Wild woman in the garden

I sit in my reading chair, feet up, consume a portion of homemade peach cobbler and a soft-boiled egg, a breakfast I recently served my baby sister at my table.

A hallowed meal together.

She’s now back home in a suburb of Grand Rapids, known as GR to the Underwood clan. For Grand Rapids was my husband’s home when we first met at Central Michigan University in 1968.

I loved the Underwood’s large, colonial house.

The patriarch, Milton Underwood, passed in March 2003. Rosalie Underwood, the matriarch, left us in 2015. Then, the two younger sons prepared their beautiful, childhood home for sale.

It sold before Mel and I could take one last look.

My aging cats, Cuddles and Mittens, jump up on my lap, claim their place. Again, I adore Cuddles’ green eyes and Mitty’s blue. What would I do without them?

Not to be overlooked, my weedy perennial island calls my name again from outside my study window. “Where’s our fair share of her TLC?” the flowers murmur to one another.

Now that summer’s relentless heatwave is ended, I promise to uproot every weed, deadhead lilies, prune spent roses, and at last plant iris rhizomes gifted by friends.

Such is the season of a “wild woman in the garden”.

Furthermore, my firstborn’s memorial crabapple tree needs pruning. And the faithful yellow cluster of Cosmos beneath it reminds me I’ve promised to provide her a companion.

There’s another yellow flower blooming on a new variety with variegated leaves. She’s so healthy I’d like another just like her for a garden in the backyard.

At last, towering over the creeping, red rose, a white hibiscus bloom opens to its pink center.

Breathtaking. Bountiful.

Sedums, also known as stonecrop, sporadically sprawl on the sandstone border around the island.

At last, the tall sedum border before my study window turns pink (my favorite color) from bees’ pollination.

This bounty flashes me back to MacArthur Manor Apartments in Warren. There, in a macrame hanger, I placed a pot holding a pink begonia that Mel’s Gram Underwood transplanted from a window box on her Presque Isle Lodge into a small pot.

I can still see her wizened hands tamp the soil around the tender stem.

As newlywed renters, I’d thirsted for color, and the begonia bloomed as we moved from place to place during those shaky years of the Vietnam draft.

Mel and I packed our few belongings and moved four times in two years, the former two with our firstborn.

At last, I hung Gram’s begonia between the living and dining room in our first house on Cummings Street in Berkley.

Her begonia thrived there for four years before we moved again.

Dear Reader, I realize not one begonia blooms in my gardens. I determine to correct that in Gram’s honor and drive to Piechink’s Garden Gate.

There, I’m distracted with their sale on perennials.

Looks like this wild woman in the garden will have to return for a begonia.

Contact Iris at irisfarmletters@gmail.com