Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

I sit at the handmade table, writing in the half-light, cherishing the quiet before my family gets up. “Putting food by,” I write, quoting the title of a book, thinking of the pears in the orchard behind the house, of how, this year, I really do want to make chutney out of them.

“Space shorts from Bi-Way,” I write for my son Sam. They had space shorts in the Bi-Way flyer yesterday, covered with fluorescent planets and space ships and things, three bucks, size two to six-X. My son should have those; size six-X for him. Because I work in these very early morning hours it sometimes seems my whole family is something I dreamed. I’m always sleeping when they are awake. It’s as though they are a glossy magazine someone has left on the kitchen table, through which I look longingly at photographs of a plump beautiful wife in flowered dresses, and chubby gleaming children, stubbornly radiant with happiness and health. Yet, by the time they are up I am fast asleep again, exhausted by my nocturnal prognostications, my order filling, my lists, my walks, sometimes accompanied by the cat, to the dark lake. When I get up again, having catnapped, at noon or at one, there is a cheerful note and an absent pickup truck. “Good Idea! Gone to town to get shorts. See you soon. Love, Katya, Sam, Sela.” Sam has written his name himself, a child’s scrawl.

I’d like to spend more time with them, but it doesn’t work. I wake like clockwork at two each morning, like a pregnant woman with insomnia, regardless of sleeping pills, alcohol, valerian. I’ve tried them all. I’ve given up, now use the time to work, to walk to the lake at dawn or before. In the afternoon, after I’ve slept and they are gone, I take the shipments to the post office. I make more lists. I wonder. We meet for dinner.

Creeping thyme, I write. Phlox subulata , michaelmas daisies. I pack the plants carefully. Afterwards I throw the I-Ching. It is an old habit, from when I was young. Chen Tui, the marrying maiden.

Thunder over the lake, indeed.

lavender

echinacea (purple coneflower)

comfrey

creeping thyme

bergamot

bee balm

The last two of which are almost the same thing, the first having a greater medicinal value, the second a floral one. My business is in perennial flowers and herbs, plants and seeds. I experiment with the placing of plants, which goes beside which, according to the homeopathic formulas of Rudolph Steiner. Plants and humus, desire and energy. I mutter through the rose beds at four in the morning, pushing aside straw mulch with my feet to see where the new asparagus is coming up. Mutter mutter mutter : the flower and herb beds, all shimmering pale blue and silver in the ghost light. Sometimes they all seem to rise up and speak to me at once. But what do they say? Simple things, most of the time. “Move me,” the veronica says. “Where would you like to go?” “Beside the foxglove.” And so I do. “Swim with your monster,” the dark opal basil says, but I am afraid. I don’t think I’m crazy to talk to my plants and hear them talk back, but I am afraid to swim with my monster, afraid the change she might demand would be too real.

Shambling through the shrubbery, poking our noses into our charges: a little tear here, a sniff, a chew, a pulled weed. Although many of the weeds are left. Being herbs, or flowers. Motherwort, feverfew, cinquefoil, catnip, some of the wild asters and daisies. Compositae. We take out some of the clover and alfalfa, because there is so much of it, and leave some in, because it is a nitrogen binder, and because we like the flowers. The red clover flowers, especially, are said to be a cancer preventative when taken in tea. I pull the ragweed. The pigweed and purslane I weed selectively. The rest I take home to make a salad for dinner.

Sometimes it seems as though I am always dreaming. And yet, everything seems to get done around me, miraculously. Perhaps I do it myself, sleepwalking. As though that night waking time for me takes place in an alternate temporal stream, one that doesn’t belong to my other life, the life I share. My cheerful domesticity, my dinners with neighbours and the friends they bring, hoping to share in our always pleasantly surprising overflow of joy. Time keeps doing funny things around me, as though I have two selves, and they slip in and out of each other, leaving imprints. I sit on the one sandy bank of the lake for hours; I look at fossilized shells; I can’t seem to remember ever doing anything else, staring at the fossils of snails, fossiled spirals. Everything in my life is like double exposure photographs.

The pickup truck starts up, and leaves down the driveway.

Someday I will go with them, to where they go every day. To Stedman’s, to IGA, to Katya’s store. But today I take off my socks and shoes—red $12.99 high-tops Katya bought me at Stedman’s—my shorts and T-shirt. Today I dive into the cold spring water, come face to face with that other being who lives there, the horned one whose face I’ve only seen reflected in my coffee mug. She knows I am not in love with my young wife, but with her. Holds that secret for me, tames it. “Rest your heart,” she says, speaking soft and clear in my mind, “it will be again.”

Pictures, words. When I wake at two that morning, I don’t go downstairs to endlessly peer into the mirror of my journals, with the excuse of working, but open my cells to my sleeping wife, listen to her with my body’s tiny receivers, the ears of the skin, the way Monsty taught me.

Then, from Katya’s flesh into mine comes the feeling of eating green ice cream, on a hot dusty day, a million years ago, her feet in plastic thongs and her thighs damp inside her shorts. She sits on a fence, watching men, kicking her legs. Already she feels superior to them. Already she knows she can do what she wants. She chews gum. She kicks her legs. She walks along the railroad tracks, putting down pennies to be flattened by the train as it roars past, so close her hair feels like it is being blown off, so loud her ears hear it for a long time afterwards. Afterwards the pennies are too hot to touch. She goes down the street, to where her uncle has his metal shop in the back of a garage facing an alleyway, and watches in mute fascination as he makes little holes in her collection of flattened coins. She makes earrings and a necklace, and wears them until they get too heavy. She isn’t afraid of the drill press. She knows that very soon, maybe next year, maybe even this year, if she is very serious and very good, he will let her use it. She is eleven; in two days she will be twelve.

It is always hot summer when her year turns. It makes her feel special. It is always hot afternoon when everything is still and she walks down the street, her flip-flops going slimy from the sweat, even the wildest dogs lounging in doorways or under cars, their tongues hanging out. She walks to the corner store for more gum, the change jangling in her pocket. Later this afternoon they will go out for dinner, Katya and her mum, who is called Estelle, and her uncle, who is called Randolph, to the place on the river, and Katya will eat crab. There will be a big tank in the window, with crabs swimming around in it. There will be sea vegetables growing from the mire on the bottom; the owner’s one concession aside from the tank’s relative roominess to the comfort of the crabs.

Randolph gets the creeps from the crabs, but he doesn’t say anything. He loves Katya too much, and, as always, admires her feistiness, her bravery. Estelle is wearing a white suit; she looks slim and pure, her brown hair has waves in it. Katya is wearing a clean T-shirt over her shorts and not the green velvet dress which was offered to her by her mother. Her hair is cut in bangs and quite short but not too short, so that it curls under just above her shoulders. Her brown legs under the table are wearing not flip-flops but new white sandals. Randolph: I am not sure whether he, too, is wearing a white linen dinner jacket (where would he get such a thing?) or his overalls over a purple T-shirt, his safety goggles up on his head, where he has forgotten to take them off. He watches Katya with an intense interest. I inject myself into his interest: it is awed, admiring, completely absorbed. Estelle watches, too. She is cool, a little distant; she sips her drink, which tastes faintly of lime Kool-Aid. She is in love with Randolph.