I got to hug my mama this week in advance of her 80th birthday. But more about that in a second.
In front of my preferred breakfast joint is a small patch of scraggly grass, eking out a hardscrabble existence between the asphalt of the road and the concrete-hard soil adjacent. It is not lush. It is not pretty. More weed than grass, it has hung on despite two major episodes of construction.
In the middle of the patch of grass grows one solitary stalk. Somehow, a single corn plant has volunteered between the still-under-construction hotel and the newly resurfaced asphalt of the Waffle House parking lot.
Two miles down the street, I have had a work hobby for the past few years. In front of our office building are a series of concrete barriers, placed alongside the building to protect us. They are three feet high, and are filled with dirt. Planters. For the first few years of my time working there, they were occupied by dead trees. It was truly awful.
And so it came to pass that one day I dug the trees out, added some soil, and dropped some plants in. Then some seeds. Then more seeds. I have written before about my devil-take-the-hindmost chaos of my planting process, and this fits my modus operandi perfectly. A tangle of volunteers and weeds and heirloom plants and flowers.
Somehow, two years ago, I had three random stalks of popcorn that pushed their way past the surface, growing past the crowded tangle of pumpkin and oregano and kale in the understory. Those three stalks grew strong, and they got a cup of water every day as I walked out of the building.
A co-worker stopped me one day. "Crorey, you do know that you will not get any corn from that, right?"
Um, no, I replied. I did not know that.
"Yeah. Pollination of corn happens by wind, so you need a field full of corn to get enough windborne pollen to make corn. That is why fields of corn always have rows packed so tight. So that the wind blows the pollen over to the other stalks and the pollen from the tassels get picked up by the silks of adjacent plants."
Huh. And sure enough, the corn ears I eventually harvested were puny to the extreme. Three kernels on a curvy cob. Five kernels. Not even enough to keep for replanting. A little internet research confirmed his statement. Corn does not thrive in isolation -- it requires a group of similar plants to do well.
Back to the visit with Mom. We celebrated her 80th anniversary this week, and made a big fuss over her. A couple of dozen members of the Parker family traveled from Washington State, Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts and Mississippi, all come to SC to celebrate with her. Lawton clan members also showed up to love on her, and she received messages from the Beltram clan from Tokyo, Prague, Dallas and the UAE.
It was a lovely weekend. We all -- both sides of the family -- connected and reconnected and got to know one another as adults and made family once again.
I have been a solo stalk for a long time. Growing up with Sunday dinners with all of my Lawton cousins every week, and monthly visits with Parkers, I have always known what it is to be surrounded by family. And in the years since I left home, I have found the isolation of living a long way away from that family to be difficult. I have local connections, and I have built community around myself, and have been accepted into communities far from my family of origin. I have a rich life filled with music and theatre and art and bees and work and home and friends and acquaintances.... But I miss family.
I arrived in Anderson, SC, and hugged Mom. A long hug. I hugged Jake, my cousin who works so hard to keep us all connected. I hugged my sister, who organized the whole weekend and managed to reduce chaos within a wildly chaotic group. I held long conversations with Andrew, who visits me on his annual trip to retrieve alligator brains from SW Louisiana. And with Chris, whose ship repair business is thriving. With Brian, who told me of a lateral relative named Gus, who collects rocks in the US Southwest. With my Idaho cousin Kirstyn, who combines a response career with a preventative career (she is a nurse working in two settings). With Chelsea, a cousin I have not seen since she was seven, some thirty some odd years ago. With Michael and Parker and Jonathan and John Mark and and I think there might have been a Steve and an Otto in there somewhere.
And somewhere in the middle of all of these recollections and reconnections, I received a gift.
Back around 1984, I spent a couple of weeks of my summer helping Granddaddy Lawton. He would have been around 70 years old, and I was available for doing some yard work up at the mountain house (I also suspect that mom needed a little less 14-year old energy for a week or two). Under Granddaddy's supervision, I built thank-you-ma'ams to channel water off of the gravel road. I helped harvest and weed and pick and shovel and do general cleanup. I got fed steak and eggs, and ate like a king every meal. I went exploring in the mountains after the work hours were over, and delighted in discovery -- finding minerals and waterfalls and mushrooms and flowers and trails and ridges galore.
During that week, I also dug holes for some 40 thousand daffodils along the edge of the driveway, taking bulbs that granddaddy had divided and spread out and made into a floral town crier, announcing the annual arrival of spring in Cleveland, SC.
In her description of it, Roxana explained, "...all of these bulbs originally came from just twelve daffodils my grandmother gave my grandfather in 1955, planted at their mountain home in Cleveland, South Carolina. That property has since been sold and is now part of a 365-acre conservation area in a natural trust. And somehow that makes me happy... imagining the animals quietly walking through those same daffodils each spring."
I am now back in Mississippi.
"How was the week?" my coworkers all asked. My response, somehow, captures none of the magic of being a single stalk who is fully pollinated. Of the connection that I felt through storytelling and the reconnections that happened as myriad ghosts linger around our every table. Of food that makes you want to weep for the joy of it. Of gift giving and pictures passed around, each a prompt for one more story.
"It was fine. It was a very good weekend," I offer, lamely. But let me tell you:
This lone stalk has returned with a very full heart. Connected. Re-rooted.
