Bedtime Stories

Night Sky petunias make it impossible for me to give up on this world.

Tuesday, 10:02 p.m. E.T.

My students’ final grades are due within hours, so this has been a long day of reading. Their final projects are compilations of revisions, and I have been taking my time with their writing, gratefully so. All but two of them are graduating seniors, and they have worked hard this semester to finish strong. I owe them my full attention one last time.

Some professors—perhaps I should say most—are far more organized than I am and have already turned in their grades. This is me shouting from the sofa in my study, “Good for you!” And I mean it. Yes, I do.

Anyway, a fresh pot of coffee is brewing and I thought I’d take a quick break and say hi from this cliff I’m toeing.

This is my third year of teaching at Denison, and I will miss these students the most. I have known known them the longest, so there’s that. But I have also known them the best, which has to do with a vow I made to myself at the beginning of the semester.

I remember well the moment. It was early January, just past dawn, and I was shivering in front of our opened front door, watching the snow fall as if it had no intention of ever stopping. I had pulled on a long coat over my nightgown and rubber wellies on my bare feet. Why, I was practically a pioneer women, I told myself, as I braced to march into the wind to feed the birds. The day before, I had counted thirty-one cardinals gathered around the two platform feeders outside my study windows.

Thirty-one hungry birds. They were counting on me.

I tugged the woolen hat over my ears and the promise arrived like a prayer. All this effort for the birds. Surely, my students deserved at least the same degree of commitment.

I have always tried to be available to them, but I decided then and there to be on campus more, with my office door wide open. I could not have predicted all that followed. So many unscheduled conversations. Too many reasons now to miss them.

A few hours ago, I was sitting on the sofa when the setting sun suddenly cast its golden glow on the patch of bookshelf less than six feet in front of me. I am thirty-six years old in that framed photo, holding onto my six-year-old daughter, Cait, and feeling like a mother lion. A few months later, she and I would move out of the only house she’d ever known and into a first-floor rental in a Tudor in Shaker Heights. One day we were a family of four, the next day we weren’t. Most of the time it was just the two of us, as my son Andy was in college.

Despite the sad narrative spooling around this photo, I have always loved it. I could already feel the strong headwinds of change trying to knock me over and I was afraid, but I was not without courage. I was that little girl’s mommy. I would do what I had to do.

The mother and daughter figures to the left of the photo are more than thirty years old. They are made of straw, and I don’t remember where I bought them. I do recall thinking they were deceptively strong. “Like us,” I told Cait the day I brought them home and set them on the mantle. The skirts of their dresses used to be bright red, but they have faded after so many years.

“Like me,” I whispered to our dogs, wedged on either side of me. Old Franklin sighed. Walter is licking my hand as I type.

One more photo, one more story, before I go back to grading. See the little boy in that picture? That’s Andy, also six years old, in 1980. It is the very first picture I ever had of him, taken by his father at Andy’s request. We had just met, that little boy and I, and he wanted me to have a Polaroid photo of him.

“So, you don’t forget me,” he said, sliding it into my hand.

As if I could.

Twenty -four years later, Andy and his sister walked me down the aisle the day I married Sherrod. This past Sunday, on Mother’s Day, he called me and we talked about plans for his only child’s high school graduation. Our first grandchild, Clayton. That’s me in the photo below, holding Clayton in the NICU when they weighed barely three pounds. Clayton is about six feet tall now.

Yesterday, I sat in the shade of our backyard with a kind and talented man named Jake who is designing the garden of my dreams. All these years later, I am living in a Tudor again, and yes, this is a campaign year, and yes, I am hard at work on my next novel but also, yes, I want to create something new and beautiful that says welcome to your home every time we pull into the driveway.

And so, Jake and I are planting a cottage garden for this little stone-and-brick house of ours. The Mugo pines will go there, next to the tree peony here, just feet away from the Itea Sweet Spire and the Red Rocket Barberry bushes. A row of Annabelle hydrangea will line the fence, and we’ll plant mixed perennials, so many little batches of them, each of them a bouquet sprouting from the soil.

I stared at the sketch and couldn’t stop grinning as Jake talked excitedly and drew in the air with his sharp little pencil. At some point, we started chatting about all the children in our lives, both the grown and not yet launched. Happiness is contagious that way, as you know. I think this part of the conversation began with my mentioning something about how, when he was four, our grandson Milo picked out a foot-high gnome for our garden and it now lives at the base of a rubber tree in our house because I couldn’t bear seeing it buried in snow.

“Oh, and listen to this,” I said to Jake. (We’re friends now.) Two days earlier I had met someone who described her grandchildren to me in two batches—the “bloods” and the “steps”-- and then shook her head before adding, “I know you think they’re all the same.”

“Honestly,” I said to Jake. “Can you imagine?” He and I agreed on the spot that this was no way to think about the children we love. There are no steps, no gradations, to the swell of love that washes over me every time I hear a voice call out, “Grandma.” On this, Jake and I loudly agreed, and then moved on to a discussion of the Knock Out Rose, who will be taking up residence near our shed, I’m told. I can’t wait to meet her.

I love this book. (Hi, Walter.)

Really, truly now, I’m about to leave you. But first, I must share a passage from E.B. White’s introduction to a collection of essays by his wife Katharine S. White in the 1979 book, Onward and Upward in the Garden. I discovered it two weeks ago and I can’t stop thinking about it.

She was the first and legendary fiction editor of The New Yorker. He was one of the magazine’s popular staff writers. After she retired as editor, she began writing essays about gardening, including reviews of mail order catalogues. These were published as a book two years after her death, and his description of her as a writer is all the proof I need to know he loved her.

Letters came easily to her, he said. But, goodness, the agony whenever she was writing for The New Yorker.

“When she sat down to compose a magazine piece on gardening, faced with all the strictures and disciplines of formal composition and suffering the uneasiness that goes with critical expression in the public print—this was something else again. Gone was the clear and steady stream. Katharine’s act of composition often achieved the turbulence of a shoot-out. The editor in her fought the writer every inch of the way; the struggle was felt all through the house. She would write eight or ten words, then draw her gun and shoot them down. This made for slow and torturous going. It was simple warfare—the editor ready to nip the writer before she committed all the sins and errors the editor clearly foresaw.”

On he goes, offering one vivid snapshot after another of his wife immersed in the labor of creation. Mercy, how he studied her. What a love story.

It’s nearly midnight here in Ohio. Coffee is ready.

Now I can leave you.