Transplant

The Long Saturday

Chapter 68: Transplant

Not everything from a garden can be moved.

Mom says this on moving day while standing in her old yard with a trowel in one hand and authority in the other.

"You can take cuttings. Bulbs. Starts. Seeds if you're patient. But if anybody suggests we dig up the peony, they're losing speaking privileges."

Jude, who had in fact been looking at the peony with theological ambition, raises both hands.

"I submit to wiser rule."

The new place is nine minutes away on Linden, in a row of brick townhouses built sometime during the Carter administration and held together ever since by modesty and caulk.

Mom chose it because the stairs are finite, the church is close, and the patch of dirt out back is "small but teachable."

Clara chose it because the neighbor has a wind chime shaped like a fish.

Norah chose to support it because she enjoys my mother in survivable doses and likes the way the kitchen window faces west.

I chose nothing.

I am here with the truck and the tape gun and the old family weakness for carrying too much at once.

Kira is in from Colorado again because she said no one gets to transplant the roses without an eyewitness.

Maria has shown up in work boots and a bandanna because adulthood has apparently made her even more willing to assist any crisis involving furniture or dirt.

Stephanie takes Clara and Dylan for the first hour under the promise of doughnuts and a playground, which is the only reason actual labor gets done.

The movers take the obvious things.

Couch.

Table.

Boxes.

Mattress.

The rest of us take the things with roots.

Mom has marked them already.

Lavender from the south fence.

The yellow climbing rose Dad argued into existence one stubborn spring because the nursery man said it would never take in our soil and Dad accepted that as provocation.

The volunteer tomato seedlings that appeared every year near the compost because life is vulgar that way.

I dig while Kira loosens around the edges and Norah wraps root balls in burlap like the world's least ceremonial midwife.

Jude hauls pots.

Maria labels everything with masking tape because chaos requires opposition.

"This one says rose?" I ask, looking at her handwriting.

"Because it is a rose."

"Could've been a theological tract."

"Keep moving, pastor."

Mom kneels by the lavender and presses the blade in herself.

"Not too deep," she says. "It resents drama."

"Strong family resemblance."

"Exactly."

When Clara returns, powdered with playground sand and one half of a doughnut, she takes the smallest plastic shovel in the yard and appoints herself assistant to all operations.

"I am helping roots."

"You are endangering roots," Norah says, moving the spade six inches to the left of a vulnerable stem.

"Same thing."

No one in this family has ever respected the difference between intention and impact without training.

At the new place the backyard is hardly a yard.

More a declared possibility.

A rectangle of dirt bordered by brick, one brave strip of grass, and a chain-link fence that separates Mom from a retired woman named Eunice who appears within eight minutes carrying iced tea and local intelligence.

"I hear you have tomatoes," Eunice says.

"I intend to," Mom replies.

This seems to satisfy neighborhood law.

We carry the plants through one by one.

The lavender first.

Then the rose.

Then the volunteer tomatoes in their improvised trays.

Mom stands in the little patch of dirt and looks at it the way generals must have once looked at poor maps.

"It'll do," she says.

"It doesn't have to become the old yard."

We dig.

Set.

Backfill.

Water.

Clara pats soil around the lavender with both hands and says, "Grow good."

"Excellent liturgy," Jude says.

The rose takes longer because the roots are stubborn and because anything Dad once loved feels required to resist change on principle.

Kira gets dirt on the knees of jeans that cost too much for this kind of thing and says, "If this dies, I'm moving back out of spite."

"If it dies," Mom says, not looking up, "we will buy another one and tell no one."

By evening the truck is empty.

The kitchen is half arranged.

The new living room is full of boxes and one lamp already working much harder than it deserves.

Outside, the small garden waits under fresh water and relocation shock.

Mom stands at the back step with her hands on her hips.

Clara leans against her leg.

The air smells like cut roots, hose water, and somebody's dinner through the fence.

"Well," Mom says.

"We have a kingdom again."

"A principality," Kira corrects.

"Do not demote me in my own yard."

We laugh because the work is over and because laughter is often what families use instead of blessing when blessing would embarrass everyone.

Later, as Norah and I load Clara into the car, I look back once.

Mom has not gone inside yet.

She is crouched by the lavender in the dusk, touching one stem lightly as if greeting it after a long drive.

The house behind her is smaller.

The yard is smaller.

The life waiting there is not.