untitled book- chapter 3

Ta-thump
June 19, 1993

It is the first really nice day of the summer season and Amos is 73 years old. Although he doesn’t work anymore, Amos still tries to get out in the community and stay active. He will be the first to admit that his joints hurt on a daily basis, and that there are days when it is a real struggle to accomplish the tasks he has set for himself. He still has his drivers license, and thankfully a car but he uses it rarely. He doesn’t feel the need to be out trolling around department stores without the purpose of buying something, but he will spend an entire day happily poking through flee markets and garden centers.
Today is not one of the days that Amos can happily do anything, and despite the warm sun Amos stares mournfully out his window at his wife’s quietly faltering flower garden. For all of the years since his green thumb of a wife died Amos has cared meticulously for her garden, tenderly replanting, weeding, watering, fertilizing and clipping her beautiful plants and flowers. Each year he goes to the garden center and re-supplies her gardening shed and begins planting the same flowers and fauna in the same colors that his wife left behind. Amos has spent countless hours on his knees crawling around the front yard and each year it has gotten harder and harder for him to keep that garden in the same condition his wife did. Over the years he has transferred his need to care for his wife, into a need to care for her garden in her absence and has finally come to the sad and heartbreaking conclusion that he can no longer do either. It is Wednesday today, and Amos is so downtrodden that he doesn’t even realize that Ella will be visiting him today.
When Ella arrives, she walks up the front walk noticing the wilting flowers, the weeds stubbornly poking through the flower bed, and her fathers gardening tools laid out but untouched. Amos is more than happy to see her but he is unable to feel his usual elation. Ella proves once again how adept and sensitive she is when she smiles and suggests they go out to the garden. Amos smiles gratefully at his daughter, pride shining through his sad eyes silently thanking her. Ella has spent so many years caring for him, he knows it is nearly impossible to hide his feelings from her. He follows slowly, she automatically slowing her steps to match his.
Ella drags a wooden garden chair over to the shade for Amos to sit on and supplies her father with a glass and a pitcher of lemonade she made in the house, placing it on the table beside him. They spend the rest of the day together in the front yard, Ella caring for her father by caring for the garden he can’t let go of. She pulls on his old gardening gloves, and the two of them talk companionably between bits of gardening advice and lore from her father. As Amos begins to let some of his melancholy mood go he eventually forgets his pains and happily joins Ella in the garden. She pulls the weeds out, tossing them in a growing pile and Amos waters the plants, slowly walking back and forth from the plants to the garden hose, filling up the watering can and back.
When they are almost done, Ella empties the rest of the lemonade into their two glasses and fills the pitcher with water. They make their small circuit around the garden gathering up their tools and putting them back in their garden shed. As they pass by the rose bushes, Ella stops to clip one or two from every bush. Roses were her mothers favorite flower and so there are many colors. On the largest red rosebush, Ella clips several flowers and she and Amos are pleased to find one white rose. It has bloomed there, standing out among the many red roses since Ellen had planted it, when it was no higher than mid shin. Now it towers above the other plants, stretching as high as the top of Amos head. With a look of fondness, both Amos and his daughter bend down to smell the rose remembering all the times Ellen told them not to pick it because it was good luck. Before she died, they tried every year to get her to clip it and every year she told them no, it was good luck to let it grow. The desire to clip it vanished, leaving them both wanting to leave it, as though a part of that well loved mother and wife were still there.
Before the afternoon is over, the entire garden is watered, weeded and loved, as is Amos. They sit companionably together with Ellas bare feet crossed in her fathers lap. Amos noticed that her toe nails are painted bright fire engine red and remembered the color for the rest of his life. Privately he thought his daughter was far too old with grandchildren of her own to wear such a bright color, besides which it belonged on a hooker.
He clearly remembers a day when he and his wife were sitting down to tea when Ella was three or four years old when they realized that they couldn’t hear her anymore. Quietly they crept upstairs, hoping to catch their daughter in the midst of her mischief; Ellen and Amos had learned from experience that dead silence during the daytime always meant that Ella was doing something she knew wasn’t allowed. They saw her through the doorway perched on a stool at her mothers vanity with Ellens favorite flower printed dress dangling at least a foot past her toes and a straw hat that kept drooping down past her eyes with her face powdered white and red lipstick smeared across her lips. Evidently she had also found her mothers mascara because she had used it to darken her eyebrows as her mother did giving her the appearance, from the eyes up that she was very angry. The two of them quietly chuckled at their daughter who looked like a tiny little drunken clown, sitting amidst an acrid haze of every perfume her mother owned. Today Ellas toes are exactly the same shade as that lipstick, and Amos decides that maybe that particular shade isn’t so inappropriate after all.
He doesn’t remember when, but at some point before supper time, Ella smiled Ellen’s beautiful smile at him and told him a parcel had been sent to him from China. Amos was surprised but had left excitement behind a long time ago, but Ella looked so excited to share this with him that he smiled knowing that if he had to jump up and down clapping to please her, he probably would.
Ella pulled from her shoulder bag a small box wrapped in brown paper. Amos opened it, noticing that it had come from his grandson. Inside the package he found a small folded piece of white cloth and although he wasn’t sure what he was expecting, it wasn’t that. Slowly he picked it up and it fell open showing blue writing on it. His eyes filled with tears as he read the words, and he sat there quietly laughing and crying feeling closer to his wife than he had in a long time, the smell of her flowers and the sun on his face a balm to the soul. That little white bit of material sat on his dresser for all of the rest of his years and he always remembered exactly how he felt when he read the words. “Congratulations Greatgrandpa!” The story that started when a dirty barefoot mouthy little girl threw an apple at him from the branches of an old apple tree was finally ending, and it was the most beautiful ending that he could imagine.