The Garden Club Luncheon on Her Wedding Day
“Honey,” I said, “the garden club meets here the second Saturday of October. The fall luncheon. It’s been on the calendar since January. It’s been in this yard 18 years.”
She waved her hand at me the way she used to wave off sunscreen. “So move it, Mom. Whatever. Nobody is going to care what week they eat chicken salad.”
Then she kissed my cheek, said she had a 7 a.m. call with a doctor’s office in Branson, and drove back to Springfield. Her tea sat there sweating on the table until the ice was gone.
I want to tell you a little about my backyard, because it is the third main character in this story, and it deserves a proper introduction.
It is a big, square, old-fashioned yard behind a 1950s ranch house on the edge of a town of about 3,000 people in southwest Missouri. Phil and I bought the place 27 years ago, when Taylor was still on the way.
There are two sugar maples along the back fence that go red every October like somebody flipped a switch. There is a garden gate Phil hung on cedar posts. And there are my beds, which are the one place I have ever been truly patient.
Mums, mostly, because they carry the fall. Orange and yellow and a deep rust. Zinnias in the summer that hang on until frost. Asters, sedum, a stand of black-eyed Susans, and a beautyberry bush the cardinals strip clean every winter.
And in the middle of it all is the gazebo.
Phil built it the summer Taylor turned ten. She had seen one in a picture book from my library, a white one with a little cupola on top, and she asked him if a person could live in one.
He told her a person could not live in one, but a princess could certainly hold court in one. Then he spent every evening for two months out there with a level, a circular saw and a radio tuned to the Cardinals.
On the morning of her tenth birthday, he walked her out back with his big rough hands over her eyes. When he took them away, she screamed so loud the neighbor’s dog started barking.
Phil died four years ago of a heart attack at 51, in the parking lot of the feed store, holding a bag of birdseed for me. I still buy the same birdseed. I don’t know what that says about me.
So when my daughter told me she was going to be married in that yard, under that gazebo, I wanted to go stand in it and cry happy tears to her father.
And when she told me I was not welcome to be in it on the morning she got married, I went and stood in it anyway, and I cried a different kind.
My sister Carla came over that night. She is 55, three years older than me, and she has been fixing my problems since I was in a playpen, whether I want them fixed or not.
“Just tell her no,” Carla said. She was eating my leftover pot roast standing up at the counter. “Call her back right now. Tell her it’s your house and you’re staying in it. Done.”
“I know,” I said.
“Then do it.”
I was not going to call my own daughter and beg her for a place in my own yard. I was not going to argue my way onto the guest list of my own house like a woman at a bouncer’s rope.