Yesterday, in the morning, she made lemon jello for supper. “So when we sit down to eat tonight, you’ll have something on your plate, too,” she said. It was the day of my first colonoscopy. Later in the afternoon, she sits in a folding chair in her vegetable garden, hoeing her potatoes.
Gloria epitomizes the generation of women who glued American farms together. She kept them running, not only cooking and canning, but being accountant and administrator, doctor, 4-H leader, counselor, comedian, and expert at making patterns to turn paper grocery bags into book covers and robot costumes.
Gloria, my Momma Gloria Harvey Farmer, is the woman behind this old farm and the lady behind the dazzling, multi-color, crinum lily called ‘Aurora Glorialis.’
Yesterday, I watched Momma from a distance. She sat on a chair out in her veggie garden, hoeing. She’d hoe for ten minutes; then she’d lean back into the rusty folding chair and soak up April sun for the next ten minutes. She rolled up her sleeves to soak up every bit of warmth. When she noticed me across the garden, over by the farm sink and larkspur, she said, “I need something to pull the dirt away from the onions. I can’t reach with the oyster shell.” An oyster shell used to be her favorite tool for shallow digging, but now, her body can’t reach down to get it to the onion bulbs that need excavating. I felt heavy and light in my heart, thought for a minute, and wished I could affix an oyster shell to a long stick. I took her a long-handled, hand trowel and from the rusty chair, she got to work on the onions.
Normally, this time of year, I’m going full speed, digging and washing bulbs, loading plants onto the pick-up, and talk-texting as I go. But today, per instructions on and physical effects of a giant jug of colon cleanse juice, I’m getting slower and slower as the day progresses. I’m slowing down to Gloria speed. “Woo! I’m tired.” She walks up to me, leaning on the hoe, “I want to root some roses later.” I started gathering propagation sand, rooting hormone, and stems of roses named for her Mother’s friends. She’ll root them later, and by July, I’ll be potting them up.
She moves slowly into the house. “I forgot something. Let’s do roses later.” She has an appointment with her tech teacher, “There’s something about Siri I just don’t understand yet.” And she’s off.
Now after 12 hours with no food, I’m easily seduced by that same April sun, and the robin and wren orchestra. I fall into a deep nap on the porch. I’m dreaming of Cats when she walks by with her cane and a big knife, “I”m going to get a cabbage for slaw for supper.”
“Can you lean down to get it?” I ask, and she answers frankly, “We’ll see.”
Ten minutes later, she walks by again, “It’s so heavy,” she says, with her cane and knife in one hand, holding the veggie upside down by its stalk with the other. Concentrating, she only now notices a young urban friend who’s stopped in to visit. “Andrew, would you like half a cabbage?” He is one of those paleo-diet, meat-only guys and looks at the cabbage like a baby alien head on a spike, “No, ma’am, I don’t eat those things.”
Momma doesn’t know how to respond to that crazy talk, so she says, “Well, don’t leave before I get back; I have a jar of pickled okra for you.”
Here I am, one day under the weather, complaining to my friend about how I can’t get anything done. One day down, and I’m complaining. I’m mourning for yesterday when I had the internal drive to dream up projects and the physical ability to go and do them. “Enjoy a slow day,” he says. I do not. But I’l try to remember tomorrow to appreciate my body when it gets back to normal for a brief time before it all goes away again.
Back in 2007, I turned an acre of turf into a meadow. South Carolina ‘meadows’, more accurately called pine savannas, look somewhat like river-side grasslands in parts of Africa, so included in my plant mix were a thousand or so Orange River lilies I’d grown from seed. Over the years, I noticed one of these seedlings flowered differently from all the others. Flowers opened green the first day, then faded to a pale pink, then on to a rich, rose. The combination of all three colors on one stalk sparkled. I tagged it for a few years and just watched it in the meadow.
Then I dug it up and tried to propagate it. No luck. So I worked with a professor to propagate it, and now, 15 years later, I finally have a row of this special, multi-colored flower.
Since it’s my seedling, I got to name it. I needed a name to reflect its colors. One night, at a bar, I told a friend about this naming quest. I said, “How about Aurora Borealis to reflect the mutable greens and pinks? But I kind of want to name if for my Momma.” I spoke the words from a Joan Baez quote, “You—special, miraculous, unrepeatable, fragile, fearful, tender, lost, sparkling ruby emerald jewel, rainbow splendor person.” My friend, said, ‘Aurora Glorialis’
Gloria Farmer, who made lemon jello for me this morning, sparkling, ruby, emerald, woman, changing but reliable as day and night inspired me to love plants, is the woman behind the plant I’m most proud of, Crinum x bulbispermum ‘Aurora Glorialis.’
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