The Dahlias Mom Grew by Feel

Rolf at the end of the lane

Rolf was baling hay that whole day on the eighty acres he rents north of the Nishnabotna. He did not know anything about it until he came in for supper.

I know because he pulled his pickup into Mom’s yard at almost nine that night, still in his hay clothes.

My brother is fifty-two, quiet like Dad was, with forearms burned dark from the sun and a straw hat he will not replace.

He got out and walked down along the stubble with a flashlight, all the way to the end of the row and back.

“She didn’t tell me,” he said when he came up to the porch. “I’d have stopped it, Kris. I would have. I know what those were to Mom.”

“I believe you,” I said. And I did. Rolf had never once in his life lied to me.

He sat on the step below Mom and put his hand on her knee.

“Mom, I’m sorry. Shelly’s scared. Since June she’s scared every time she pulls up the lane. That’s not an excuse. It’s just the truth.”

“I know it,” Mom said. She patted his hand. “I’m scared too, Rolfie. I’m just not ready to quit.”

He drove home after that. I found out later that he and Shelly talked until two in the morning, and that he told her it was not her decision to make alone.

He did not tell her she was wrong to be afraid. He told her she was wrong to do it behind Mom’s back.

They’re not dead underneath

For a week Mom did not go out the front door. She sat inside in Dad’s chair with the radio on the Atlantic station and listened to the swap shop and the hog prices.

When I came out in the evenings she was polite and smaller, somehow, than she had been.

On the eighth day I found her at the end of the bed.

She had walked out by herself, one hand on Dad’s cedar edging, and was down on her knees with her palm flat on the dirt.

“Mom.” I hurried over, careful not to startle her. “You can’t be out here alone. Shelly’s right about that much.”

“Hush a minute,” she said. “Put your hand here.”

I knelt down and put my hand beside hers. Out of one of the cut stalks, a little green shoot was pushing up, no taller than my thumb. Then I saw another one, and another, all down the row.

“They’re not dead, Kristi,” she said. “Not underneath. Mowing takes the top. It doesn’t take the tuber. Your dad ran over the end three plants with the bush hog in 1987, and they came back that same fall.”

She was right, of course. Dahlias will regrow from the crown if the tuber is sound. I knew that from the extension office.

What I did not want to tell her was what else I knew, that a cut hollow stalk can catch rain and rot the crown from the top down.

The next morning I called Rosemary Kluever, one of our Master Gardeners, who also ran the flower show at the Cass County Fair.

“Some will rot, honey,” Rosemary said. “Rain goes down those hollow stems like a straw. But Arla’s bed drains like nobody’s. Let them grow back, and dig them all after the first frost.”

So we let them grow. They came back short and leggy and hardly bloomed, but leaves make tubers. Mom had me walk her out every Sunday to touch them.