“I suppose I pamper the lilacs because it takes me back to them,” she said. “She developed these varieties herself. The lilacs represent survival. And that’s what we’re about now, surviving until better times come through.”
And when they do, Ruth thought, I’m going to go visit Mrs. Hulda. She owed it to the woman to tell her face to face how much she’d meant to her, how many lessons she’d taken from the lilacs in her life.
When John came home that day from teaching at the university, new for him since the beginning of the decade, he was upbeat. “There’s talk about a Federal Music Project,” he said. “Maybe years out, but they’ll pay small salaries to musicians, and we’ll give concerts, for very small fees. There’ll be projects for writers too, perhaps. And artists.”
“That would be … inventive,” Ruth said.
“People don’t have much money to spare, but the arts feed the spirit, Ruthie, they do.”
“Like gardens.”
She stood with her back to the window, watching her husband. It was good to see him looking forward. He caught her smile, spread his arms, an invitation, like the opening of a tulip. She stepped into his embrace, warm and safe in this garden of love.
FORTY-ONE
OVERWHELMING
Hulda, 1933
The first storm came on December 5. I’d never seen such rain in all my years. I couldn’t even see the barn for the density of the water. Thunder and lightning didn’t happen often here, but that day, we had both, along with the downpour, a word that seems miniscule to what we endured. Bobby hid under the table, and even though I usually didn’t let the dog and cats stay in the house, that night I did. I didn’t go to bed, stayed up in my rocker listening instead for the siren that might announce a breach in the levee or something else gone wrong at one of the dams built on the Lewis these past years. I dozed in the rocking chair, stoking the fire when I awoke. I could hear Fritz snoring upstairs. My high-school helper Marjorie had gone home. Her parents lived up on the bluffs. I never heard a siren, and in the morning I thought, well, all those dams have been worth it, taxes and all.
By the evening of the second day, the rain let up, and then we had days of the usual rains, soft, misty ones that allow walking without umbrellas. A few sunbreaks in between. I had puddles of standing water in the yard, but any pooling near the roots of my plants I channeled with my shovel, draining them away from the lilacs especially. I was glad we lived close enough to town to walk for a few groceries we might need, because the roads would be slick snakes of mud. The main paved road south toward Portland, it was said, had water over it in places. I checked my new rain gauge. Two and one half inches in the past day. The weather warmed up too, above freezing, so at least we didn’t have snow. Of course that meant snow would be melting in the high country, sending the melt to the Lewis and Columbia Rivers. Nothing to do about it, but I thought maybe we should dig up lilacs, just in case.
I heard on the radio that the coast had been wrecked with seventy-mile-an-hour winds along with all that rain. I was glad there was a hundred miles between us and the onset of that storm, so it had a few hours to wear itself out. Aberdeen and Hoquiam, coastal cities, had two to six feet of water standing, or so they reported. I looked at the wall trying to imagine water that high coming into my house.
The rivers crested on December 10. Kelso, north of us, reported major flooding, and we learned a railroad bridge collapsed. I looked at the railroad grade next to the house and didn’t see seepage, but it was saturated from all the rain just as the levee along the Lewis was. If we got dry weather, we’d be all right. That’s what Fritz told me, and I agreed.
On the seventeenth, we had another storm, pouring rain into every crack and corner. I noticed a leak in the kitchen and set a pot to catch it. Rainwater is good for plants, but I didn’t like collecting it inside my house. Heavy rain continued for days, and when it lessened, we waited in the misty rain for word about when they thought the rivers would crest again.
On December 22, a dam at the headwaters of the Lewis broke, and all that rain and snowmelt headed toward Merwin Dam on the Lewis River. Sirens told us to evacuate, and we learned that they were going to open the gates at the Merwin Dam, hoping to let water through, controlled; but then something happened, and they couldn’t get the gates closed, or the water couldn’t be controlled, and all that water and debris and logs and trees just kept coming our way. The Lewis River ran ten feet above what it had ever run before, and it was heading toward Woodland.
There is nothing so alarming to a farmer or a homeowner or businessman as seeing water rising, pouring, flattening out around all you’ve worked for all your life. The rushing river demolished dikes 11 and 5. By then, Fritz and Bobby, the chickens and the cats and I were at Bertha’s, up on Martin’s Bluff. It was a good thing, because Woodland—and our farm—was underwater. We could see portions of our village, rooftops mostly, from the grade at Martin’s Bluff. The bottoms of barns that hadn’t floated away were left to the imagination. Many of the roofs had rocks on top hoping to keep them secured, with second-story windows peeking out like eyes under hats. The islands on the Columbia were gone. I looked across that river and could see that the town of St. Helens was underwater too.
We spent Christmas with my sister, high but not dry as the rain continued in its usual drip, soaking every bit of dirt there was and worrying mud slides into being. Finally, the weather cooled, keeping snow in the high country, and we waited for the rivers to recede.
I made Fritz take me out in the boat to survey the damage, bundled up with a scarf on my head. For the first time, I was glad Frank wasn’t here to see it. The house still stood but with water well into the first floor, halfway up my sun porch. I couldn’t tell if the plants in there had made it or not. They likely floated off the shelves. Trees survived. Even the barn stood and the windmill tower too. My farm hadn’t floated away or been smothered by slides or taken out by log jams racing on the river making new channels. It had to, I suppose. We would have to make new channels too.
Our county had more than twenty inches of rain that December, twice what we might usually get, and most of that fell during those two storms.
“Do we begin again?” I asked as Fritz rowed us around the woodshed. I touched the tops of lilac bushes, which was all I could see of them, the ones we couldn’t get onto rafts. How long they could endure in the standing water I wasn’t sure. “Do we begin again?” I asked again, realizing it was a prayer. Did it really matter, having lilacs bloom for Planter’s Day?
People said later that if we had to have such a devastating flood, that we were lucky it came in December of 1933, because in November, Congress had created the CWA, Civil Works Administration. It was meant just to get the country through that winter until new programs could be brought in to help the folks most damaged by the downturn, the Depression, as they were calling it, by putting millions of needy people to work. Oh, there was politics about what was right, people arguing, complaining about paying taxes on land that was washed into the river and taken out to sea.
Whole bunches of men that December filled sandbags, patrolled dikes, and helped evacuate people during the flooding, some even served food at soup kitchens. It was worthy work for any man, and in January more than one hundred people formed the Cowlitz County Flood Committee to start repairs, seeking approval from the CWA, then enacting what they got money to do. Later we’d learn that more money was expended to recover from the flood in Cowlitz County than any other county in the state, even though the rest of the state had been hit hard too. We got “coordinated,” Fritz said, and he worked the dike repairs. We’d never have begun our recovery so soon if the flood had occurred the year before. Of course, timing can be everything, and at least for flood recovery and the beginning work to restore my garden, we were on the right hand of time.
But time stole other things from me those years. My brother, Emil, passed the year after the flood. His wife, Tillie, had died not long after Frank, so my brothe
r and I had continued on as neighbors, looking after each other, being beloved and helped by each other’s children.
At the farm, we began again, shoveling mud, planting. Because so much was ruined, it seemed proper to make changes, look at new ways of landscaping, think about drainage differently so we might recover better if we had another breach in the dikes. Future thinking is good, and I kept reading about horticulture and engineering too. No Lilac Days that year, even though I had my girls and Elma, Emil’s daughter and her husband living next-door to help. Hobos came by and worked a day or two for eggs and bread, and we had a vegetable garden that year so I did my usual canning.
Those government programs brought surprises to our country too, with men from other places seeking work, and we’d had good “coordinating” using those precious federal funds. I met Ruth’s oldest boy, John, that way. He’d come from Baltimore to live with his grandparents, hoping to find work in the West when there were mostly soup lines in the eastern cities. Nice boy, who made it a point to tell me he’d smelled lilacs all his life, and he guessed they’d begun right here in this garden. He worked the soil around lilac roots, as his mother had directed. “She taught us a few lessons she said came from you,” he told me. They must have been about being generous and helpful, because he was, or ones about being persevering and willing to make changes.
I guess his younger brother had his problems. John didn’t go into detail, but every family had one or two stories of hope gone to drink and degradation, and I’d come to see that even with the best of upraising, circumstances and choice can take a soul down.
My dear Delia died in January. Not unlike Martha, Edmond told us. “She just went in her sleep.”
Not that I thought losing another child would be less painful than the first, but I had hoped. It wasn’t so. Even grown and on her own for years, a grandmother herself, didn’t change the painfulness of my having lived long enough to bring a soul to earth, nurture it, watch it grow, and lay it to rest. I’d watched her pass through painful losses and singular joys and now had to live with knowing when that phone rang, it wouldn’t be Delia calling me. I’d have no news of how her day had gone, couldn’t ask if her roses bloomed yet or had she found a new recipe for pickling cucumbers. I wouldn’t see her at church, never hear her voice lift above the sandhill cranes, nor stare with me as we watched their wings span wide, circling upward as they left the fields beside the Lewis River. Of such mundane things are lives made and woven richer—and so missed when they have passed.
At least I could go to sleep at night savoring memories of my daughter and be grateful she’d allowed her children to be so much a part of my life: Irvina comforting me after Frank died, Clara walking beside me in the lilacs till she was old enough to marry and move to Oregon. Those girls stayed in touch, writing notes and remembering their grandma or coming across the field to bring me rhubarb fresh picked and stay to talk a bit about when we thought the lilacs would be blooming. That’s how my Delia would live on.
I thought of pioneer families who told of traveling across the plains and losing not just one but two, three, four children, buried and covered with wagon tracks to keep the coyotes out, no other markings for their graves. I thanked God I knew where Delia rested. We’d saved her named lilac and replanted it. Edmond helped, and later I thought that his broad shoulders and handsome looks reminded me of that screen actor John Wayne, the first “singing cowboy” who graced Woodland’s movie house in 1933. Delia and Edmond had taken me to that movie. I’d never forget seeing Delia’s face, hearing her laughter. I’d remember the feel of her cheek when I pressed mine to hers before they closed the casket and I said my final good-byes.
Before we left those dirty thirties (as I thought of them), Edmond, Delia’s husband, had succumbed in 1936, and the next year my Bertha left us. We grieved them both, knowing that with each passing, ours came closer too. That walk alone to parts unknown moved closer, and I often woke in the morning with a start, my heart pounding, feeling fearful of what lay ahead. But then I’d remind myself that I was not moving toward places unknown. Aging made me think there’s no sense waiting for a time free of trial and temptation; living looked like this. One had to grab abundance when one could, smelling lilacs when they bloomed and thanking God and dancing a little jig when a double white gave me ten petals on a hardy stalk.
“I’m close,” I told Frank as I inhaled the fragrance, gently thumbed the petals between my fingers. I was overwhelmed by the goodness. “Maybe ten is all I’ll see before I die.” But while I was here, I’d keep working for twelve.
FORTY-TWO
SHELLY AND BILL
1940–1941
They were part of the Emerald Necklace now, the system of parks and waterways and transportation corridors that marked the parks and ponds between the colonial Boston Parkway and Arnold Arboretum. Shelly could not believe the thrill these landscapes gave her. She remembered the lectures at the Lowthorpe School given by Mr. Dawson of the Olmsted Brothers firm. He taught them how to “fool the eye,” from the French trompe l’oeil. What looked like a natural place of woody trees and gentle ponds was actually designed by men who moved soil for sewage and drainage, visualized where conifers and cedars, rhododendrons and pears, and cherries and crab apples would surprise the eye. Visitors rode their carriages through the greenery or walked the lazy paths meant to slow the world down from its hectic pace and breathe in air purified by plants. A place of health and beauty, that’s what these linked parks of Boston were, and feats of engineering.
Bill worked with the herbarium collections and was happier than he’d ever been. Shelly had worried that she’d taken him from his beloved Baltimore and Annapolis, and yes, from his mother too, but she felt certain that if they had not made this change, she would have gone on alone. Did a wife have the right to say “This is what I need” if it appeared to be at the expense of what her husband required? She wasn’t certain. She only knew that as she prayed for guidance, how to keep her marriage and her spirit from sinking into despair, that this idea of moving him, urging him on to different climes could bring them the resolution she sought and that he needed as well.
His mother had resisted and finally said that she would not go and that Bill must choose between his mother and his wife. Shelly felt no exuberance as they packed crates of personal things. Minnie Snyder forbid the removal of furniture or anything other than personal effects. But Bill stood firm when it came to plantings and the labeled starts. Those flowers would move with them. Beautiful lilacs with blooms of exquisite yellow.
She could see the pain in her husband’s eyes as they arranged to leave. They’d secured the assistance of the woman they’d hired some years earlier to help in the garden and serve Minnie Snyder. Ruth was competent, patient, and loved lilacs, which endeared her to Bill and Shelly, if not to Minnie. But Ruth didn’t let the woman’s demeanor disrupt her care, and they were grateful that she could overlook the sometimes insensitive statements the elderly woman made. But Shelly was hopeful, oh, so hopeful, that her husband would experience the joy she imagined in these many parks once they moved to Boston.
“Fool the eye.” That’s what her lecturer said was part of the design of landscapes, to make the eye think all was natural, when in fact it had been planned this way, organized with thoughtfulness. She remembered that visit to Hulda Klager’s lilac garden. The woman had an eye for design. Her walkways curved just so, then straightened past the lilac plantings. Birdbaths and water fountains offered glimpses of finches and warblers and red-shafted flickers who used the trees as cover, then zipped to dip in water. Colors blended so subtly one didn’t realize how the woman planned ahead, planted with an eye to the future.
Today, as Shelly trimmed the lilacs, she noted the scientific name and common name of a magenta lilac labeled Klager My Favorite at the very top of the curving walk. How could she ever decide what to name them, and which would truly be her favorite?
John Wister had come through the arboretum in 1941, surve
ying lilacs across the country. He’d graduated years before from Harvard and gone on to design and lead a Philadelphia arboretum for many years. It was good an avid horticulturist took the time to catalog all the lilacs in the United States. They were a part of the history of a nation and ought not to be forgotten.
Bill joined her for lunch, and in the evening they worked in their own garden, miniscule by comparison to the one they’d left behind in Baltimore. They’d had no children, so Shelly’s idea of arranging for a planting to honor all those childlike firsts never came to be. Instead, she had developed her interest in bonsai, seeing the natural characteristics of a plant and training it and trimming it in such a way that it was a smaller version of something larger but equally magnificent. She had found her passion through a practice she learned was hundreds of years old and brought from isolated China to ancient Japan and from there eventually to the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland. Shelly hadn’t seen them there, but Laura Hetzer had, and thus had begun Shelly’s journey, a desire to create within nature and enhance a landscape like their small garden with the bigness of imagination that bonsai nurtured.
She’d even tried her hand at bonsai lilacs. It offered quite the satisfaction, though she’d slowed down with her knuckles swollen with age now. But amazingly, Bill enjoyed working with bonsai beside Shelly. She watched her husband, slightly bent now, walk toward her. He waved a greeting, a smile fresh upon his aging face. He looked happy to see her, distinct among the plants. What wife could ask for more?
FORTY-THREE
ACHIEVEMENT
Hulda, 1943–1947
During the Second World War, people started coming back to visit the garden. A whole new town had built up along the Columbia River called Vanport City, because it lay between Vancouver and Portland. Built on the flood plain, the city fast-housed workers needed to build ships. Fritz said thirty-five thousand people lived there close to Portland, the town springing up within weeks. On a Saturday or Sunday, many of those working in the shipyard—women too—took a break, and in May I’d find ready visitors at my picket fence. A few hours in the garden, a blanket spread at the grassy areas, watching and listening, gave rest to those worried about husbands and sons and grandsons in faraway places, took their minds from building things used to carry men to war.