Non-Fiction
Life, Edaphic / Grace Linh Cajski
Image courtesy of the author
My first flower bloomed in April, the same month I turned twenty-one. It was a lily, and it was a month of sun. Not the sun that I grew up with in New Orleans, which is willful and unruly. Nor was it the heady Oahu sun, which I know well from visiting my grandparents. This felt like another star altogether, for it was the Connecticut spring sun, and it was charming. Life was easy under its rays. There was a joviality in that existence, and my hair grew long. I spent many hours under the spring sun, walking to classes and sitting on quads and tending to my garden.
It took days to unfurl, my lily. For a while, it was just a strong stalk with long, perfect leaves. Then a bud formed, narrow and green, like an unripe apple banana. A tightly bound present wrapped in three petals. Inside that bundle were three others. Slowly, they emerged. The petals arched their backs and pushed out their tummies. They were pink and speckled with little maroon papillae. Where the petals met, delicate filaments interwove and craned upwards, thirsty for attention. Some chubby bees obliged.
Before the lily, there were herbs. Oregano, rosemary, chives, mint. They had survived the winter. After the lily came oxeye daisies and the hostas’ blushing racemes. In the backyard, some yucca plants begot five-foot spires and dozens of dangling flowers.
Imagine the tough yucca on New England’s rolling hills. A desert xerophyte in the winter chill. Growing alongside irises and hydrangeas, visited by cabbage white butterflies and ruby-throated hummingbirds. Poor anatopic yucca. For five years (maybe more), it had been eking calcium and sulphur and potassium from its Connecticut soil, sipping from the Connecticut downpour. Patiently waiting for the summer. Then, it blossomed.
I grew up in a green house on a small corner lot in Uptown, New Orleans, which was once a large sunflower garden. As a kid, while my parents were still designing their green house, we’d walk to that sunflower garden and my father would cut a couple stalks. We’d tote them home—a blue shotgun house just five blocks away—and stick them in blue vases.
After the green house was built, and most of our stuff was translocated, my parents moved their garden: the compost bin, some ginger, a few sweet olives, but not the umbrella tree. They bought lemon and lime trees, and built garden beds out of scrap wood. They grew spinach, bok choy, green beans, strawberries, sweet potato, watermelon, grapes. Sometimes there were vines, sometimes there was fruit, but, always, the garden was green. Its foliage—low and high, waist-length and rapping against second-story windows—cooked a humid petrichor that beckoned small creatures. On leaf-bottoms I found red aphids and striped caterpillars. Chrysalises hung from stems. Invading slugs drowned in surreptitious cups of beer.
Like the insects, the weeds seemed to spontaneously generate. They were serrated or skinny, sometimes reddish but most times green. They grew handsomely—usually my parents let them grow. The weeds confirmed something we already knew: without us, this garden would keep growing; with us, though, it could grow more fruitfully. Sometimes we added compost to the humus, or we tilled the soil before planting seedlings. When we got chickens, we scattered chicken poop; we always had dogs and always kept them in the other yard. When the rain only came falteringly, I dragged buckets from the rain cisterns. This made the garden grow deep. A deep, green garden.
I left that garden for university. It was the end of summer, when the tree canopies were quivering with expectation. In the beginning, my Connecticut was copper scuppers and iron gates, chunks of marble and sandstone; it was wood paneled and hearty, and, sometimes, it was autumn’s dusty light floating through clerestory windows, photons eavesdropping on the assembly chatter that precedes a speech. It was handshakes and titters and not saying ‘Good morning’ to everyone on the street. Connecticut was also nightwalking—the boisterous, drunken kind—and the giggles of friendships forming.
Before I arrived, the Connecticut of my mind’s eye was the sort of rugged, woody place that impassioned Thoreau and Melville. New Haven was not that. It was streetlamps and sewer systems, CVSs and Chipotles; it was the chirp of crosswalks and the rumble of traffic. It was sparrows and pigeons, and I did see a chipmunk once.
Sometimes I left New Haven and visited small towns, which all reminded me of linen. Manicured fairy cottages, at once sleepy and poised, with tumbling gardens and little moths. One day, I drove past a mailman, and his eyes almost curved into a smile: everything in these towns was too modest and orderly. Quaint little sheds and clean cars and bookshelves full of books.
Most houses had lawns and delicate slopes, and some flowered in the patches where their owners had planted a few bulbs. Many houses had random ponds in their backyards, and little dinghies near the shore. I often saw people gliding on standup paddle boards and a golden retriever splashing in their wake. This certainly was the sort of place for old whalers and writers, but it wasn’t like the relentless verdure of the bayou or the swamp or my city; the sun wasn’t intense enough or dedicated enough, the soil not amniotic enough, not blithe enough—this Connecitcut wasn’t full enough, not fetid enough, not real enough to grow a real life. I was content with being a visitor.
I left Yale on one of those awkward post-winter days, just before the spring sun could warm my skin. I went back to my parents’ green house for that first pandemic summer. Before it ended, I went to Hawaii for the semester.
I met Drew that summer, on Oahu. We hiked ridgelines and ate sushi and swam with fish. We spent Thanksgiving together. It turned out we were both heading back to Connecticut, which is where we got engaged a year and a half later. We picked out a ring and spent a month at his house, a little red cuboid on a quiet hill, forty-five minutes upcoast of New Haven and just east of the Thames River.
A large Japanese maple grows in the front yard, sequestered from the scrappy lawn by a circle of red pavestones. The previous owners had planted some topiaries by the front door, and they’re still there. In the backyard are a shed and a steep decline, then two rows of garden beds. On the southern side of the house is one more bed, and that’s where I first started digging.
I planted chives—Drew’s mom had given us a bundle, uprooted from her front yard—and I covered their roots with Miracle-Gro. Drew bought a banana pepper seedling from Lowe’s, and we stuck it catty-corner to the chives. I transplanted mint from the backyard, and grew some oregano nearby. The summer after our Hawaii summer, we planted kale and spinach and pole beans; tomatoes and rhubarb. The beans were just starting to climb their trellises when I left for a couple months to research aquaculture in Hawaii.
During that time, the plants deepened their roots and clutched the soil. They faced the sun. Since it was dry, Drew watered them, and they gulped the tap water.
When I returned, the garden was overgrown and busy. Blue jays flirted in the bird bath, squirrels scrambled up the red maple. American robins and starlings pecked the grass. I’m sure these creatures were spreading sassafras seeds, because trilobed volunteers peppered the yard. Aphids ate the kale. Then everything went away—winter arrived. A brumal pause of life. The trees jettisoned their leaves and the birds went southwards. The Thames slowed, or, at least, it appeared to. Apparently, it was at this time that I was supposed to plant the lily bulbs, but I didn’t know that. Then snow fell. The semester ended. I shoveled snow.
A flower opening in reverse: winter ended slowly, then all at once. The days elongated, and the birds returned. Sailboats navigated the river. This was when Drew and I bought a sack of Asiatic lily bulbs and planted them beside the topiaries. We pulled weeds.
The daffodils at Yale blossomed before the lily did, yellow and white brushstrokes against the concrete. Bees, flecks of gold, bumbled around them. A magnolia tree blossomed on the main quad, and people hung hammocks between the nearby elm trees. My friends and I liked lounging on old blankets under the sun—cloud watching unobscured by a canopy. While we laughed and gossiped, the lily was growing. Roots pushed out of its basal plate, and a shoot groped its way towards the light.
Under the spring sun, Drew and I went for walks in the little pockets of forest that speckle Connecticut. I ran my hand over a boulder and touseled some lichen tucked in a little pit on its side. I peered into a stream-bed, looking for fish. I lingered under an eastern redbud. In New Haven we stood on antediluvian bluffs, shorn by icebergs. On the train from New Haven, I saw a vernal pond encircled by moss-covered trees, and a flock of coots (a loud bunch, aptly called a commotion) grazed its surface. Perhaps there were some wild rabbits canoodling in the underbrush. And, between trees, I’m sure some skittish deer were nibbling on skunk cabbage.
Once, I looked in the eyes of a short-eared owl. It was perched on a young maple tree by my dorm. The day was ending, the sky was pinkening, and the air was blurry. I regarded the owl for a while, with some other students, and now I wonder if they were thinking what I was, as dusk was settling—that perhaps this place is as ancient as the bayou, and though its seasons are ephemeral and its people a little too glib, a good, strong life could grow from this earth, and perhaps one already was.
I went back to Hawaii again this summer (the third one in a row) and this time Drew came too. We ate dinner in my grandparents’ backyard—a small plot at the base of a hill, a couple blocks from Kailua beach. My grandparents arrived on Oahu, from Tahiti and Wisconsin, six decades ago. Since then, they’ve been growing a garden on that land at the base of the hill. Plumerias and orchids and breadfruit trees; palms and bougainvillea and a banyan tree with luscious prop roots. A tiare shrub grows in the side yard. Every morning, my grandmother collects tiare flowers and wraps them in leaves. A couple bundles were on the table during that dinner. One in the bathroom. Some for us to take with us. I’ve only ever seen that gardenia plant with flowers. In Connecticut, flowers don’t grow with so much devotion. Just once a year, and with the help of good potting soil.
It’s now July, I’m in Connecticut, and a summer haze hugs the horizon. All the plants have blossomed.
Last week, I walked around the garden and regarded the lily. Presumably, its roots had reached the cool subsoil beneath the Miracle-Gro and humus. Probably a welcome relief from the thick summer air. For all its effort, the lily was beautiful. I cut the flower and put it in a vase. It sat between Drew and me as we ate breakfast and dinner.
When it shriveled—its petals crispy, its pistil collapsed, even its color reduced—I dumped it in the compost bin. Nearby, the yuccas were wilting too. Probably already storing up energy to survive the wan winter sun, probably already ideating next spring’s habiliments. Maybe the lily was even growing some bulblets.