smother

All I know to do is to leave another gift, for them and for the future, those next unknowns who will live here. I heard once that Maori people make beautiful wood sculptures that they carry long distances into the forest and leave there as a gift to the trees. And so I plant Daffodils, hundreds of them, in sunny flocks beneath the Maples, in homage to their beauty and in reciprocity for their gift. Even now, as the sap rises, so too the Daffodils rise underfoot. Witch Hazel As told through the eyes of my daughter. November is not a time for flowers, the days short and cold. Heavy clouds drag at my mood, and sleet like a muttered curse propels me indoors—I am reluctant to venture out again. So when the sun breaks through for that rare yellow day, maybe the last before the snow falls, I have to go. Because the woods are quiet this time of year without leaves or birds, the buzz of a bee seems inordinately loud. Intrigued, I follow her path—what could bring her out in November? She makes directly for bare branches, which, when I look more closely, are strewn with yellow flowers—Witch Hazel. The flowers are a ragged affair: five long petals, each like a scrap of fading yellow cloth that snagged on the branch, torn strips that wave in the breeze. But, oh are they welcome, a spot of color when months of gray lie ahead. A last hurrah before winter that suddenly reminds me of a November long ago. The house had stood empty since she left. The cardboard Santas she had pasted on the tall windows were faded from shafts of summer sun and plastic poinsettias on the table were draped in cobwebs. You could smell that the mice ransacked the pantry while the Christmas ham turned to mounds of mold in the icebox after the power was shut off. Outside on the porch a wren built its nest in the lunch box again, awaiting her return. Asters bloomed in profusion under the sagging clothesline, where a gray cardigan was still pinned. I first met Hazel Barnett when I was walking the fields in Kentucky, looking for wild blackberries with my mother. We were bent to our picking when I heard a high voice from the hedgerow call, “Howdy-do. Howdy-do.” There at the fence stood the oldest woman I’d ever seen. Slightly afraid, I took my mother’s hand as we walked over to greet her. She supported herself by leaning against the fence among the pink and burgundy hollyhocks. Her iron-gray hair was drawn into a bun at the back of her neck with a corona of white wisps standing out like sun rays around her toothless face. “I like to see yer light at night, ” she said. “It feels real neighborly. I seen y’all out walkin’ and come to say hi-dee.” My mother introduced herself, explained we’d moved in a few months ago. “And who is this lil’ bundle of joy?” she asked, leaning over the barbed wire to pinch my cheek. The fence pressed into the loose breast of her housedress, where pink and purple flowers like the hollyhocks were fading from many washings. She wore bedroom slippers outside in the garden, something my mother would never allow. She stuck her wrinkled old hand over the fence, veiny and crooked with a wire-thin band of gold loose on her ring finger. I’d never heard of a person named Hazel, but I’d heard of Witch Hazel and was quite certain that this must be the witch herself. I held my mother’s hand even tighter. I suppose, given the way she is with plants, there was a time when some might have called her “witch.” And there i s something eerie about a tree that flowers so far out of season and then spits its seeds—shiny pearls as black as midnight—twenty feet into the quiet fall woods, with a sound like an elfin footfall. She and my mother became unlikely friends, trading recipes and garden tips. By day my mother was a professor at the college in town, sitting at her microscope, writing scientific articles. But spring twilight found her barefoot in the garden, planting beans and helping me fill my pail with earthworms that were severed by her shovel. I thought I could nurse them back to health in the worm hospital I constructed beneath the irises. She encouraged me in this, always saying, “There is no hurt that can’t be healed by love.” Before dark many evenings, we would wander across the pasture to the fence and meet Hazel. “I do like to see your light in the window, ” she said. “There ain’t nothing better than a good neighbor.” I listened while they discussed putting stove ash at the base of tomato plants to keep off cutworms or Mama bragged on how fast I was learning to read. “Lord, she’s a quick study, ain’t you, my little honeybee?” Hazel said. Sometimes she had a wrapped peppermint in her dress pocket for me, the cellophane old and soft around it. The visits progressed from the fence line to the front porch. When we baked, we would take over a plate of cookies and sip lemonade on her sagging stoop. I never liked to go in the house, an overwhelming jumble of old junk, trash bags, cigarette smoke, and what I now know as the smell of poverty. Hazel lived in the little shotgun house with her son Sam and daughter Janie. Janie was, as her mother explained, “simple, ” on account of she came late in life, her mother’s last child. She was kind and loving and always wanting to smother my sister and me in her deep, soft arms. Sam was disabled, couldn’t work but received some veteran’s benefits and pension from the coal company that they all lived on. Barely. When he was well enough to go fishing, he would bring us big catfish from the river. He coughed like crazy but had twinkling blue eyes and a world of stories, having been overseas in the war. Once he brought us a whole bucket of blackberries he’d picked along the railroad track. My mom tried to refuse that big pail as too generous a gift. “Why, don’t talk nonsense, ” Hazel said. “They aren’t my berries. The Lord done made these things for us to share.” My mother loved to work. For her, a good time was building stone walls or clearing brush. On occasion, Hazel would come over and sit in a lawn chair under the oaks while Mama stacked stones or split kindling. They would just talk about this and that, Hazel telling about how she liked a good woodpile, especially when she used to take in washing to earn a little extra. She needed a goodly pile to fuel her washtubs. She had worked as a cook in a place down by the river and she shook her head at the number of platters she could carry at one time. Mama would tell about her students or a trip she had taken and Hazel would wonder at the very idea of flying in an airplane. And Hazel would tell about the time she was called out to deliver a baby in a snowstorm, or how people would come to her door for healing herbs. She said how some other lady professor had once come with a tape recorder to talk to her and was going to put her in a book, on account of all the old ways she knew. But the professor had never come back and Hazel had never seen the book. I half listened to talk about gathering hickory nuts under the big trees or carrying a lunch pail to her daddy, who worked making barrels at the distillery down by the river, but my mother was charmed by Hazel’s stories. I know my mother loved being a scientist, but she always said that she was born too late. Her real calling, she was sure, was to be a nineteenthcentury farmwife. She sang while she canned tomatoes, stewed peaches, punched down the dough for bread, and was insistent that I learn how, too. When I think back on her friendship with Hazel, I suppose that the deep respect they had for each other was rooted in such things: both were women with feet planted deep in the earth who took pride in a back strong enough to carry a load for others.