cloye

clearing outside, pointing out trees she had planted and flowerbeds long overgrown. At the back of the house, under the oaks, was a clump of bare gray branches erupting with a froth of stringy yellow blossoms. “Why lookee here, it’s my old medicine come to greet me, ” she said and reached out to take the branch as if she was going to shake its hand. “I made me many a batch of this old witch hazel and folks would come to me for it, special. I’d cook up that bark in the fall and have it all winter to rub on aches and pains, burns and rashes—everybody wanted it. There ain’t hardly no hurt the woods don’t have medicine for.” “That witch hazel, ” she said, “it’s not just good for you outside, but inside too. Land sakes, flowers in November. The good Lord gave us witch hazel to remind us that there’s always somethin’ good even when it seems like there ain’t. It just lightens your heavy heart, is what it does.” After that first visit, Hazel would often call on a Sunday afternoon and ask, “Would y’all like to go for a ride?” My mother thought it important that we girls go along. It was like her insistence that we learn to bake bread and plant beans—things that didn’t seem important then, but now I know differently. We got to pick hickory nuts from behind the old house, wrinkle our noses at the tilting outhouse, and root around in the barn for treasures while Mama and Hazel sat on the porch and talked. Hung on a nail right beside her door was an old, black metal lunch box, open and lined with what looked like shelf paper. There were remnants of a bird’s nest within. Hazel had brought along a small plastic bag filled with cracker crumbs, which she scattered on the porch rail. “This little Jenny Wren has made her home here every year since Rowley passed on. This here was his lunch pail. Now she counts on me for house and home and I cain’t let her down.” A lot of people must have counted on Hazel when she was young and strong. She took us driving down her road and we stopped at nearly every house but one. “Them are no count folks, ” she said, and looked away. The others seemed overjoyed to see Hazel again. My sister and I would follow the chickens around or pet the hound dogs while Mama and Hazel would visit with the neighbors. These folks were very different from the ones we met at school or at parties at the college. One lady reached out to tap my teeth. “Those are mighty purty teeth you got, ” she said. I’d never thought that teeth were worthy of a compliment, but then I hadn’t met people before who had so few. I mostly remember their kindness, though. They were ladies Hazel had sung with in the choir of the little white church under the pines. Ladies she had known since girlhood, and they cackled together about dances by the river and shook their heads sadly over the fate of kids who up and moved away. We’d go home in the afternoon with a basket of fresh eggs or a slice of cake for each of us and Hazel just beaming. When winter began, our visits were fewer and the light seemed to go out of Hazel’s eyes. She sat at our kitchen table one day and said, “I know I shouldn’t ask the good Lord for nuthin more’n what I already got, but how I wish I could have just one more Christmas in my dear old home. But those days are gone. Gone with the wind.” This was an ache for which the woods had no medicine. We were not going north to my grandma and grandpa’s for Christmas that year and my mother was taking it hard. It was still weeks until Christmas but already she was baking up a fury while we girls strung popcorn and cranberries for the tree. She talked about how she would miss the snow, the smell of balsam, and her family. And then she got an idea. It was to be a complete surprise. She got the house key from Sam and went to the old schoolhouse to see what she could do. She got on the phone to the Rural Electric Co-op and arranged to have Hazel’s power reconnected, just for those few days. As soon as the lights came on, it became clear how dirty it all was. There was no running water, so we had to bring jugs of water from home to sponge things down. The job was bigger than us, so Mama enlisted the help of some fraternity boys from her classes at the college who needed a community service project. They sure got one: cleaning out that refrigerator rivaled any microbiology experiment. We drove up and down Hazel’s road, where I ran in to houses with handmade invitations for all her old friends. There weren’t too many, so Mama invited the college boys and her friends, too. The house still had its Christmas decorations, but we made more, paper chains and candles, out of paper towel tubes. My dad cut a tree and set it up in the parlor with a box of lights stripped from the skeleton tree that had stood there before. We brought armloads of prickly red cedar boughs to decorate the tables and hung candy canes on the tree. The smell of cedar and peppermint filled the place where mold and mice had been only days ago. My mom and her friends baked plates of cookies. The morning of the party, the heat was on, the tree lights lit, and one by one people started to arrive, clumping up the steps of the front porch. My sister and I played hostess while Mama drove off to get the guest of honor. “Hey, any of y’all feel like going for a ride?” Mama said, and bundled Hazel into her warm coat. “Why, where we goin’?” Hazel asked. Her face gleamed like a candle when she stepped into her “home sweet home” filled with light and friends. My mother pinned a Christmas corsage—a plastic bell with golden glitter that she had found on the dresser—to Hazel’s dress. Hazel moved through her house like a queen that day. My father and my sister played their violins in the parlor, “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World, ” while I ladled out sweet red punch. I don’t remember much more about the party, except Hazel falling asleep on the way home. Just a few years later, we left Kentucky to move back north. My mom was glad to be going home, to have her maples instead of oaks, but saying good-bye to Hazel was hard. She saved it for last. Hazel gave her a going-away present, a rocking chair and a little box with a couple of her old-time Christmas ornaments inside. A celluloid drum and a silver plastic bird, missing its tail feathers. My mother still hangs them on her tree every year and tells the story of that party as if it were the best Christmas she ever had. We got word that Hazel had died a couple of years after we moved. “Gone, all gone with the wind, ” she would have said. There are some aches witch hazel can’t assuage; for those, we need each other. My mother and Hazel Barnett, unlikely sisters, I suppose, learned well from the plants they both loved—they made a balm for loneliness together, a strengthening tea for the pain of longing. Now, when the red leaves are all down and the geese are gone, I go looking for witch hazel. It never lets me down, always carrying the memory of that Christmas and how their friendship was medicine for each other. I cherish a witch hazel kind of day, a scrap of color, a light in the window when winter is closing all around. A Mother’s Work I wanted to be a good mother, that’s all—like Skywoman maybe. Somehow this led me into hip waders filled with brown water. The rubber boots that were intended to keep the pond at bay now contain it. And me. And one tadpole. I feel a flutter at the back of my other knee. Make that two tadpoles.