appleblossoms
#29
11 May 2025
My Dear Mellon,
Happy Easter ‘92 To Reagan N. From Grandma I.
I was seven years old when my grandma wrote this inscription inside a clothbound hardcover copy of The Secret Garden, illustrated by Tasha Tudor. I still remember reading the story of Mary Lennox and the cheery robin redbreast who showed the way. I still love the feeling wrapped up in the question “Might I have a bit of earth?” Now, looking back, I realize that my grandpa had died of cancer a scant two months earlier, and my grandma still sent this book all the way from Iowa to California for my Easter basket. Of course she did.
Even though your namesake is in Burnett’s A Little Princess, you named your house Misselthwaite Manor for its garden. I love how your garden wakes up in the spring and how you put it to bed in fall. You have learned the names of all your flowers and lamented peach and apple trees. What a fun happenstance that you bought your “very expensive key” so near the same time we came to ours. Look at these last ten years! Look at what has bloomed and blossomed on our respective plots. You filled your manor with books and chairs and roommates, and now it overflows with a husband and your own children.
Last fall I wrote about the day we first set foot here on this particular piece of prairie. Greeted so merrily by apple trees, we planted two more our first spring. We discovered asparagus on the southwest hillside, overlooking the garden which previous residents had fruitfully tended. Lilacs, tulips, irises, lilies, clematis, and phlox were scattered all around the property. Our catalog of trees includes silver maple, juniper cedar, quaking aspen, crabapple, ash, walnut, linden, boxelder. The arbor vitae we’ve replaced with pines. Every May the cherry and apple trees burst incandescent and startle us speechless with their breathtaking creme puff wedding dresses.
My favorites are the wildflowers. Bright dandelions and violets are the first, followed by fragrant clover and chamomile. Catnip mint creeps up through cracks and raspberry vines coil wherever the sun filters through the leaves to kiss the soil. Decorative dock and coneflowers errupt later. Milkweed lures monarch butterflies in two waves, at the beginning and end of summer. If it isn’t rooted out quickly, the prickly thistle surges to a surprising purple glow. Even the nettle and burdock have their medicinal uses, for they teach little ones to be careful in a world lurching toward eden. If we cannot bear itches and tangles, stings and scratches, how can we learn to brave much sharper thorns? In the world you will have trouble; take heart. Best of all are the wild sunflowers and roses, brilliant and spangled in the fields, soft and sweet on the breezes. Consider the wildflowers: utter gifts of fresh and fleeting grace, unearned, unsuspected, arrayed more gloriously than Solomon, hedging the ditches and dirt roads. Blushing like sunsets. Bleeding like spilled starlight. Blanketing the prairie in rainbowed sprays.
When I walk with the Lord in the cool of morning, he gestures with all creation, take note of your patch of ground. Atop the wall of the secret garden Ben Weatherstaff’s robin sings, Isn’t it grand? Look! See! Come! beckoning, flitting, pecking at the key that lies in wait. And just as the chicken-of-the-woods, the apple branches, and the wild herbs burgeon unbidden to bury us in decadence undeserved, so words pour out on the page beneath my fingers in ways I never thought to ask for and can’t outrun.
“….she took another long breath, because she could not help it, and she held back the swinging curtain of ivy and she pushed back the door….”
—The Secret Garden
Here where I thought I wanted one kind of bounty, a better gift was given. Your garden was not the final thing you were being called to; neither was mine. Now our hearts are holding long-hoped-for, unimagined desires. Patience, gentleness, and faithfulness have braided our broken dreams into a tapestry of thanksgiving. I don’t have a lapful of babies, but letters pile up and topple over onto my desk. Letters to Ontario and Omaha, Tennessee and Tanzania, Northern Ireland and New South Wales. Letters from librarians and laundresses, athletes and artists, missionaries and mushroom-eaters.1 Instead of naming children I name sensations, memories, and the hopes and fears that swirl and churn within us. A year ago I was asked to write a liturgy for Mother’s Day. I knelt and found the lost key in the soil. I brushed aside the ivy, and the words bloomed just like appleblossoms.
Additionally… campers hikers runners dawdlers gawkers gardeners farmers foragers explorers entrepreneurs experimenters antagonists advocates amateurs cooks caterers churchgoers cheerleaders schoolteachers statisticians technicians local television stars birdwatchers dogwalkers catwranglers ringmasters horseback riders button mashers baseball players bandwagon jumpers shepherds goatherds grandmothers distant relations cousins rabbits and caregivers of every inexhaustible stripe.
Oh to receive some sort of paycheck for dawdling and gawking--I'd be a millionaire!
Your descriptions of all the plants made it feel like a whole world. And the part about learning to deal with thorns—take heart! Thank you for always reminding us of the truer story.