The Secret of Flowers

Pocatello, Idaho, 1950

“Janie, can you help me with these?” Grandma calls over her shoulder from the garden bed.

Grandma is a no-nonsense kind of woman–the kind of woman who gets down on her hands and knees in the dirt in a dress and heels. Little Janie watches her curiously from the front steps of the house. 

“Grandma, why are you planting flowers when it's cold?” Janie asks in her small voice.

“It’s spring, Janie–you plant pansies in the spring. As soon as the soil is ready.” She says through labored breaths, flecks of dirt catching in her curly gray hair. “And it's not cold. The sun is out.”

Little Janie blinks up at the blinding sun in the cloudless blue sky. Grandma is right, but that doesn’t stop the goosebumps prickling her arms. 

“Come here, Janie.” Grandma’s tone is insistent now. 

Janie rises obediently and goes to kneel beside Grandma. 

“See what I’m doing now?” Grandma cradles the next pansy plant and turns it upside down to expose the delicate roots. “Gently now, always gently,” She says. Janie knows that nothing about Grandma is gentle, but she nods anyway. “You dig a nice size hole–deep enough and wide enough–then set it in.” She guides her small hand to the base of the purple and yellow pansy flower. “There now. Now we fill it in.” Janie takes a fistful of soft black soil and tosses it in. 

“Here,” Grandma says, guiding Janie’s hands into tiny cups to smooth the dirt. “We fold it in, like egg whites into batter. We don’t want to scare them.”

“Them?” Janie asks. “But they’re flowers.” 

“Ah, they’re more than just flowers, Janie. The more time you spend around flowers, the more you’ll discover their secrets.” 

Janie sits up on her knees. “Secrets? What secrets?”

“Flowers listen to you when you talk to them,” Grandma says, patting the dirt around the flowers as if tucking a child into bed. “They bring hope and beauty to a world so often dark and gray.”

“But today is not dark and gray,” Janie observes in the way that only a seven-year-old can. 

Grandma stops to catch her breath. “Yes, but life has plenty of dark days, and flowers help to brighten even the darkest of times.” 

Fremont, California, 1998

“Look at you helping Grandma, little Sagey.” Grandma smiles as she walks past her five-year-old granddaughter. Little Sage holds the handle of a small metal wagon carrying a load of gravel. Sage watches her grandmother in quiet admiration as she takes the gravel and dumps it onto the ground, carefully smoothing it around the base of the wooden flowerbeds. 

“Grandma, why are you putting rocks in your garden?” Sage asks.

Grandma laughs from where she sits in the gravel, a small shovel in one hand. She wears black jeans, a nice black floral blouse, and white tennis shoes, but looks as comfortable sitting in the dirt and rocks as if she were on an evening stroll downtown. “Why am I putting rocks in my garden? To stop the weeds.” She says, emphasizing the last word like a dreaded disease. 

“What’s so bad about weeds?” Sage wonders aloud.

“Weeds kill flowers; we hate weeds.”

“What’s your favorite flower?” 

Grandma pauses and looks around at her garden. “Well, I love my pink begonias, my lantanas, my hydrangeas…”

“But your favorite?”

“Probably that one behind you, the one with purple flowers.” 

“What is it?”

Grandma smiles. “It’s a sage bush. I planted it the day you were born.”

Pocatello, ID 1950

“Just where do you think you’re going, Dorothy?” Grandma yells from inside the kitchen. Janie’s mom comes down the hall into the kitchen like a whirlwind, heels clacking on the parquet floor, eyes flashing with anger. 

“I’ve met someone. He wants to marry me. We’re leaving.” She says definitively, slamming her suitcases on the armchair in the living room. “Now.”

“We?”

“Me and the children.”

Grandma goes still. Janie freezes outside on the porch, watching through the screen door. Grandma is rarely rendered speechless.

“You can’t be serious!” Grandma bursts out. 

“Serious as a heart attack, mother!” Dorothy, Janie’s mother, says callously. “I’m done living here. Done listening to you and your church friends prattle on about me like I’m some kind of Jezebel!”

“You can’t do this!” Grandma cries. 

“You can’t stop me!” Dorothy shouts back.

Janie winces, stepping away from the door. 

 “Have you lost your mind, girl?" Grandma glares at her. "Every day you’re gone, doing Lord knows what, and every night there’s another man, another stranger. Thank the Lord I’m here to raise your children!” 

“I will not apologize for living my life!” Dorothy rages. 

“No, you won’t apologize at all! Not to anyone. Why would you? You only live your life for yourself.” Grandma accuses her. “Are you really going to take these children away from the only home they have ever known? Who will take care of them?”

“Oh, please! I can take care of my own kids!” Dorothy rails.

Grandma shoves a finger at her own chest. “I feed them. I wash them. I dress them. I put them to bed. Do you know Gloria cries herself to sleep at night? Do you know Janie doesn’t even know if you love her? Not to mention Tommy and Frank. Frank’s just a baby!”

“Stop it!” Dorothy barks.

Janie sinks to the ground and folds her legs to her chest, squeezing her eyes shut and burrowing her face against her knees. She wishes the fighting would stop. When it does, a car engine roars to life. 

“Gloria! Janie! Tommy! Time to go!” Their mother calls. Janie looks up to see her mother marching out the door. There are tears swimming in her eyes. 

“Why are we leaving, Mama?” Janie cries. “I don’t wanna leave.” 

Her mother tugs her toward the car waiting in the driveway. “We have to.” 

“But I don’t want to leave! Where’s Grandma? Is Grandma coming?” Janie’s heart hammers. Dorothy shoves Janie into the back seat and then returns to the house for the others. Janie sees a man sitting at the wheel she has never seen before. His eyes are guarded behind dark black shades, and his mouth is a flat line chewing a cigarette. 

“Grandma!” Janie wails. 

Dorothy storms out the door with the rest of her children in tow. Grandma hurries out the door close behind them. 

Grandma reaches out to embrace Janie. Janie grips her grandmother’s arms. “Grandma, don’t make us go, please! I want to stay.” She buries her face in her Grandma’s chest. 

“No, Janie, I wish you could.” Her Grandma pulls away to hold Janie’s face in her palms. “You must go, it seems, but just know I will still be here. You can always come see me.” Here she stops to glare at her daughter, who turns away. “But if you don’t, just remember,” Grandma leans forward to whisper in her ear, “Look for the flowers.” 

Fremont, CA 2008

“You’re not so little anymore, my Sagey,” Grandma says, reaching over to pat her granddaughter's hand as they sit side by side on her outdoor swing, rocking in the mild Northern California sunshine. Grandma wears the same outfit: black jeans, a black blouse with white and pink flowers, and white Keds. She has aged, though: her skin is dark with age spots, and more wrinkles weigh down her eyes and mouth. She is looking out over her garden, lost in thought. “The garden is my favorite place.” She says. “Sometimes I come and sit out here for hours, to look at the flowers, and to talk.”

Sage glances at her. “To talk? To who?”

Grandma smiles. “The flowers listen.”  

Sage is fifteen now. She might have believed that kind of stuff as a kid, but not now. She rolls her eyes. The garden looks much smaller than she remembers, but it is still beautiful. The flowers are in full bloom, and butterflies and hummingbirds dart through the air. The old stone bird bath, rusted bicycle, and the plastic goose all peek from the flowers like old friends. 

“It feels exactly the same,” Sage says, gazing at everything. “I always feel at home here.” 

Grandma nods. “Good. That’s what I always wanted…a home. This will forever be my home.” 

“What was your home like growing up?” Sage asks. 

Grandma’s eyes go distant. She waits a while, simply rocking. “I never really had one. The closest I had was living with Grandma as a kid. She was the only one who took care of my siblings and me. And after my mother took us away, I never saw her again…” Her eyes grow misty, and she sniffs. “Home was always changing, and it was never really a home. A home is a place of love, and peace, and joy. A place you can plant flowers.” 

Pittsburg, California, 1956

Janie drags her feet up the steps of the large stone building. It is dark, it is late, and she is exhausted. To her left, her younger brother Tommy whines with hunger. To her right, her little brother Frankie is crying, and once again, they find themselves without a roof over their heads. Her step-Dad is drunk again, gone–and her Mother’s irrational behavior got them kicked out of her latest friend’s house. Dorothy assured them she would have a place to stay the night. Janie looks wearily up at the vast brick building. It looks like a prison. 

A man in a government-type uniform greets them at the gate and then ushers them inside. Janie shuffles inside behind her mother and older sister and urges her brothers forward, promising them a bedtime story later. 

They walk down a long, dim hallway littered with trash that smells of urine. Graffiti streaks the walls. They are led to a dark, empty room. When the man leading them turns on the light, the floor beneath them shifts and Janie recoils in fear. 

“Don’t mind the bugs.” The man drones. “Just roaches. I advise leaving the light on.”

Janie can hardly breathe; she is so disgusted. Her mother, however, is smiling as if they’ve just been invited to stay at Buckingham Palace. In the sickly yellow light, Janie can see rows upon rows of flimsy metal bunk beds, furnished with the barest of mattresses.

“Thank you, dear,” Dorothy gushes, patting the man on the shoulder. “We are much obliged.” 

The man only nods. “Bread and soup tomorrow at nine in the mess hall.” He groans, then turns away. 

Janie turns to her mother, still gripping her little brothers’ hands. “Mom, what is this place? Why are we here?”

Dorothy releases a pent-up sigh. “Oh, wow, isn’t this fun, children? Sure beats sleeping in a car! We get to stay the night at an old Military barracks! This is where the soldiers used to sleep during the war.”

Janie gapes at her mother. “Fun? Fun? Mother, are you–,” 

“Don’t be a spoilsport, Janie!” Her mother claps back in that wicked way she always does when Janie attempts to be reasonable. 

“I think it’s fun, Mother.” Janie’s older sister Gloria says, sitting on the edge of a bottom bunk and looking rather proud of herself. 

Janie grunts, suppressing her anger and making the choice–yet again–to put her brother’s needs before her own. She settles them in a bed and sits beside Frankie, stroking his back and whispering to him that everything will be alright. She unearths the last of the sunflower seeds from the pocket of her skirt and splits them between her two brothers, who gobble them greedily. Janie’s stomach growls. She will have to wait for morning. 

Janie claims a bed in the corner, the closest one to the wall, and turns to make sure her mother is asleep. When all is quiet, Janie takes out the two crumpled papers in her other pocket. One is the young women’s motto from Church–back when her Grandmother used to take her–and the other is a picture she drew. It is a picture of a house, with a white picket fence, surrounded by beautiful flowers. 

Janie reaches up and tucks the edges of the paper into the bottom of the bunk above her so that they hang overhead, then gingerly lies back against the smelly mattress, gazing up at them. “One day, I’ll have a beautiful home, with a garden full of flowers, and I will never leave.” 

She whispers, closing her eyes and imagining the place in her mind. “I will have a home, full of flowers, and I will never leave.” A lump forms in her throat. Her bottom lip begins to tremble. Her eyes swell with tears. She chokes down a sob, and silently lets the tears fall. “I will have flowers, and I will never leave…” 

***************************************

A month later, Janie and her siblings are taken into Foster care. At first, she is relieved. The government building they are brought to is clean and quiet, with working electricity and flushing toilets. The chairs and couches are free from rips and stains, and there are water fountains and bags of peanuts for everyone. Janie takes her first real breath in years, relaxing against the sofa and hugging her brothers close as they listen to the radio play the song from the Disney movie Cinderella. The words speak to her soul: “A dream is a wish your heart makes….No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish, will come true.”

She decides right then she will never give up on her dream.

But the next day they are assigned families, and Janie learns they are all being separated. 

“No!” She pleads, grabbing her brothers and pulling them toward her. “They have to stay with me. I have to take care of them!”

“I’m afraid we can’t do that. Don’t worry, they will be taken care of.” The woman in charge says.

Janie screams, stomps her feet, and even throws pillows across the room. In the end, she has to watch her brothers, with faces red from crying, loaded into a car and taken away. 

Janie is shuttled off to a middle-aged couple with no other children. When Janie asks why they can’t take her brothers, they answer gruffly, “One a’ you is enough.”

Janie is forced to attend school, where girls and boys with neatly combed hair and new clothes sneer at her donated dress, which is too small, and her scuffed shoes. At home, she sits by her window and stares outside, dreaming. She sees flowers across the street outside the Library: yellow daffodils and pink tulips. One day, when her foster parents are busy out back, she sneaks out the front and runs to the Library. She finds a stone bench and makes herself comfortable among the flowers, then tells them her story. She tells them everything. And her grandmother is right–they listen. 

Hours pass. The sun begins to set. Janie wants to go anywhere but the awful house, but eventually the cops find her. Her foster parents are livid. They lock her bedroom door and tell her she is never allowed to leave again. 

Fremont, CA 2026

“She won’t stop worrying about her garden,” Uncle Jimmy says, lowering his head to massage his temples. The days and months spent caring for his parents have taken their toll, and he looks defeated. “I just don’t get it. Chronic osteoarthritis, several strokes, paralyzed left arm, a husband with cancer, and all she cares about is if someone is weeding and dead-heading!” He huffs. “We already have gardeners coming, but it’s never enough.”

Sage sits across from him in the old kitchen that hasn’t changed in thirty years. So much has changed in her life that seeing this house again feels almost startling. She's become a mother of four and hardly ever visits California anymore. She watches herself grow up in pictures on the opposite wall–baby, toddler, teenager, college-grad, mother. How long before she is bedridden like her grandmother?

“I’ll talk to her,” Sage says. 

She enters the room where her Grandma is lying on a hospital-grade bed, blankets tucked around her, her left arm limp at her side. A small tube snakes from her nose to help her breathe. Her normally dark hair is now white as snow, her face pale. She is not the Grandma Sage remembers, but when she sees her, Grandma smiles. 

“My Sage,” She rasps. 

Sage sits down beside her bed and takes her hand. “I’m sorry you’re worried about your garden, Grandma. It’s still beautiful.” 

Usually Grandma launches into a tirade about the inefficiency of professional gardeners, but she is much too weak now. “It needs someone…who cares,” She breathes. Her watery eyes meet her granddaughter’s with sincerity. “Someone to talk to them. I need to tell you…there’s a secret to flowers…a magic.” 

Sage nods respectfully, squeezing her hand. 

“When I’m gone…talk to my flowers. They will listen.”

Sage leaves her Grandma to rest and goes out to the garden. She walks along the gravel path, trailing her hands over the straggling flowers. She winds around to the very back, behind the shed, where a trellis of pink roses cascades down the weathered fence. 

Sage cups one of the small blooms in her hand and tells it all her fears. All her worries–about parenthood, the dreams she never has time for, and the memories she wishes to relive again. She allows herself to cry, because she feels like a child again, and so much is changing so fast. 

Then, wondrously, the thin petals begin to unfurl, and before her very eyes, a small figure crawls from the center—a small head, arms, legs, gossamer wings, and eyes that shine like dewdrops. 

She can hardly believe her eyes.

A fairy.