100 years

I am a little kid with a short dress on, and I am barefoot against the spring grass of Ohio. I run back and forth along the peony bush line at my grandmother's house. I drag my hand across the fluffy rosé-colored flowers, and the smell is a slap to my face. The ants are there, doing nature's work, and the plants are heavy, pregnant with bloom. I bend over like a peony bush and laugh. I knock their leaves to the ground with my tiny paw. My grandmother is on the porch with an apron on, just looking at me. I am so in love with my tiny world.

Peonies can outlive people. They can be 100 years old. My dad was in the arms of many people posing by the bushes for the photographs that I now find in photo books at his house. As a baby. As a little boy. As a man with my mother wrapped around him like a stem. He ran back and forth. His little dog peed on the flowers. He picked them early in the morning before they burst 10 inches across. He smelled the same heady scent. He told his mom that he loved her. He laughed and laughed.

My grandmother moved from her house, the house that she had lived in for 60 years, where she lived alone all the years after my grandfather died. She left the house, and just like my mother said in a weird way when we were buying her some new things at Kohl's department store one day, she said, "Grandma will never go back there, Amy." I guess she knew how it worked when people got old. Turns out she did. Grandma lived a groovy little life for 5 more years, and everyone said she was whip-smart and amazing, and she was. She had a photographic memory and was always baking a pie. She told me many times to take her back to her house. I always said that I would next time. We both knew how it went. It went like that. She died from being dehydrated and getting a kidney infection. She was perfect until she died almost overnight at 95.

I never went back there either. It was a bit ramshackle to begin with, and in the years that she had her little town apartment, it just became worse. She told me to go get anything I wanted. All I ever got was an old shovel from the derelict garage, and I used it to dig up some peonies. I had no idea what I was doing, and I still don't. But I planted them around the yard of my house 75 miles away. I think I planted them too deep because they struggled for years to find themselves so far away from the southeastern Ohio soil that had held them. They didn't look like the flowers she had.

I pull my car up the driveway. I have been away for the weekend visiting friends in California where the flowers are almost vulgar in their sassy, show-off ways. I look at the little wild patch by the garage. I see the blooms. They are still tight, but the pink is flashing. There is no denying the bud. It has been at least eight years since I tried to transplant this bunch for the second time. The first time I planted it in the deep shade of the side yard, and I thought about how the sun bore down on me and the ants as a child. So, I moved the plants around. I remember being much younger and acting like I knew how to plant, to split hostas with a hoe, to transplant peonies in front of my cool neighbors. Thankfully, these flowers were hardy and meant to stay in the family line because I didn't know what I was doing.

And I still do not. In front of them, there are photos of a whole family that no longer exists. Some are dead, and some are broken off into other lines. I think this is how it goes over the course of 100 years. It always kills me to walk out one morning and see the flower decay. You can eat a peony. You can put the leaves under your pillow for spells and dreams. They are only here for a short time.

My grandmother called them pinneys. Like Pine-ees. I always thought it was weird as I knew they were called peonies, but it didn't matter much what I thought or how embarrassed I was to grow up in the sticks where people talked weird. Her friend Ella had walked across the lane all those years ago and brought her some peony plants to welcome her to the neighborhood. My grandfather planted them, and here goes a mythology. I mean, the flowers maybe had 24 more years in them since my dad is 76. That scares me. They look so good, so young and bright here in the place I live now. My kids run into them. The leaves flutter down. They droop here too. Like how sexy can one flower be? I mean, there is life here. Stories too. Here where it took a long time, but all the flowers have come back to life. It's constant, isn't it? This absolute beauty of life. This terrible ache of truth.

-ATS

TY for waiting on me. For waiting with me. For being with me. Here. Everywhere. <3

ilysm

Amy