I started weeping in the spring. The song of a cardinal announced it was time to reclaim my warm-season ritual, a daily stroll around the park, in the cool just after sunrise. The breeze was sweet with lilac and optimism, but when a passing jogger tossed “good morning” over her shoulder, an unexpected urge to cry pinched off my response. Later at breakfast, a quick intake of breath brought on a fit of sobbing. My husband asked, “What’s wrong?” I couldn’t answer.
 
Come spring, toadstools sprouted in our front lawn. They radiated from a spot where we’d dug up a stump––roots invisible under the grass. The toadstools spoiled my plans for a perfect yard: begonias planted at the door, liriope marching along the stairs in stripes of gold and green, vinca popping purple under an ash tree. I would create a landscape fit for Monet. Spring was for blossoms, not for agents of decay. 

Moments of malaise stretched into weeks. Shadowy figures and snippets of conversation floated through the fog that eddied around me. I couldn’t sort laundry into colors and whites, determine which spray bottle to pick up for dusting and which for cleaning windows, or select ingredients to combine for supper. I couldn’t watch television, watched Depression instead.  

Weeding out toadstools was the one chore I could manage. Simple. Monotonous.

Wrap your hands around the rake, Dawn. Drag it through the grass. Lift, reach, pull. 

At first, I only noticed them full grown, a Mongol horde in tight formation, invading the defenseless lawn. But after a few days, my trained eye detected breaks in their advancing line. I spotted them in the grass just as the crowns of their heads broke ground. Here and there a white dot poking out of the dirt. I learned to focus on the empty spaces instead of the solid mass.
 
Seeking fragments of normalcy, I fortified myself with caffeine. One cup of green tea equaled fifteen minutes––time enough to unload the top rack of the dishwasher. Two cups to read an email. Add Excedrin, and I could answer one.
 
Sometimes I escaped my jailer by reassuring Depression I was still its prisoner. “Can’t possibly go to yoga,” I said to the bathroom mirror, “but maybe I’ll shower.” Maybe I’ll put on my clothes. Maybe, pick up the car keys. 
 
But I missed Depression, whenever it dissipated.
 
Wrap your hands around the rake, Dawn. Lift, reach, pull.
  
After a thunderstorm, the toadstools swallowed the empty spaces. Like a lava flow, the infestation consumed fescue, violets, even dandelions unfortunate enough to spring up in its path. I was outraged. Not my yard. Anger ignited a spark of energy. I worked furiously, head bowed, back bent. The effort exhausted me after ten minutes. 

“To hell with this.” I threw the rake on the ground, then feeling sheepish, kneeled to retrieve it. Beyond my feet, the rest of the lawn: lush, emerald, glistening from the rain, indifferent to the battle I waged. 

In an act of determination more than pleasure, I drove to English Landing Park, a strip of reclaimed floodplain squeezed between the Missouri River and the Burlington Northern tracks. I turned off the motor and slumped behind the wheel. The keys dangled from the ignition. I couldn’t marshal strength to open the door but managed to lower the windows. A breeze brushed my face. A train whistled as it thundered through a crossing. The engine labored against a mile-long string of cars, loaded with coal from the mines of Montana. Barely visible through the windshield, the Missouri crawled east toward the Mississippi. I let the wind breathe for me. It lifted a wisp of my sorrow into the unconcerned clouds. 

Wrap your hands around the rake, Dawn. Lift, reach, pull. 

The toadstools and I settled into a routine. They grew. I lopped off their heads. If only I could lop off my own. Surely it was the source of all this pain.
 
Ben opened the bedroom door. “How’re you doing, Honey?” 

He was too much to take in, that he would interrupt his happy life to ask how I was doing. I started to cry. 
He put his hand on my cheek. “I’m calling Phil.” He went into his office to search for our therapist’s number. His muffled voice on the phone offered solace. 
 
I had faith in Phil. He would cheer me up and then, through some hocus pocus I wouldn’t understand, he’d put me back together. 
 
Perched on the edge of a chair in his office, he studied my face while I stammered out disjointed answers to his questions. He called my condition a blockage, as though I were a plumbing problem, then went straight to work unclogging it. “A child ego state,” he said. “Witnessed family nightmares, too scary for a little one to handle. She hid in the shadows until now, until it was safe to cry.”  

She had plenty of practice not crying.
 
Mornings. A chronic stomachache kept me home from third grade. My parents took me to the doctor, even though Dad said I was lying to get out of going to school. “You better be sick, or …” 

Days. A German shepherd leapt on me, snarling, biting, tugging my shirt with his teeth. He ran off to chase a car. I ran home. Mama was behind her closed bedroom door. Dad at work.
 
Nights. A monster made of chains rattled up the stairs toward my room. I hid in the closet. No point crying when I woke up. Nobody came to comfort me.
 
For the past few weeks Little Dawn had been bursting into tears. Finally, an explanation, an alignment of cause and effect. The logic lifted my despair. Leaving Phil’s office, I assumed I was cured, but at home, the tears returned.
 
Despair doesn’t care about logic.
 
I researched toadstools on the Internet: garden blogs, nursery sites, horticulture listservs. Information gathering was based on certain imperatives: 
1) Systematize the problem 
2) Manage the process 
3) Measure the outcome  
Experimentation followed, which tested the effectiveness of: 
A. Sulphate of iron  
B. Fungicide 
C. Epsom salts 
Results: Failure on all counts.
  
I gave up on faith. At a follow-up appointment with Phil, I demanded psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, prescriptions, or at the very least, a thorough analysis replete with polysyllabic terms. “What had I witnessed? Can’t you make me remember what happened?”
 
“Sometimes you don’t need to know the details in order to get better.” He placed a buzzer in each of my palms. “Bi-lateral stimulation,” he said.
 
Eight syllables. Promising.
 
He leaned in, his eyes kind, voice soft. “I want you to take bubble baths and watch funny movies. Hold hands with Ben. You’re safe now.” 

The reassuring tone infuriated me. It sounded patronizing, but I couldn’t turn away. A little girl was watching from the dark behind my eyes.
 
The toadstools defeated me. My efforts collapsed under the weight of their proliferation. Returning the rake to its hook on the garage wall, I abandoned hope that the lawn would thrive again, assumed the toadstools––inevitable––would overrun it in one final assault. Instead, their numbers ebbed and flowed, one morning a cluster above the invisible root, two days later a dense carpet under the ash, and after that, a lone slender stalk near the sidewalk. 
 
Ben was scheduled to lead a week-long silent retreat. “I’m taking you with me,” he said.
 
“Okay.” 

“You won’t have to do anything––” 

“Okay.”
  
“––but I’m not leaving you here alone.” 

“Okay.” 

We slept on a twin bed. He curled around me like a cocoon. 
 
I was resting alone in the kitchen when Lovella, the center’s owner, ambled in wearing a ruffled bib apron over her dress. Just like the one Mama’d slipped over her head on long ago Saturdays, before making chili for supper, the aroma of sizzling onion stinging my nose.
  
Lovella’s kitchen filled up with mothers, as Annette, Kate, and Bonnie padded in to prepare dinner. They floated around each other in a waltz from fridge to sink to stove. Without speaking, anticipated just when to place a dishtowel or wooden spoon into another’s outstretched hand. I was lulled by squeaking cabinet doors, running water, and knives clacking against cutting boards. 
 
Lift, reach, pull.
 
The mothers spoke no words of comfort the week I lived on the periphery of their retreat. But on my way to the shower, Kate wrapped her arms around me, holding on until I wilted ever so slightly into her embrace. Annette, or was it Bonnie, squeezed my hand under the table at lunch. Passing me in the hallway, Lovella patted my back. The warmth of her hand lingered after she’d gone. By week’s end, depression drifted away, lifted into the silence along with the fading tones of the bell at the final meditation. 
 
Spring turned to summer. The toadstools shriveled back underground, where they’ll wait for the next good rain to push them to the surface. In my preference for the lawn, I’ll scrape them away. Maybe I’ll surrender to the rhythm of the task, instead of waging war. Maybe I’ll remember the spring when faith made the best rake, while chopping away with logic only gave me blisters. 

The intuitive was wearing oven mitts when she opened her front door and waved me in for a consult with my spirit guides. “I’ve been baking. We’ll have cookies later.” After Wendy and I settled on her couch, she spread Tarot cards on the coffee table. She turned them over one by one, her manicured fingernail tapping each card for emphasis.

Tarot cards? Really? Why isn’t she channeling my guides?

“What?” Wendy asked.

A whiff of oatmeal cookies overpowered the candle she’d lit.

“Well. Umm. I prefer the guides.”

She put the cards away and walked over to her bookcase, stood for a moment without speaking. She was emptying herself of Wendy.

When she turned to face me, the guides scolded like impatient parents. “She thinks wisdom only comes through in this fashion.” “It will be hard to live up to her potential.” “If she’s going to be creative, she’ll be destructive too.”

Even though the guides were scolding me, I was finally receiving the attention I was starving for.
Wendy scrunched her face as if trying to make out an object in the distance. “They’re gone now. Someone else is here.” Wendy paused. “A woman who hasn’t been here before. Standing in a shadow. Stoop-shouldered.” Wendy was still as a corpse. “She’s looking right at you, but she doesn’t say anything.”

I leaned forward. “Mama?”

Most days during my childhood, Mama didn’t look at me. She wandered from room to room like a zombie. Rooms with roaches in the cupboards and grime on the floors. Rooms where laundry drifted in the corners. I spent a lot of time in the corner, too, wary of the zombie, wishing I had a mother. She and Dad often argued behind their closed bedroom door, while we kids eavesdropped from the top step, long past our bedtimes. One night two men escorted Mama––listless and compliant––down those stairs. I didn’t know who they were, but Dad didn’t try to stop them. He led them through the living room and grim-faced, held the front door open. I watched them take my mother away.

In the 1960s, no one spoke of mental illness.

Dad said Mama “got better real fast” after the doctor threatened shock treatments.

My grandmother called her lazy.

In Wendy’s living room, I felt the gaze I’d craved for fifty years. “Mama’s here.”

Fragmented images of her that I’d long forgotten floated together in my imagination. The woman she’d surely been, in between bouts of depression, eased into the foreground. A tremor went up my arm.

“She’s gone,” Wendy said.

Her visit was over, but Mama had walked into my life and made it clear she’d never leave me.

The Mama I’d forgotten loved to dress up.

In my favorite picture, she posed with hands on hips, a wide grin on her face. She wore a forties skirt suit: broad shoulders, nipped waistline, and her feet clad in ankle strap peep-toes. The outfit was topped with an admiral’s hat that framed her shoulder-length waves. The epitome of chic. It took a beat to realize the headgear was a joke. It belonged to Dad’s kid brother Al, who was standing next to her, hatless, in his high school band uniform.

She and Dad celebrated a New Year’s Eve at the Elks Club. Her outfit: a champagne-colored chiffon dress. Short puffy sleeves. Sweetheart neckline. Full skirt billowing over petticoats. They swished when she walked.

She took my brother Michael, in high school then, to a production of “The World of Suzie Wong,” at Des Moines’ KRNT Theatre. Her outfit: a black knit dress that hugged her hourglass figure. A narrow belt of the same fabric. Stockings with seams up the back. Black suede pumps.

Michael remembered she’d struck up a conversation with a young Asian couple sitting next to her. “What nationality are you?” (They were Japanese and had emigrated to Hawaii.) Perhaps she followed up with Where are your parents? How did you end up in Des Moines? Do you miss Japan? These are questions I would have asked. I inherited her curiosity, along with her depression.

My sister Michelle is a minister; part of her ministry is helping the living communicate with loved ones who have passed on. “Do you think Mama has a message for me?” I asked.

“Let’s go walking in my favorite place, and I’ll find out,” she said.

At Santa Barbara’s Botanical Garden, we found a winding path that led uphill and down, in and out of the shade. We stopped on a stone bridge to listen to a creek that gurgled underneath. As we continued, the hot sun on my bare arms turned into cool, still air. We’d entered a redwood grove.

“This is the spot,” Michelle said.

We sat side by side on a bench in the shade of the giants, and then she wandered off alone. I leaned way back to see the treetops. I was a supplicant in a holy place, as I’d been at monasteries I’d visited on retreat. The redwoods silenced the chatter in my mind.

Michelle returned and sat beside me. “Mama said she’s proud of you. She said keep writing. It’s important.”
It was a Christmas present in July.

When I was eight, she noticed I’d developed a chronic stomachache and insisted on taking me to the doctor, against Dad’s objection. She noticed my dislike of chili. Whenever she made the dish for supper, she fried me a burger instead.

She noticed a world brought into our living room every night by Huntley and Brinkley. When her sisters visited from out of town, her conversation was peppered with words meaningless to me: Chiang Kai-shek, Roosevelt, The War.

Summers, Mama used to pore over the Burpee Seed Catalog. I sat across from her with my elbows on the kitchen table and the backs of my thighs sticking to the plastic chair seat. Mama didn’t look up. Her house was dirty, her children stinky, but marigolds bloomed by the front porch.

The year I turned fourteen, Dad––divorced and remarried––moved the family to California. I don’t remember saying goodbye to Mama. She wrote to me all through my high school years. I don’t remember answering. She remarried. I didn’t congratulate her. We exchanged neither phone calls nor visits. She died shortly after I graduated from college. I didn’t go back to Des Moines for her funeral. I’d inherited her looks, but also Dad’s attitude toward money. The idea of buying something as expensive as a plane ticket was alien to me. I was poor, and Mama was a stranger.

She died of heart failure.

After she visited me at Wendy’s house, I suspected her heart had been broken.

My father punished us with a razor strop. Or his bare hand. A smack on the backside sent the victim airborne. It only took a glare to shrink me into submission. Surely Mama bore witness. Did he hit her, too?
Dad woke up one morning with Mama holding a gun to his head.

He told the story when we were all grown, as proof of her madness.

After she visited me at Wendy’s house, I revisited that old story. I suspected she stood over him, sighting him down the barrel of that pistol, waiting. After his beady eyes opened, I imagined she said, “Don’t you touch my kids again, mother fucker.”

By the time we were adults, Mama’s children resided in three different states, but one summer Michael, Michelle, our brother Bill, and—along with our younger brother Wayne—visited her grave together. Or rather, Bill took the rest of us. He and Mama had remained close, and after she died, he made a pilgrimage to her gravesite every year. But it was the only time the four of us had come together to honor her. Bill bent down and brushed dirt from her headstone, set flat in the ground.

I felt awkward.

Bill said, “She was happy after she remarried.”

Michelle said, “She’s here now.”

“You mean you feel her spirit?” Michael asked.

“I see her. Right over there.” She pointed to a spot behind Bill’s shoulder. “Wearing a white dress. She’s at peace. Happy we’re here. Together.”

It was then it occurred to me. How devastating to have her children wrenched away, clear across the country.

We stood in a circle around her grave, our heads bowed. We said nothing. My shoulders slumped under the weight of confusing emotions.

As we crossed the cemetery to return to the car, our steps were slow and labored in the Iowa humidity.

Michael, Michelle, and Wayne spent the weekend at my house in Kansas City. Michelle took to sitting alone on the patio, surrounded by pots of roses, petunias, and marigolds. I’d inherited Mama’s taste for marigolds.
At dinner, amid our chatter, her gaze turned toward the dining room window. She had a way of saying big things in a small way that made the thing even bigger. “Mama was on your patio today. Now she’s standing just outside the window.”

I smiled to think of Mama striking a pose on my patio, all dressed up in a skirt suit and peep-toe pumps.

Frequently while I’m reading, a sentence grabs me and forces me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

###

“We weren’t traumatized. Just poor.”

———Angela Flournoy
——--The Turner House

I was seven, sitting on the floor of my bedroom, half dressed. I toed the pile of dirty clothes beside me hoping a pair of shorts would surface, while absently buttoning my blouse. Oh, she was a fluff of little girl fantasy, that blouse—gossamer sheer with tiny covered buttons and short puffy sleeves like Cinderella. And the prettiest shade of pink.

Distracted by a book or a daydream, I got to the last button before noticing I’d missed one. I looked down just in time to see a roach crawling up the inside of my gossamer fantasy. I screamed, tore off the blouse, stomped on it. And sobbed.

When I was seventeen, my mother brought home a present for me; a surprise present was unheard of. She handed me a bag from a fancy department store, also unheard of; she usually shopped the thrift stores. It was a party dress. A slim pleated beauty with spaghetti straps, it fit like it was made for me. And it was the prettiest shade of pink.

I hated that dress.