Yellow Out There
Yellow Out There
The community garden, known as Spring Garden, dazzled Sarah with its array of flowers and green extensions, the many tentacles and bursts of color that meandered within its gate and occasionally found their way, in little bits, out beyond. The gate - dark and elaborate and spiky with metal figures of birds perching forlornly on the tips of iron bars - was in itself tantalizing. And of course, Sarah’s eye caught more and more yellow each time she stopped to contemplate the intriguing garden.
There were maybe one hundred plots, fascinating in their differences. Some had tomato plants, some raspberries, some roses, some even corn. Sarah never once thought of growing broccoli, but here she could see an elderly man snapping it from its stem and placing it in a canvas bag hanging over his shoulder. She smiled at the scarecrows and garden chairs populating the garden. Picnic tables suggested people had dinner there, parties on the fourth of July, though she had never seen such gatherings.
With each minute she spent staring inside the garden, Sarah knew she was waiting, but
she had no idea what for. And the garden became, in her mind, the image of waiting. The
seeds waiting to grow, the plants waiting to get watered, the weeds waiting to be tall enough to pull.
“It’s so alive," she said to no one, breathing into the hot air which surrounded her, permeated the neighborhood. A gray cat, also a garden regular, wore a silver heart hanging from her white neck and often wove herself between Sarah's legs, brushing into her for comfort, reminding Sarah of where she was, that time was passing. Yes, Sarah was waiting too. Was waiting a good way to spend one’s time? What did the plants and flowers have invested in the future?
Sarah loved to imagine a fantasy garden plot. If she had her way, her plot would be filled with wildflowers, daisies, tiger lilies. Maybe she would grow vegetables like broccoli, but what she dreamed of was something impractical, something wild. Something thirsty that she could water and that would drink, something beautiful and vibrant she could cut and bring to her slowly dying mother, Molly. Pushing aside these dreams, Sarah’s mind always nagged with the knowledge she must turn away, walk her bike up the street, head home.
"Hey," Celly, Molly’s home health aide, said as Sarah let herself into the stuffy house.
"It smells bad in here," Sarah said, instantly realizing how accusing she sounded. "Sorry, Celly, I'm sorry."
"No problem, sweetheart." Celly was wiping down the counter, getting ready to leave.
The silence in the house was no longer a shock. Molly hadn't spoken in months. She just looked out of scared eyes like a lonely lost child. Some in the late stages of Alzheimer's grow belligerent, angry. Molly was as docile as a pussycat, alarmingly so. Sarah missed her spitfire, well-read, fifth grade teacher mother who could answer all the questions on the evening quiz show and complete the crossword every day, her hot cup of coffee by her side.
Sitting in her usual chair next to Molly’s bed that night, Sarah thought of all of the wildflowers at Spring Garden, and wished she had time to care for other living things. She reminded herself to buy her mother flowers at the market the next day.
Sarah closed the door, passed through the hallway and down the stairs, warmed by all the yellow, everything painted yellow, Molly’s favorite color. In the living room she looked for a book bought years before, Container Gardens by Number, something that Reader’s Digest had published, a cheap soft-covered thing. Molly had used this book to learn how to make beautiful arrangements in anything that would hold dirt outside their house. Visitors would always comment on her adept abilities with a box of mud and a few plants. Molly shrugged off the compliments. “I'm just a recipe follower," she said.
Her mother’s handwritten Post-it notes were stuck throughout the book. Sarah felt the usual stab of pain when confronted with a remnant of "before." She listened to the tall hall clock tick as she moved her head back to rest against the couch. Sarah let all of Molly’s containers wither up and die. Everything besides work and Molly seemed so overwhelming.
#
They had lived in this house together for Sarah's whole life.
"I’m lucky to have this house, honestly I am, but I swear if only I could paint it yellow. I have dreamed my whole life of a yellow house, really." Molly reminded Sarah of Anne of Green Gables, how Anne was constantly dreaming of hair another color besides red. Nevertheless, they compensated for the brownstone exterior by painting every room inside a different shade of yellow. Molly's bedroom was a butter yellow.
"It's almost not yellow, almost cream, but at the same time it's a perfect yellow!" Molly said, satisfied, on the day they painted it. Sarah's room was what they both called lemonade. "What would you say Sarah? A brighter butter? A butter turned up a notch?"
They called it the yellow project. Sarah could still picture her mother with paint all over her jeans and sweatshirt and old white canvas sneakers, her short hair covered up in a bandana, hands on her hips. Sarah liked to find different shades of yellow to add to the list they kept on a bulletin board in the kitchen. They perused the many catalogues that dropped through their door mail slot, noting the numerous nuances of yellow, recording colors like burnt sunrise and honeyed umber.
"It gives you hope, doesn't it?" Molly said, flipping the pages, "All that yellow out there?"
#
One day, gazing into Spring Garden, Sarah heard an older man's voice shouting over the corn stalks. "What’re you doin’ over there?"
Sarah jumped, then froze. "Um-I.." she began to say.
He laughed, "I knew I'd scare ya!!"
She smiled weakly and remained frozen in her place, staring at the green pumpkins connected to their vines.
The sight of the pumpkins provoked a dark shade across Sarah’s mind. The doctor said Molly would not see another fall.
"What, don't you like pumpkins?" he said, coming over and taking out a cooler from underneath his workbench. He produced a little paper cup out of nowhere, filled it with a purple drink. "Take this," he said, reaching his hand out through the bars of the fence.
Sarah felt shy but predicted this man would not take no for an answer. She gulped it down, finding she was really very thirsty. She stared at him for a second as she finished her drink, looking into his face in the late afternoon sun, the comers of his eyes revealing deep wrinkles. His skin was a kind of intense earth with hints of orange.
"I'm Vince," he said, sort of gasping after his drink. "I work around here."
Sarah didn't know if he meant in the garden or the neighborhood. "What do you do?" she said.
He left the pumpkins and started furiously digging up a rose bush. "Landscape, plumbing, moving, pool maintenance, you name it. Need something done?"
"Wow! No, I was just curious. I'm surprised you have time to have a garden."
"Always time. You should come and garden. You look like you could use some sun," he stopped what he was doing and squinted at her.
Sarah noticed the stain of sweat lining the bandana wrapped around his head. "I have too much to take care of already," she said, looking down, then away, becoming self-conscious by the familiarity of the phrase.
"Ha! Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’! Where’d I get that?" he asked, pushing his worn boot on the top of a spade. Then he stopped, and reached in his pocket. "See these keys? One's for the gate, one's for the shed. You can have them. You can come in and work in my plot, whenever you want. Weed, water, cut some flowers from over there," he pointed to a bank of wildflowers and wiped his grimy face on his shoulder.
"I have work -" Sarah said.
“Ha!" he repeated in reply.
#
It felt strange to Sarah, to enter the garden for the first time as she did the following Monday. She looked at her watch as she entered, knowing she only had about twenty minutes. The gate opened easily, no sign of Vince, so she walked slowly toward his shed, unlocking that door next. She surveyed the darkness and immediately noticed a bench with a collection of garden tools thrown across it. Underneath a dirt-encrusted spade, lay a sprawled handwritten note on which she deciphered the words, It's about time!
On her next visit, she made sure she left work a little earlier, making an excuse about her mother and feeling guilty for doing so, but getting out the door at four just the same. This time she took the red-handled shears that were on Vince's potting bench and began dead-heading. She loved the catharsis of removing the dead ends of things. His basil looks dry. She looked around for a hose, seeing one nestled between rows of com. She approached the green snake, feeling by its coldness and wetness that it had been used, and recently. She pressed the spray gun and saw an arc of water shoot forth. Dragging the weighty green coil over to the desired destination, she drenched Vince's herbs. When she was done, she went to drop the hose back where it was, but instead she followed its trail through the garden, wishing to see where it began, what different living things were in its charge.
Another time, down on all fours with her hands stuck straight into the mud, she dug deeper and deeper, and, moving further down she detected the earth getting richer and darker. She felt worms and small rocks. It was not until she stood up and mopped her forehead and took a sip of water, that she realized tears were mingled with the salty streaks of sweat on her face.
#
Always, she snipped the yellowest wildflowers from the garden and, after returning home, put them in a tall glass vase beside her mother's bed, softly recounting for Molly the sunshine yellow, the honey yellow, the shady yellow. Sarah looked down at the dirt in her short nails and then around the still room. She knew there was no point in reading, Molly didn’t seem to notice anymore. The flowers do brighten this room the tiniest bit. She listened to the air conditioner humming softly. Sarah sat quietly, thinking, always to herself.
Sarah regarded her mother's withered bird-like face, then stared at her own in the bathroom mirror. Is Molly busy living or dying? What about me? She was already thirty-five, she knew she didn’t have much to show for it. Some of her co-workers made small comments about “keeping her mother alive,” not-so-subtly questioning Sarah’s choices. All she knew for sure was that she needed to be right where she was, now. Everything outside of that, she didn't, couldn’t know. Would Molly see another fall? Sarah chose not to picture the winter months when Spring Garden would be devoid of color, the dried corn stalks blowing in the winter wind, just as she chose not to envision this room empty of her mother, the bed stripped, the door closed.
Sarah remembered a quote, "God gave us memories so we could have roses in winter and mothers forever." She didn't know who said this, but thought if she had her own plot in the garden she would put that quote on a stake and keep it there.
