My Father's Garden

A paradigm, or a shared cognitive framework, first understood scientifically, can shift with new discovery. The fabric of our ideologies is never stagnant, changing to allow new light in, leaving us with only memories of past patterns. Or, visually, a line drawn in the sand divides life into discernable sections, so we can say, that was then, and this is now.

In the backyard of my childhood home, before my family fissured into different directions, my father fashioned a garden. In summer, he spent Sundays kneeling on the ground with grass-stained knees and fingers blackened from mulch—a different sort of worship. Always, he wore a white undershirt, and when he stamped inside for dinner, trailing cakes of dirt across the tiled kitchen floor, he smelled of the earth after a storm. He planted Japanese Maples, and Dogwoods that bloomed with plush white flowers. He built a winding stream of stones beneath a wooden bench.

In some lights, especially when the sun lowered and glowed across blades of grass, I believed time would freeze here forever.

***

When I was small, my father read to me from the Bible’s Matthew, explaining that a seed planted by a farmer in good soil is like a person who listens analytically to find God. Perhaps, this is where I learned to analyze to the point of anguish, to pick apart language in search of a truth that glimmered out of reach just beneath.

In the parable of the weeds in the field, an enemy sowed bad seed amongst a farmer’s good crop, so that when the weeds grew, they choked the fruits of the harvest. With one man’s choice, the crop fell. I read over my father’s shoulder, curled up on the leather sofa, brown faded orange, my eyes half-shut against the early morning sun.

Perhaps, my love of parable was born here. I’d like to believe that life holds poetries like this, even if I have to squint for them to slide into focus.

***

My birth shifted the trajectories of my family’s lives. The news of my conception came as a surprise to my parents, who (ages forty-four and forty-five) had three nearly grown children, the oldest of whom was twenty-two and studying English at Penn State, unprepared to relinquish her title of ‘only girl.’ The youngest, fifteen and dynamic, moved in defiance to the backyard shed at the news of my mother’s pregnancy, where he smoked pot beneath a “say no to marijuana” poster that my parents hung above his makeshift bed. The middle, a math major, the quiet and gentle one, was nineteen and off at Vanderbilt in Tennessee. All of this, I’ve learned through story, hanging on the shirttails of others’ memories. I’m sure I don’t have the facts as they were, gone to the past now, but this is my story, my attempt at truth.

Years later, our family would grow apart in many directions, though that is another story for another time – and one that is painful for me to look at.

There’s evidence that they were a family before me—photos of the five of them piled on each other’s backs at a campsite, tent pitched in the background—though I can’t conceptualize it. The mind always reaches in vain toward the past or the future.

The past isn’t solidified in any concrete truth, instead encapsulated in fog. My siblings might say that dynamics were unfair, or my parents fought incessantly. My parents will speak of regret or confusion, of building a home in their twenties with three young children. They each tell a different story. But I don’t know them in that life. They had become different people when I joined them. For a time, after my birth, they grew close again, with me in common.

It’s a heavy weight to bear, to be the glue that pastes everyone together.

If you’re quiet enough, you can feel when you’re amid a before, caught in a blanket of peacefulness. And, if you’re like me, you feel the dread of the after even before it comes, as if a future iteration of yourself has reached back to warn you. You’ll run to catch it, the after, like rainwater in a bucket after a drought, though the downpour never falls until you turn your back, never plinks with satisfaction into tin. The world keeps turning, and you’ve done nothing to steer it in any direction. You must remind yourself of this.

***

The month of May meant that my father’s flora blossomed, while my mother and I read books under the Dogwoods, enveloped in a pungent wave of honeysuckle. Somewhere between Anne of Green Gables and Little Women, my birthday came too, always uninvited.

An anxious child, obsessed with age (especially the ages of my older parents), I dreaded birthdays. My mind ran years ahead, calculating their ages at my graduation, wedding, the birth of my child, picturing them old and gray and fading, despite my attempts to hold on.

Each birthday my father joked that the next age’s hugs wouldn’t be as special. “I have to get in all the eight-year-old hugs I can,” he’d say. “I heard the nines aren’t as good.”

For a reason I can’t articulate, this always broke my heart, felt like fists kneading my sternum.

***

Because my siblings were older, it was often the three of us: mom, dad, and me. I remember a vivid fear that my parents were my soulmates, and that I couldn’t move into an adulthood that didn’t center around them.

Parts of me will live in that house forever, relishing the “before.” The stillness of mornings with my mother, waffles on the table surrounded by the toasted, nutty scent of butter and syrup. The bells she rang out to wake me for school, pulling open the blinds to let the light flood in. Or winters with my father collecting firewood and sledding down a slope in Rose Tree Park with warmers in our socks and gloves.

In the first grade, my childhood best friend and I said that we’d only ever marry our fathers. Now hers is gone.

***

In middle school, my siblings came over for games on football Sundays. We ordered pizza, and teased my mother, and laughed at things I can’t recall. We talked about metaphysics and fear and said things that only families can say to one another and understand.

On birthdays, my mother pressed the foot of an electric hamster dressed like Ringo Starr, and he belted out, “Happy birthday to you,” in a gust of sucked-in-helium soprano.

Now, in the aftermath, I know that these moments existed, but they’re fading.

***

We spiraled into different directions, our struggles becoming private, and I stood still, grasping at the pieces, wondering where my binding power had gone.

I thought of the little girl at Deerfield Drive who had written a poem for every member of her family, turtle included. I thought of how uncomplicated it is to love as a child. I thought of how adulthood might forever be spent reaching into the past, trying to remember who we’ve been, and trying to be those people again.

***

I’m twenty-six now, one of the milestone ages from my childhood calculations, and my parents are seventy and seventy-one, ages I’d once feared. They look older, with lines in their faces, evidence that their children’s lives did not turn out as they’d wished; or, perhaps, just evidence of life—its disappointments, its laughter, how swiftly it goes by.

My father’s hair has whitened. The skin on my mother’s hands has wrinkled in smooth, soft folds, dotted with age spots.

When they moved a thousand miles away to a beach town, they gave me all the photo albums, as if they were physically placing their memories into my hands, pages of moments I didn’t live through. My father is tall, has dark hair curling to his shoulders, holds my brothers on each hip while my sister plays on the floor. Their wedding day: my mother stands in an old-fashioned gown; they smile and wave as they depart for their honeymoon.

I read these photos the way I devour books, trying to find meaning beneath the surface, trying to analyze through the words or the eyes. I don’t know what I need to understand—how to hold onto the love forever, how to know every facet of the person, how to pin down a memory and live in it—or, simply, how to discern the ways that now is born from then.

Now, they sit by the water and call me on speakerphone and talk about hopes and politics and regrets. My father writes poetry in his iPhone notes about human fragility and the way the ocean foams on rocks and sends me screenshots, says the water inspires him.

I think that I will never live under the same roof as them again or hear them shout at one another downstairs and listen at the steps to make out the words. There’s bad with the good, always, but it makes the good more beautiful, more complex.

And I still think it—the soulmate fear. I still calculate. I still hold my breath, willing time to stand still.

***

Before we moved from my childhood home, my father took about a hundred pictures of his garden from different angles. It was springtime when we left, but the pictures don’t capture the beauty—instead, a hue of darkness imposes over red Maple leaves, pink florals, and vibrant greens in each glossy shot.

You search through it all—the photos, the home videos—living your memories again like an outsider with face pressed to glass. You wish it all back, but it slips away anyway, it says, you had time to appreciate this. There’s something lovely about nostalgia, that lump in your throat, but you can’t quite pin it down in words. You might never be able, and you must remind yourself of this, too.

I drove by the house the other day, seven years since it sold, to see if the trees had grown and to envy the lives being lived within its walls. Still gray, my home looked smaller.

The front door had been painted purple. Sweeping branches scraped against the side of the house. A plastic child’s car with a swinging hinge door and black rubber wheels sat in the driveway.

I hope it belongs to a little girl who will grow to read in the summers beneath the Dogwood trees in my father’s garden.

About the Author

Annie Lowenthal is a copywriter in the Greater Philadelphia Area. She holds a master's degree in English from West Chester University of Pennsylvania, where she focused in creative writing. Annie's fiction appears in Litro Mag and her poetry can be found in The Bangalore Review and Pulp Poets Press. This is her first creative nonfiction publication.

about the artist

Kimberly Summers is a Designer, Painter, Potter, Engineer, and Maker. She shares her home in Orange CT with her husband, a pair of tabby cats, and an impractically large dog.

PeatsmokeOctober 17, 2021