“Good morning to you too.” Aunt Gert looked up and waved me over. “I woke up with a compelling need to weed.”
I knelt down beside her, ignoring the fact that the ground was damp and spongy from recent rain. The knees of my pajama pants were immediately soaked.
“Is there any way to go back to somewhere I’ve already been?”
“The pansies are overgrown with weeds and all dead now,” Aunt Gert observed with a cluck of her tongue, ignoring my question. “And I think a snail has had his way with the impatiens. They didn’t do much this year.” She pointed to a few brown flowers. “The marigolds were still vigorous through November, however.”
These few bedraggled flowers were all that remained of Mom’s edible-flower garden. Every spring since her death I’d planted a handful of varieties in the hopes that it would foster more home cooking and a farm-to-table ethos in our house, but none of us had the time or energy to do much with it after long days at the diner. Now almost all of the plants were dormant or dead.
Gardening had been one of the only things Aunt Gert and I discovered we had in common. I liked it because Mom had loved it. It connected me with her. But despite the fact that we both enjoyed it, neither Aunt Gert nor I had found the time yet to restore the garden to its former glory. Now, in the last short days of winter, it was just a shadow of its past self. Perhaps someday I’d have time to garden again.
“Taste this.” Aunt Gert offered me a bright green leaf. I took it and nibbled obediently. It always amazed me that some plants could grow year-round in the Pacific Northwest. With temperatures that rarely dipped below freezing, some hardier plants such as rosemary could stay green through the winter. This mint plant, sheltered against Aunt Gert’s cottage wall, seemed likely to make it to spring.
“Persian mint,” she explained. “I planted it last summer. The first time I ever had it was in Jordan, on a tour for educators. They serve adrink there called limonana, a frosty mint lemonade. It’s divine in the scorching heat. Oh, that was the best trip. The food, the historic sights. Petra.” She smiled, her eyes far away, and I caught a glimpse of what she would have looked like when she was young. Not pretty, exactly, but lively, with a quick smile, a wide expressive mouth that could curl up in amusement or turn down in distain, and a sharp wit to match those ice-blue eyes. She’d been strawberry blond, she’d told me once, prone to sunburn and freckling.
I shifted impatiently. I’d learned early in Aunt Gert’s time with us that she was stubborn as a mule. You couldn’t push her to do anything she wasn’t good and ready to do. And obviously she wasn’t ready to answer my question. However, I had no intention of leaving until I had an answer one way or the other.
“You used another lemon drop.” She sat back on her heels and looked at me. The knees of her pantsuit were muddy brown circles. I nodded.
“And what did you choose?” she asked, and for a moment I contemplated not telling her, keeping the memory of my day with my mother precious and close. But this was Aunt Gert’s niece we were discussing, my mother, the woman she’d loved almost like a daughter. Aunt Gert had never had children, and she’d picked my mom as her favorite from an early age. They exchanged letters back and forth, and Aunt Gert visited every few years. She even flew Mom to New York City as a surprise for her fifteenth birthday. Mom used to tell us about that trip, seeing a show on Broadway and tasting champagne for the first time.
“I went to see my mom.” I reached down and plucked up a few dried stalks of cilantro. It had never really flourished in this spot and was now just shriveled and brown. “We spent the day together.”
Aunt Gert nodded as though my words confirmed her suspicions, then picked up a pair of garden shears and cut back a dry and yellowed bunch of parsley. “How marvelous. And how was Irene?”
“She was amazing.” My tone was wistful. “Happy. Opinionated. In Hawaii. Just... herself.”
Aunt Gert sat back and sighed. “Dear Irene.” She smiled sadly for a moment. “How wonderful to be able to see her again.”
“Couldn’t you go visit her if you wanted to? Just use one of the lemon drops?”
“Oh, I’m too old for all that now,” she said dismissively. “I used a few of the lemon drops years ago, early on after I’d first been given them, but then after a while I felt they’d served their purpose in my life. Now I’m far past the days where I want to live any other reality than this one, hard as it sometimes is.” She tossed the stems of parsley into her weed pile.
“I’ve been meaning to ask. Where did you get the lemon drops?” I’d been wondering since she gave them to me. If there was a way to get more of them... I caught my breath. I would give anything to spend more days with my mom.
Aunt Gert smiled, reaching down and pulling a few little clumps of weeds and tossing them over her shoulder into the yard. “Believe it or not, I got them from a fortune-teller at a county fair in rural Ohio.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It’s true.” She paused. “It was 1962. I was twenty years old, and the carnival was in town. It was gaudy and a little tawdry, with a freak show and hawkers and tinny carousel music, but we all loved it and looked forward to it every year.” Aunt Gert smiled at the memory. “And there was always a fortune-teller, Madam Esme. My mother disapproved. She was a devout Methodist and considered fortune-telling witchcraft. Well, I was a Unitarian Universalist and had always been curious about Madam Esme, and that night, for whatever reason, I went to see her.”
“What did she tell you?”
Aunt Gert chuckled. “She was sitting in her tent smoking a cigarette. When I came in, she stubbed out the cigarette quick as a wink and told me to sit down. She looked the part, tiny and wizened with long silver hair and a red spangled headscarf. She took one look at my plain face, pretended to consult her crystal ball, and predicted there was a mysterious dark and handsome stranger in my future, then demanded I pay her fifty cents.”
“And?”
“I laughed in her face and said I had no interest in a dark and handsome stranger in my future, that I’d already suffered a broken heart and wanted nothing more to do with love.”
Aunt Gert pulled up a dried clump of marigolds and tossed them onto the growing weed pile.
“What did she say to that?”
“It got her attention.” Aunt Gert smiled. “She wanted to know more. I told her about being engaged, about how my fiancé left me for another girl in our senior class, Dorothy Allan. She was tall and blond and had a laugh like a guinea hen. And I told her about my family and our life—our struggling berry farm, my invalid mother and her frail health. And about my father, who was bipolar, although we didn’t use that label back then. He was a brilliant, violent man, given to black moods. We were so poor, always just scraping along, making ends almost meet somehow. My father didn’t believe in women being educated. My mother had to fight hard just so he’d let me finish high school. I was expected to run the house and the berry stand and take care of Mother. That was going to be my lot in life.”
“You told the fortune-teller all that?”
“Yes, and I told her I wanted so much more. A different life. I was very bright and ambitious, I wanted to be a schoolteacher somewhere far away from our poor little town. I dreamed of going to New YorkCity, but I was stuck in the gravity of my family and our little town with a whole lot of big dreams and little real hope for the future.” She paused and rested for a moment, her tone of voice matter-of-fact.
