The Dahlias Mom Grew by Feel

October

The first hard frost came the second week of October that year.

I took a Friday off from the office, and my husband Andy took a vacation day from the county road crew, and we went out to the farm at seven in the morning with two spading forks.

Andy is a big quiet man who runs a motor grader on the gravel roads in the south half of Cass County.

He does not say much about feelings. He brought a folding lawn chair for Mom and set it right at the end of the row without being asked.

Mom sat in that chair in Dad’s old barn coat and told us where every plant was. She knew them by count from the end.

“Seventeen is Thomas Edison. Eighteen and nineteen are Café au Lait. Careful on twenty, that’s an old one, the clump’s as big as a ham.”

We dug wide around each one and lifted it with the fork, the way she taught me when I was nine.

Some came up heavy and firm and clean. Some came up black and soft, the necks rotted through, and those went in a bucket.

When we were done we had forty-one sound clumps out of seventy. Andy counted them twice.

I was afraid to tell her, but Mom just nodded. “That’s more than I started with,” she said. “That’s more than six from a church sale.”

Shelly’s car went by on the gravel road around ten. It slowed at the end of our lane, and I watched it, and then it went on.

She did not stop. Mom heard it and turned her head, and she did not say anything either.

We washed the clumps with the garden hose, let them dry in the sun on old window screens along the lane, and wrote each name on a strip of masking tape.

That afternoon we packed them in peat moss in plastic tubs and carried them down to the cellar where they had wintered for forty-five years.

The winter in between

All that winter I drove Mom to her eye shots in Omaha, an hour and a quarter each way on Interstate 80.

Shelly had done most of that driving before. In November Mom called her and said, kindly, that Kristi would take her from now on.

I do not think Mom meant it as a punishment. But it was one, and Shelly knew it. At church in Atlantic people noticed she was no longer the one walking Arla in on Sunday.

I did not say a word about the dahlias to anyone outside the family. I did not have to.

The Hadley boy had told his friends, and his friends had told their mothers, and by Thanksgiving half of Cass County knew about the forty dollars.

I am not proud that a part of me was glad. Mom never once said a hard word about Shelly, not on any of those long drives with the snow blowing across the interstate.

What Mom did say, somewhere around the Neola exit in January, was this: “I want to plant them again, Kristi. I want to do it myself. Will you help me figure out how I can do it without falling down?”