The Dahlias Mom Grew by Feel

The bed along the lane

Mom started that dahlia bed the spring she turned thirty-eight. Dad had just poured the new machine shed floor, and she said if he could have his concrete she could have her flowers.

He built her a cedar edging along the lane that same week.

She started with six tubers from a church sale in Elk Horn. By the time I was in high school there were forty plants.

By the time Dad died, six years before that summer, there were seventy, and people from Atlantic drove out on Sunday afternoons in August just to look.

She grew Thomas Edison, a deep purple the size of a saucer, and Kelvin Floodlight, a yellow so big it bent its own stake.

She grew Bishop of Llandaff, red with dark ferny leaves. And she grew Duet, dark red with a white tip on every petal, which was Dad’s favorite and the showiest bloom in the row.

Every October after the first hard frost she dug every clump, washed them, let them dry, and packed them in peat moss in the cellar.

Every May she planted them back out. Forty-five years she did that, with her own two hands.

Her eyes had been going for a while. The doctor in Omaha called it macular degeneration. The first eye went three years before, the dry kind, slow.

That year the second eye turned to the wet kind, and it went fast, the way the doctor warned it might.

By June she could see colors at the edges of things, and light, and shapes. She could not see faces.

She could not read the tag on a dahlia or see her own fingers in front of her. She got shots in that eye every six weeks to slow it down.

And she fell. That was the part I could not argue with.

In late May she caught her foot on a stake and went down in the bed, and she got up by herself. In June she went down again and could not get up.

She lay in the dirt for twenty minutes that second time, between Kelvin Floodlight and a row of pompons, until the mail carrier saw her from the road and came running.

Her hip was bruised black. Nothing broke. We all knew it could have.

Shelly in the yard

I was still sitting on the steps with Mom when Shelly’s car came up the lane.

She parked right where the bed had been, and she got out and stood there a minute looking at the stubble before she came over.

Shelly is fifty, tall and quick, a woman who keeps the books for two grain elevators and does not waste words. She had her keys in her hand and her chin up.

“Before you start,” she said, “I know how this looks.”

“I’m not starting anything,” I said. My voice came out very calm. I was surprised by that. “I’m asking why you didn’t wait for Rolf, or call me.”

“Because you’d have talked me out of it.” Shelly crossed her arms.

“And then she’d have gone back out there in the morning on her hands and knees, and one of these days nobody would come by for an hour.”

“She’s sitting right here, Shelly.”

Shelly looked at Mom then, and her face changed for a second. Then it set again.

“Arla, I’m sorry. I am. But I’m the one who finds you. I’m not doing it again. You’re done in that bed, and it’s for your own good.”

Mom did not say anything at all. She just turned her face toward the lane, where her flowers had been, and held very still.

I have thought about that stillness many times since. It was worse than if she had cried.

I want to be honest about my own part here. I did not yell. I did not call anyone.

I did not drive down the road and start a war with my brother’s wife in her own driveway, though I thought about it the whole way home that night.

Mom asked me not to. That was most of it. She took my wrist after Shelly drove off and said, “Kristi, she’s family, and she’s not all wrong. Don’t you make Rolf choose.”

And the flowers were already on the ground. Nothing I said would stand them back up.