Posts: Bloom

It’s Your Life

I have a toilet sitting in front of my house. It has purple flowers coiling over the edges and succulents that remind me of my grandmother’s weed-infested garden. I get all my gardening advice from Grandma Kim, whose garden in Southeast Portland overflows with produce. When I visit her, I hold on to something sacred that was lost over the generations. 

Grandma Kim first planted her feet in the United States in the 1960s. From the outside, the Kims look like a normal family who immigrated from Korea; but an arranged marriage and family honor is what pushed them to get married. Sixty years later, they remain in the same house in a neighborhood that has been gentrified two times over. My grandmother never got her driver’s license, was never able to work, and jokes about being a servant to my grandfather. Yet it wasn’t until recently that I gained awareness of how unjust this was to her, and I wonder what role gender had in determining the outcome of her life in a new country, marrying a man she’d never met, in a language she didn’t know a word of. 

When I was fourteen, I dropped a copy of the book I was reading: White Feminism by Koa Beck. Grandma Kim picked it up.
My mom and I nervously exchanged glances, and my grandma said, “Feminism? Already? Good girl.” 

In the garden, she would show me leaves with brown spots and holes from bugs and whisper, “We share with the bugs.” She’d laugh, and I would think about how all these organisms are reliant on one another for survival: the bugs, the leaves, and my grandmother. 

She used to whisper, “The neighbors are homo.” She was disappointed, not because of their sexuality, but because, in her terms, there were “only dogs and cats,” and no babies for her to knit for or bake brownies for. I was always scared to tell her about my sexuality, afraid that I might lose her. Eventually, in my late teens, I worked up the nerve and told her I had a girlfriend. 

“Girlfriend? Everyone has girlfriend,” she said.

“No, Grandma, like, I’m dating a girl.”

“Well, that’s your decision,” she said, and went back to chopping up fresh cucumbers from her garden. I panicked, scared she didn’t understand. 

“What? You think I have problem with that?” She shook her head. “Aye, I don’t have problem. The neighbors around the corner have girlfriend and people are, y’know. It’s your life.” 

My grandmother’s resilience, her untraditional actions in a traditional life, showed me there’s no one single way to exist, and no wrong way to live. As I add the final touches to my garden toilet, planting succulents and flowers, I think of her advice: Pluck the brown parts off, talk to the plants, and nothing matters unless you are happy. Like my grandmother, I hope to create something beautiful where I was planted. 

Charlie Bloomer, Eagle Creek

Second Chances

Ten days before her eightieth birthday, an ambulance rushed my mom to the hospital. My sister and I met in the emergency room, where an X-ray showed a cracked skull from a fall. Doctors queried her history and lifestyle. We spoke of verve, water aerobics, her cat. Meanwhile, a trickle of blood bloomed in her head. The more we discussed vitality, the more serious the doctors became. Would she choose to live, doctors wondered, if she couldn’t feed herself? 

For three days she lay unresponsive. We sat bedside at the hospital, waiting. 

I cleaned her room at the assisted living facility and found empty vodka bottles in the laundry, behind the kitty litter box, between cashmere sweaters. Months earlier, my siblings and I were bewildered after discovering her recent alcohol use. She denied it and fought us. I’d yearned to quit managing her care. 

On day four, her condition stabilized. Nurses propped her in a chair, tethered her to IVs, and wedged pillows behind her head. Underneath her still-closed eyelids, two black half-moons made her resemble a strangely beautiful raccoon. She didn’t eat.

The nurses kept the lights dim. We waited. Old magazines and cold coffee kept me company. I brushed her hair. I hadn’t made peace. I hadn’t confronted her. I hadn’t told her I loved her. 

I played “Clair de lune” one afternoon when we were alone. Always, her favorite song. Piano notes tiptoed into the hushed room.

Her right forearm slowly lifted, as if caught by a breeze, and her palm swayed. My chest tightened. As the piano intensified, her wrist turned, fingers fluttering like a dancer’s. 

A slick of tears streaked down her cheeks from unopened eyes. Was she in there? The inability to understand burned at me. I blinked, breathless and blinded. Her body was motionless, her hand now a falling bird. Did she hurt?

I switched to “How Sweet It Is,” by James Taylor. Her thumb bent, and four fingers tapped the air like she was playing a bongo drum.

A nurse entered and admonished me for my noisemaking.

That night, Mom opened her eyes halfway. She swallowed pudding. A doctor knelt by her bed and whispered into her ear.

Slowly, she healed. The drinking and lies vanished.

We had one final year where words of understanding and joy were spoken. Part of our Mom had died. The best of her lived.

Kelli Grinich, McMinnville

At the Library

“This looks like a really good book,” says the boy with tired eyes and a runny nose, eager to hand me books to shelve, impatient with the placement, rushing ahead to the next book, and the next. 

“How was winter break?” I ask. He shrugs. “It was okay. I like school better.” 

Post retirement—following five years of COVID, national strife and discord, and as everyone says “a world on fire”—I am sitting in a small elementary school library, or more accurately kneeling, scooting, bending, listening, reading, smiling. Really looking into the eyes of the (six-year-old) person in front of me. Helping.

Even at seventy-one, I am still figuring out life. More wary, less comfortable, less cheerful. But still trying. And so each week I go to the library, smiling, greeting everyone, noticing a little bloom of happiness in my heart. 

The children are a school of fish unto themselves, whirling through story time. Bodies, hands, and feet busy with each other, leaning up to and on top of tables, tipping over chairs, eddying toward the teachers, then finally, for some, sitting with the books.

For these young readers, the words, in Spanish and English, are mostly indecipherable. They are drawn to pictures of dancers, dark eyes, beautiful dresses, warriors, dragons, dark skin, light skin, hair with diamonds, animals with swords. 

In a moment of calm, and with focused concentration, the boy and I read a book about orangutans. I turn the pages, and we talk about what we see; and as we talk, a world opens for both of us, and we step in. In that moment, my mind is quiet, and my heart lifts off. 

We finish the book, and it is time to go. The boy’s happy face reflects my happiness. I wonder what this all means to him. I reach back for memories of myself at that age. Does it mean as much for him as for me? Probably not. But maybe this small, shared experience—sitting together, sharing space and time and imagination, exploring—maybe that means something that will last a lifetime. For both of us. 

Jolene Siemsen, Eugene

Of Flames and Flowers

I once taught English on the island of Saipan in Micronesia. I lived at the top of a neglected coral road that was often washed out and always riddled with potholes. 

Most drivers catapulted their cars up and down the road, sending white coral dust into thick clouds that dulled the jungle blooms and obscured pedestrians. Walking is my meditation and exercise, so I tried to walk the road a few times, but whenever a car passed me, I’d end up coughing into the thick trees—dust covering the leaves and me. 

I decided that any benefits from walking that road were more than cancelled out by dust inhalation and probable injury by automobile. So I started driving north to Marpi to walk. There, the road was lined with swaths of lush green crabgrass, and the horizontal boughs of flame trees stretched their scarlet blossoms to the sky. There, it was easier to shed heaviness of every kind.  

But in the spring of my last year on Saipan, the north end of the island was closed to detonate unexploded remnants of World War II munitions. 

A fire had recently burned nearby, and friends who lived in the neighborhood hadn’t been worried about the fire so much as the latent landmines it might ignite. Sure enough, they said it sounded like the Fourth of July when the flames sent rusted elements of war exploding. 

In my early thirties then, I was still learning how to put out my own figurative fires. When a flame of fear or anger caught and began to race through the forests of my life, I braced myself for the detonation of rusty and forgotten pasts. It was never pretty when things exploded. But I grew grateful for the clarity that came after. And, like soil after a burn, I also grew grateful for the nutrients that life’s ashes offer. They encourage growth.

Later that spring, the island’s annual Flame Tree Arts Festival began. As the only art event on the island at the time, it had a big turnout. All along the beach, beneath the bright flowers of the trees that gave the festival its name, people gathered to dance, eat, and enjoy the art. 

An even more enduring art: learning to till the ashes of hardship, loss, and regret. To replant burned places with joy and thankfulness. To watch something new begin to bloom. 

Anna Elkins, Rogue River

Conversation Starter

Five years ago, Jody hired me to help her keep order in her apartment garden. I drove to the address and pulled into a drab group of two-story buildings with minimal land-scaping. Dumpsters were overflowing, and cigarette butts dotted the areas in front of doorways.

I’d have been able to find her place even without the building number, as it was practically the only spot with any color. She had planted most every possible area in front and back.

Jody was a bargain shopper out of necessity. She lived on a limited income in her retirement, and she shopped thrift stores to fill her apartment and markdown shelves at garden centers to fill her garden beds. She repurposed bed frames as trellises. We would start weeding at opposite ends of her backyard, and I would meet her far beyond the midpoint. She loved to talk of plants, and I’d do my best to converse given my preference for working alone.

One summer she paid me to weed in front of every apartment. I was wary of trespassing on people’s territory, but she had no qualms. She felt that she was a one-person beautification committee, bringing a sliver of joy to a sad complex. 

Another time she decided to plant a strawberry patch in a spot directly across the parking lot from her door. We built up the area with soil and compost, and I plugged in thirty plants. The patch produced loads of berries from the start, beginning in the spring and all the way until early fall, year after year.  

Jody started having jaw pain and eventually got referred to a specialist; before long, she found out she had stage 4 cancer. She was losing weight because she couldn’t eat solid food. She never complained. It was painful for her to speak, so she used a tablet to communicate in a neat script. Hospice sent a nurse to check in. I visited with her and took her for coffee. I sent postcards across town to her. And then silence. I found out she had gone to a hospice house and passed away quickly and peacefully, fourteen months after her diagnosis.

I’ll keep on weeding the strawberries and remember my funny friend, recalling how much she liked to talk while I worked, teaching me to listen and share and be less concerned with the finishing.   

Tom Spofford, Eugene

The Hospitality of Huckleberries

Are you from here?

The question makes my chest tighten. I’ve been asked this regularly since moving to Eastern Oregon six months ago, but my “no” still comes out like an apology.

It’s an iceberg of a question. On the surface, a “yes-no.” But underneath, the expectation of elaboration, which, in my case, has me circling around the drain of my life story, justifying my winding path through multiple states, while simultaneously trying to convey how deeply I want to put down roots.

Plants are how I like to get to know my new homes. Plants welcome me without judgment, though I can’t say I’ve always returned the favor. Flipping through my guidebooks, I’m the one asking, Are you from here?

I noticed the huckleberries on my first day. After hours of unpacking, my partner and I hopped on our bikes, racing to the summit of the local mountain. Winding up the road, the landscape transitioned from farmland to open ponderosa pine to dense and verdant grand fir and spruce. Midway up, I stopped and shouted, “Look at all these huckleberries!”

The shrubs carpeted the understory as far as I could see. Wading in up to my hips, I peeked at the pale white and pink buds, barely noticeable and clinging to the undersides of the stems. But the promise of abundance was there.

Wild Western huckleberries have resisted commercialization for many reasons, including their slow growth, preference for higher elevations, and the fact that they revel in disturbance, like wildfire. Historically, Indigenous cultural burning benefited huckleberries in the Pacific Northwest by allowing more sunlight into the understory and keeping less-fire-tolerant vegetation at bay. With the arrival of European colonization and fire suppression, huckleberry habitat began to dwindle.

In ecological thinking, ecosystems are dynamic and disturbance is possibility, creating new potential niches and spaces for newcomers. Our current zeitgeist tends to favor homogenization over this kind of messiness. A defiant separation from the earth. A denial that we are “from here.”

A few months later, the huckleberry patch has transformed into a sea of bright purple jewels. Their juice anoints my fingers and their freely given flesh tastes like sunlight melting in my mouth. The berry blessings are a tender balance between belonging—being rooted and resourced—and an abundance that blooms not in spite of disturbance, but because of it.

Anna Lindquist, La Grande

Suckers

Sarah calls for help: The tomato plants are budding with self-destruction. I don’t understand, and I ask her as I tie my shoes, What’s wrong with them growing? They drape across their cages, theatrically sighing over their own verdant voluptuousness. Bulbs thicken on twiggy fingers, flirting with edibility as they blush spots of red under the summer sun. Isn’t that what we want? Maximum tomatoes.

She’s hesitant to remind me of what I’m conveniently forgetting: We had too many tomatoes last year. Not enough youth were taking them home. The youth who were, weren’t taking enough. We couldn’t make them want. We hauled Romas, tomatillos, ground-cherries, and heirlooms to the shelter and prayed they’d be consumed. We grew, gathered, and gave. What else do we know to do?

At the beds, she lifts a limb, exposing the armpit: From a V of stalk and branch pokes a branch-in-beginning, a tiny twig with two leaves curled shyly inward, alien ears of malachite. Clipping “suckers,” she tells me they’re called, refocuses the body’s energy on what it already has. So we spend the afternoon amputating every attempted sixth finger from each plant, pinched between our human pointers and thumbs, chastising crops for thinking the grass is greener only when it’s more. 

I’m half a hypocrite stripping newborn arms, littering them at their roots. I’m a sucker for creation until it hurts. Gripping crayons until I’m in the nurse’s office with pounding palms, reddened by the passion of first-grade art. Cradling an ice pack, brainstorming what shapes to form from wax next. I create into nothing: Poems torn and flushed down the toilet, chalk art hosed from the sidewalk.

I don’t feel like we’re suckers. Not for sprouts. Not for being fruitless, for reaching out to touch more. I feel like a sucker when produce tumbles to lawn, split, rotten, wasted; when I fail to can or cook or chew all the fruit away.

I squeeze the gratitude for growth until my grip nearly gives. I crouch and toil over unripe lives among friends even as the summer dry-heaves heavier heat across our bent backs. Even as participants dwindle and funding rears its question mark, we teach teenagers pasta sauce recipes, we deliver rare treasures to lacking troops, we, yes, sometimes feed the snake the very tail its own scales adorn in tapestry. What else do we know to do?

Lee Thomas, Portland

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