A garden in the midst of grief
June 2, 2020
In a radically different world, I sat down to write about lilies of the valley. That was days ago. It was ages ago.
May 25th was Memorial Day. That afternoon, as I pushed my shovel into heavy clumps of root-bound soil in my back yard, a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, pushed his knee into the neck of George Floyd, a black man, killing him. The following day, a cellphone video of that horrific event went public, and the world we knew was gone.
George Floyd was murdered on a street in Minneapolis. I live across the river, in St. Paul. I call both of these cities home. The angle of my lens is not wide enough to encompass the events now convulsing the rest of the nation and the world. Forgive the journal-entry format. Forgive my “just the facts” tone. I cannot express the anguish I feel, along with millions of others. I offer only a few stark, inadequate words.
I have spent the past several excruciating nights watching the scenes on cable TV. Protestors facing tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets. Criminals seizing the opportunity to vandalize, loot and burn. Governors mobilizing the National Guard, imposing curfews, closing freeways. Marches and demonstrations. Volunteers cleaning up wreckage, bringing food, donating money and supplies. Businesses re-opening as they can, many with boarded-up windows.
My house is separated by a bridge from the Third Precinct police station, where the four officers now charged in George Floyd’s death worked. That building was set on fire, as were several others in the vicinity. Those buildings were located on Lake Street, a primary artery through South Minneapolis. During the evening before that rage-filled night, a three-mile swath of Lake Street saw businesses - most of them small, family-owned, minority-owned - looted and vandalized. Years ago, my address was a brief walk from the Fifth Precinct building, a few blocks through the residential areas that the cameras did not show.
As Minneapolis meets St. Paul, in the middle of that bridge across the Mississippi, it turns into Marshall Avenue. I live three blocks north of Marshall.
For me, the damage was mostly an inconvenience. The Speedway just up the street, torched. The Walgreens where I pick up my prescriptions, looted. Even the tiny shop where I bring my broken watches, a business devoted entirely to fixing broken watches, was trashed. For days, I couldn’t buy groceries, gas, toiletries, Tylenol, or liquor. It is heartbreaking to see the sheets of plywood covering the windows of the family-owned, minority-owned shops and restaurants I have patronized for decades. God only knows what the next few months will bring.
I have lived in the Twin Cities my entire life. For decades, I’ve stayed through brutal winters, glorious summers, magnificent autumns. I fill my soul with spring. It is the season too brief, too filled with life not to celebrate. Spring signals growth. First, the crocuses appear. Then the star magnolia blossoms outrageously, followed by lilacs, Northern Lights azaleas, Siberian irises. And finally, lilies of the valley.
Christian Dior sewed sprigs into the hems of his couture gowns, so that the scent would waft through the air as his elegant patrons moved. He slipped a stem into his buttonhole each day. It was Dior’s favorite flower. And it is mine, as well.
When I was a kid, lilies of the valley ran in an unruly border along one side of the house. They bloomed before the dandelions, and their scent was heavenly. I’d bring fistfuls of them to my mother and was rewarded with hugs. Thirty years ago, I brought a few of the plants to my own yard. Now, these “pips”, as the gardening books so perkily call them, have choked and throttled every growing thing they’ve encountered. They’ve reduced my beloved tulips to a few helpless gestures. To say they are invasive is to minimize their march of terror. They are the al Qaeda of the plant kingdom. But like a doting grandmother, like Dior, I’ve looked the other way.
For the two weeks of the year that they bloom, I place small, narrow-necked bottles of the translucent green shoots with their tiny cascading white bells throughout the house. As I walk from room to room, I breathe in their sweetness with each step. Afterwards, I go outside, take up my spade, and attempt to eradicate them from the face of the earth.
Not an easy task. After digging out a one-foot-square patch, I’m soaked with sweat. It has taken me more than an hour. I could just as well try to cut through shag carpeting with a spoon. Those tousled, innocuously dewy leaves have a root system so tangled as to be nearly impregnable. These exquisite flowers with their attractive foliage are not only challenging to uproot. They are poisonous.
How poisonous? A quick Google search revealed that the entire plant is toxic. The ingestion of any part of it can cause seizures, heart arrhythmia, blurred vision, vomiting, even death. All the more reason to remove them. All of them.
As I went back to my digging, an analogy came to mind. Racism derives from the word that means ‘root’ in our language. I think of the roots of racism, as embodied our police force, in our country, in our whiteness. Beneath the leaves and the lovely flowers are a mass of tangled roots. They are insidious, but not indestructible. Maybe their evil spread can be contained. We can stop the toxins. We can stop the deaths.
George Floyd, the innocent man crushed under the knee of a brutal police officer, crying out that he could not breathe, is dead. I, who can fill my lungs with the fragrance of the flower I so deeply love, am alive.
The word ‘root’ is also a cognate of the word ‘radical’. And as a small, radical gesture in his memory, I uproot that poison.
