lilies showed even the slightest growth. I felt like Claudia and Frieda in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, whose marigold seeds never sprout, the “earth itself…unyielding.” But then I kicked myself, knowing how lame it was to compare myself to these two little girls who were dealing with a world so inhospitable, so unforgiving, so hostile to Black life it killed the unborn child of their young friend. I could feel the frozen feeling coming over me again.
Just as I was pondering Claudia and Frieda, and my unyielding garden, the world erupted with the news of George Floyd’s murder. Anger against senseless, cruel brutality broke through the stay-at-home orders, people flocking to the streets to demand justice. We put on our masks and marched to the town square, a crowd larger than any I’d ever seen in our small town for any protest. What was supposed to stay contained on the town square spilled out into the streets, stopping traffic and spreading through the neighborhoods. Even after the crowds dissipated, our daughter stood with friends on the square every day, across from the District Attorney’s office. They looked up statistics on the police budget in our town, the disproportionate number of Black citizens arrested. They held up signs questioning the arrests, the budget, the violence. It could feel futile; the district attorney’s office refused to answer their calls, and even liberal folks in town considered them troublemakers. But they kept going, four, five, six, eight of them standing there every day, across from the Court House. One day, the owner of the local music store, the one that rents instruments to the public school, stomped down and yelled at them about their “unchristian” protests. The next day our daughter held up a new sign with another Jewish friend, “Jews for Black Lives Matter.” New day, new tactics. With each new morning, they just showed up.
I kept returning to my hard-hit garden, where I tried to move myself out of the frozen place. I watered, and looked at the earth, and pulled out a few weeds. One day, I was amazed: a jalapeno pepper had simply appeared, like a ship that shows up on the horizon and you wonder where it came from. The nasturtium had started blooming, enough for me to snip off a few and eat their spiciness. I even found one canna lily coming up, late, short. I propped the milkweed next to the joe pie weed, hoping for some monarchs. The tomatoes, I realized, had begun reaching far, covered with flowers. I sat spellbound, listening to the bee balm where big fat bumblebees dove deep into each petal. I heard a rustling in the rosebush, one that was blooming far past its usual “stop” date. A gray catbird was making another nest there. I took a deep breath and sighed.
“Oh, Amy, you do love your garden,” I could hear Mom saying, puffing on her cigarette and tinkling the cubes in her glass.
It was always safe to plant things by Mother’s Day where we lived in South Central Pennsylvania. In the last years of very mild winters and very early springs, it was actually fine to plant by mid-April, but I had prudently waited until the first of May to plant these little babies. I had bought them from the Leaf Project, a small organization in our area where teens worked together on a local farm. Carefully masked and hands gloved, the teenagers had carried the plants to my car a week ago. I had purchased an eggplant, three different kinds of peppers (jalapeno, hot yellows, and red), basil, parsley, and four tomatoes—Pink Lady, yellow cherries, San Marzano, and Big Uglies. It had been years since I’d planted vegetables, not since our kids were little and we were home for most of the summer. But this year, Covid upended all our plans. So, I bought the vegetables, as well as ten different packets of zinnia, nasturtium, marigolds, and sunflowers that came by mail. I was so excited when the seeds arrived, I placed them lovingly on the dining room table and gazed at those bright reds and yellows. The weekend I planted the vegetables, I also scattered many seeds, especially the zinnia. I couldn’t wait for their tall shoots, their medley of color.
It had been good to get out in the dirt after months of lockdown. We had spent so much time reading the New York Times and watching the news. My husband sequestered all day in the living room, on Zoom, teaching his students scattered across the country. Kicked out of my office at work, I tried to continue writing in the makeshift space outside our bedroom, struggling not to waste my fellowship. Our daughter was home from New York, in shock to be back in her childhood bedroom after living on her own for years. Zoom calls with our son in Austin, Texas, broke the monotony. “Are you being careful? Are you okay?” we would ask, peering into the screen. For the most part, the days never seemed to wake up. Endless sameness, endless rain.
It was as if the entire world shifted to the place I had been inhabiting for the last year, since Mom died. Nothing moving, unmoored, free floating. Silent. Empty. Frozen in place.
But spring did not care if Covid was ravaging the world, if temporary morgues sat outside of hospitals, if we had no leadership to deal with the panic or the pandemic. And spring did not care if I was still flattened by my mother’s death. And so, spring pulled me out of our petrified, too-crowded house, to gaze at the overgrown garden.
I had completely ignored the garden for well over a year. Without Mom to visit, who cared if it looked good or bad? What did it matter without her eyes to witness, to tease, to judge? When she and my dad first moved to Carlisle—a second retirement after their initial move to Florida—she would come over in her pastel blouses and khakis, kick off her flats, and kneel with me in the garden. She especially loved to pull out long vines and deeply rooted weeds. She never got dirty, not even a smudge on the pressed seams, maybe just a little dirt under her long nails. She always suggested I might try some weedkiller. “I know you love organic, Amy, but a little Round Up could really help.” Mine was a wild, experimental garden, fitting for our eccentric 1850 townhouse. It made her a bit nervous, and I knew she’d like it if we mulched. One time she pulled out—“by mistake”—all the strawberry plants that meandered through the garden and onto the brick patio. “Mom, those are my strawberries!” I exclaimed when I saw the pile of plants on the path. She looked hurt, though, and since her eyes were starting to fail, I really couldn’t be too mad. Maybe it was a mistake.
Even after she became too arthritic to kneel with me in the beds, we’d still head to our neighborhood garden center to buy spring plants. She’d buy me trailing potato vines and petunia for our hanging baskets, bright red geranium for the clay pots. And she’d still come over, unannounced, to check out the garden. I’d see her rounding the bend from the alley between the townhouses, ready to sit down and talk while I poked and pulled. And, later, widowed and too frail to come over for a visit by herself, after she broke her hip, one of the kids would walk over to get her, or my sister would accompany her. She’d walk slowly down the brick path with her cane, sit down at the table, and happily sip her martini. We’d tempt her with one of John’s plates of pasta; it was such a good feeling when she actually ate a full meal. She would compliment me on how good the garden looked. I took this as more evidence of her failing eyesight, because the garden had grown way out of hand in those final years of her life. I spent so many hours at the office, and then we were gone so often visiting the kids or traveling, and every evening when I was home, I walked over to Mom’s house to visit.
Sometimes John and I went before dinner. “Would you like a drink?” I’d ask Mom, pouring her a vodka and a wine for myself. John would bring his own beer over. Mom would tell us about Fish Face, her name for Trump, reporting all the news she’d gathered from the endless hours of TV news—CNN, Fox, MSNBC. She hated Trump. She’d actually dropped the Republican party years ago, when they lived in Florida and Jeb Bush worked hard to destroy the public schools. We’d talk, disagree sometimes, our ideas still far to the Left of Mom. A lot of evenings I’d go over after dinner, or after an evening event at my college, maybe bringing a dessert to share. There she would be, sitting in the uncharacteristic LaZBoy she had bought after the hip surgery, smoking a cigarette that she would stub out quickly when I opened the door. I’d bring her a glass of water, urge her to drink more. We’d watch trash TV--Pawn Stars, America’s Most Wanted—or maybe a British mystery. Usually we would move to the living room, and talk about our days—her bridge partners, her errands with my sister, her visits to doctors. I’d tell her about my colleagues, and my students, and we’d talk about all the grandchildren. I’d needlepoint. Sometimes I’d be especially tired, or maybe a little irritated if she even insinuated something a Republican did was reasonable. She’d say, “You don’t have to come over every evening, Amy.” I’d say, “Oh Mom, I wanted to come over.” I knew she would wait up for me, wondering, if I didn’t come.
But I wish I had said: “I want to soak in as much of you as I can while I can. I love you so much.” I wish I had asked: “How will I ever be able to live without you?”
But I didn’t. I couldn't imagine a life without her companionship, her conversation, her presence, her warmth. Before I would leave, she’d hand over the ironing she still did for me. We’d say goodnight, I’d give her a little kiss and close the heavy door behind me, reminding her to lock it after I left.
All this time at Mom’s, though, meant the garden, like many things in my life, had to tend to itself. I would speak kindly to the perennials as I walked by, thanking them for the way they drew in the bees. I’d admire the orange poppies and the daisies that came up every year, so much on schedule that I knew the dates of anniversaries and birthdays by their arrival. I’d scatter a few packages of sunflowers and zinnia in May and plant a few Canna Lilly bulbs I’d dug up in the fall. They grew tall through the weeds, pulling hummingbirds out of the sky. I’d push back encroaching vines with some firm clipping a half hour before anyone would come for dinner. But nothing more.
That May weekend in quarantine was the first time I had spent any length of time in the garden. For two full days, I pulled out invasive plants, including the kiwi that that threatened to take over the house. I emptied the compost and wheeled barrels of the dark, sweet miracle over to the beds. I planted the tomatoes, the eggplant, the basil, the rosemary, the lavender. John helped me figure out the new cages and we placed them carefully around the little plants. I wouldn’t make the mistake of waiting until they were long and rangy before I staked them. I picked out my favorite zinnia seeds and sunflowers and dropped them strategically in the soil. The biggest sunflowers I chose for the front of the house; I loved hearing the neighbor kids stopping to wonder at their size. While I bent and pushed in the dirt, a grey catbird darted into the wisteria, placing one stick after another into a cozy spot deep in the vines. At one point, she sat in her half-made nest and just sang. At the end of the two days, I took pictures and even posted them on Facebook. I was dirty and happy.
But now, I was out there in the wind. On the night before Mother’s Day. Everything looked so miserable, leaves turned up, trembling. In the morning, I lifted off the boxes and sheets. At first everything seemed to have made it, even if they did look shocked. But the next few days and weeks proved me wrong. The basil turned black and wilted. The peppers seemed stunted. The tomatoes turned an odd yellow color. At first the petunias started sprouting nicely, but overnight something—slugs?—got to them and they were just gone. The poppies, so trustworthy over the years, were nowhere in sight. Even the zinnias never sprouted. It was all so discouraging, I made a quick visit to the garden store. My glasses fogged with my mask on, though, and I bought the wrong ones, orange midget plants nothing like the pinks and reds of the tall zinnia I was imagining. The gray catbird abandoned her nest in the wisteria. None of the canna lilies showed even the slightest growth. I felt like Claudia and Frieda in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, whose marigold seeds never sprout, the “earth itself…unyielding.” But then I kicked myself, knowing how lame it was to compare myself to these two little girls who were dealing with a world so inhospitable, so unforgiving, so hostile to Black life it killed the unborn child of their young friend. I could feel the frozen feeling coming over me again.
Just as I was pondering Claudia and Frieda, and my unyielding garden, the world erupted with the news of George Floyd’s murder. Anger against senseless, cruel brutality broke through the stay-at-home orders, people flocking to the streets to demand justice. We put on our masks and marched to the town square, a crowd larger than any I’d ever seen in our small town for any protest. What was supposed to stay contained on the town square spilled out into the streets, stopping traffic and spreading through the neighborhoods. Even after the crowds dissipated, our daughter stood with friends on the square every day, across from the District Attorney’s office. They looked up statistics on the police budget in our town, the disproportionate number of Black citizens arrested. They held up signs questioning the arrests, the budget, the violence. It could feel futile; the district attorney’s office refused to answer their calls, and even liberal folks in town considered them troublemakers. But they kept going, four, five, six, eight of them standing there every day, across from the Court House. One day, the owner of the local music store, the one that rents instruments to the public school, stomped down and yelled at them about their “unchristian” protests. The next day our daughter held up a new sign with another Jewish friend, “Jews for Black Lives Matter.” New day, new tactics. With each new morning, they just showed up.
I kept returning to my hard-hit garden, where I tried to move myself out of the frozen place. I watered, and looked at the earth, and pulled out a few weeds. One day, I was amazed: a jalapeno pepper had simply appeared, like a ship that shows up on the horizon and you wonder where it came from. The nasturtium had started blooming, enough for me to snip off a few and eat their spiciness. I even found one canna lily coming up, late, short. I propped the milkweed next to the joe pie weed, hoping for some monarchs. The tomatoes, I realized, had begun reaching far, covered with flowers. I sat spellbound, listening to the bee balm where big fat bumblebees dove deep into each petal. I heard a rustling in the rosebush, one that was blooming far past its usual “stop” date. A gray catbird was making another nest there. I took a deep breath and sighed.
“Oh, Amy, you do love your garden,” I could hear Mom saying, puffing on her cigarette and tinkling the cubes in her glass.
BIO: Amy Farrell lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with her husband John and their cat Noodles in a mid 19th century townhouse with a long narrow backyard. She has two grown children who live in Texas and New York. She teaches at Dickinson College.