The Wisteria.
My Aunt Nadaline blooms within me every spring.
She is long since gone. I did not realize the work she did to root in me when she was around, gap-tooth smiling, sneaking me Snapple when they still had glass bottles and pop tabs.
Now, she is a place where I can go and sit and visit, her branches long as the day. I did not realize before her passing how carefully she held my little earth, the sapling she left me. It grew quiet and steady, independently, and I could not have felt it then. Every time I went to sit in her company, be gazed upon, appraised, kept, she looked over the little tree I was too teensy to notice. Quietly, she watered the little mound of earth; measured the sprouts; nodded her approval. I never noticed. I was distracted by her smile. My front two teeth were coming in and I was praying every day to have a gap like hers, and like my mom’s.
I was fourteen when I saw the little tree— it was the year of her passing. I went into my journal to be with myself after The Phone Call, and there she was. Teeny. Miniature purple petals being carried by the breeze. I did not know what to make of it at the time. I did not know what I was looking at. I had not felt yet the earth, the fertile earth inside myself. There are a great many ways in which I feel grief is delayed; I did not grasp the scope of it, the grief I felt, because I had only lived such a short while. I had only been without her for a minute. A day. A year.
It has been nine years this summer, shortly after I graduate with my master’s degree. The heights and depths of grief are here making themselves known to me slowly, here in year nine, when I am in an apartment she would love but I cannot show her; when I am looking to tailor my convocation gown and cannot ask her opinions on the fabrics; when I am absentmindedly thinking of making tea and the kettle clicks on by itself, the hand of my most familiar ghosts reminding me she would like a cup too. It is raining today in Chicago. I am having tea under the Wisteria while she blooms in the spring. She was a smidge past five foot in living; a small lady has grown such a wide tree. She shades me from the easy setting sun; I watch her float her blossoms to the ground, no longer miniature. She covers me. We stay like this a while.
I am weeping. I weep. But oh, how I am kept. And I have kept her, all this time.
3| The Wisteria: a Love Letter to Grief