The Dahlias Mom Grew by Feel

Naming them by the leaf

By the middle of June the plants were knee high, and Mom walked the row holding Andy’s rope, stopping at each plant to touch the leaves and name it.

“Bishop of Llandaff,” she said at the first one, rubbing a leaf between her finger and thumb. “Feel how fine it is. Like carrot tops. Nothing else in this row has a leaf like that.”

At the next she cupped a big leaf flat in her palm. “Kelvin Floodlight. Coarse as a burdock. It wants a stout stake or it lies down in the first wind.”

At the pompons she laughed. “These little ones have little leaves. Smooth, see? Like a child’s hand.”

At the Thomas Edisons she said the leaves were dark and stiff and the stems were purple at the joint, and she could feel the ridge there with her thumb.

I walked behind her with the masking tape labels from the fall, checking. She went through all one hundred and twelve plants.

She did not miss one. Not one. I stood at the end of the row with my mouth open and the tape in my hand.

“How do you know, Mom?” I asked her. “How do you know them like that?”

She turned her face toward me, smiling. “Forty-five years, Kristi. You don’t know a thing by looking at it. You know it by taking care of it.”

Sundays with Rolf

Rolf came over every Sunday afternoon that summer after church. He did not talk about Shelly, and I did not ask. He had hauled composted manure from the cattle lot in April, and he ran the hose out to the end of the row.

One Sunday in late June, after Mom went in to rest, we stood at the end of the row together with our arms on the T-post rope, looking down the bed.

It was coming in green and thick, already taller than it had been the whole summer before.

“She hasn’t been out here,” I said. “Not once.”

“She can’t make herself,” Rolf said. He took off his straw hat and turned it in his hands.

“She drives by and slows down and can’t make herself turn in. She thinks Mom hates her. She thinks you do.”

“I don’t hate her, Rolf. I don’t understand her, but I don’t hate her.”

He looked at me for a long time. “Her mom fell, Kris. In her garden down in Red Oak, the year before Shelly and I got married. Nobody found her until the next day. Shelly was the one who found her.”

I had not known that. In twenty-some years of Thanksgivings and Christmases and baptisms, I had never known that.

I stood there with my hands on the rope and felt the whole thing turn over in my chest.

“She never told me,” I said.

“She doesn’t tell anybody,” Rolf said. “That’s why she did what she did, the way she did it. She couldn’t stand to argue about it. She just wanted it gone.”