About the peonies
The flowers tell stories and you wouldn't even know it.
My mother and my stepfather have a modest house — technically two bedrooms (if you count the little upstairs office), and two bathrooms, rehabilitated over nearly four decades from a barely livable structure to an exquisite tiny home that envelopes you in comfort and love the second you enter the bright red door.
The story is that Chris saw the massive maple out back and before he had even gone inside the house he said they’d take it.
Chris is a character right out of a movie, a quintessentially crusty fisherman with a heart of gold, a thick white beard, and calf muscles the size of most people’s heads. He’s the original “guy who wears shorts year-round,” but only because his body generates so much heat, that long pants are his true nemesis.
If you can get him to sit still long enough, he’ll tell you about life on The Clearwater with Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, entertain you with his loon call, or yelp out some ridiculous drinking song from his years in the Navy.
If you’re really lucky, you’ll join us for our multi-denominational Peaster celebration one year, and get to see him pop an entire dyed egg into his mouth and crunch it down, shell and all, without once taking his eyes off whoever looks the most startled.
Chris does like to shock people. Or at least surprise them.
He’s known throughout the neighborhood for, among other things, randomly planting tulip and daffodil bulbs along the edges of their winding road, in the patches of soil beneath craggy trees and overgrown grass where a sidewalk might otherwise be.
I asked once why he bothered to plant flowers in front of other people’s homes.
“Because I get to enjoy them every day when I’m coming and going,” he said.
Chris is one-of-a-kind.
Chris and I also didn’t get along for a long time.
A long time.
We were just so incredibly different. (Despite my mother insisting that we were both Virgos and therefore, basically the same.)
While I had always thought of my stepmother as my stepmother, Chris was always “my mother’s husband.” We just didn’t really jibe. I remember him scoffing at my music tastes in college. (In fairness, the Violent Femmes aren’t for everyone.) Trying to connect with him somehow, I asked, “So what music do you like to listen to? Classical? Jazz? Something else?”
“I don’t listen to music,” he said sharply. “I listen to the birds.”
It wasn’t until I gave birth to a tiny little girl years later, who would soon look up at this great bearded man who smelled like cedar planks and Hudson River shad and blurt out, “Papa!” that everything changed. He fell in love.
We become family.
Then he truly became “Papa,” teaching my city kids about identifying trees, picking peas from the garden, learning names of birds — and of course, flowers.
One thing to know about Chris is that if birds are his music, then flowers are his love language.
Before she died, before my kids were born, Chris’s mother had gifted him and my mother with a peony cutting from her own garden in Michigan, and he dutifully tended to it.
It’s a stark white peony, with sturdy stems.
They call it Phyllis.
Soon after, he and my mother decided to plant Dorothy, a deep pink peony named for my grandmother.
“She bloomed and then proceeded to take over the entire area where we have planted her, no surprise!” my mother laughed. “All the other plants made way and said, ‘we have to bow to you now, Dorothy.’”
When Thalia was born, she got her own peony, and I believe this is where we officially get to call it a tradition.
You’d think that choosing a peony color for a firstborn grandchild would be a challenge, but not for her father. He insisted on burgundy, in honor of the Washington football team.
This came as no big shock to anyone, seeing as how he also fought to name her Clinton [Portis] or [Bill] Gibbs.
(Yes, he knew we were having a girl. Yes he thought he was absolutely hilarious, and often, he was.)
Despite the noble intent to cultivate burgundy peonies — which I concede could have been striking — the Thalia peonies transformed over time to a bold red-blue, like a carnelian. When it catches the sun it’s more like a deep raspberry.
In fact, the Thalia peony is little different each year, a little different each time you look at it, and maybe you can’t even quite name the color at all. I think that suits her perfectly.
My first niece was born a month later. Then her sister. Then my Sage.
Four granddaughters transformed my parents’ yard into a pageant of peony bushes in pinks and roses and creamy whites.
Each spring, for the last 18 years, they call and say, “Ella is blooming, you have to come see it! Now Sage is blooming! Bea is starting to open…”
I never feel like I come often enough. Or at the right time.
The peonies keep track of the years
Two more were planted when my stepkids came along, and now we have two striking shades of pink Leta and Marlo peonies gracing the back wall against the cabin. They’re a little newer to the garden than the others, and they fit just perfectly. Like they’ve always been there.
As my 72-hour break from the world was coming to an end Monday, I walked the short path from the cabin toward the back door of the house when the unmistakable fragrance hit me — but from where?
I glanced around.
There, to my left, hidden nearly beneath a patch of green was one lone, random white peony.
“You saw it too?” Chris exclaimed, looking up from his weeding.
“I thought you planted it there — like a little surprise,” I said. “Like the ones in the road.”
He did not, in fact, plant the surprise white peony.
It was a floater, he called it — a seed carried by the wind or a bird or an animal of some kind, somehow nurtured without a human hand. It had bloomed quietly and with such modesty, it hardly showed you its petals at all.
He lifted it above the leaves and planted a Y-shaped stick to secure the bloom and keep it upright.
“It could be a Phyllis,” he said, studying the edges of the petals, “but her white peonies have very thick stems. They’re survivors.”
It could be a Bea, we decided.
Sure. It probably was a Bea, just sneaking away from the rest of the crowd, stealing a glimpse from a perspective that no other peony had ever had.
Definitely a Bea.
Whenever I pack to head home after a visit, my mom and Chris always scurry to send me home with things — the extra milk that the kids didn’t finish. A few cans of Coke for Jon. The homemade pesto for Marlo. The rest of the cut cantaloupe for the road. A stray sock or pair of shorts one kid or another must be missing since the last visit
This time, they also threw in a few fat fists full of leggy mint for me to plant in window boxes.
(A mint grows in Brooklyn?)
I hoisted my duffel on one shoulder, preparing to head down the sloped hill to the car.
“Wait!” Chris said brightly. “What if I send you home with that peony? The white one! You should have that.”
Oh no, I protested. That’s the special one. The surprise. That’s for you to enjoy while it lasts.
Instead, he cut me a fat white peony (maybe a Phyllis?) with three gorgeous blooms, and popped it into an old plastic jug filled with the caught rainwater from a bucket by the driveway.
Before I left, I realized I had asked about all the peonies’ names but had forgotten about the bubble gum pink ones outside the cabin window. The flowers I had been enjoying in the rain all weekend. They are stunning, with a single layer of petals, almost like anemones.
I had never noticed them before — or perhaps I had never visited during the short period each year that they are in bloom.
“They were planted upside down by accident and took two years to find their way… but now look at them,” my mom said.
I smiled.
She thought for a second then added:
“If that’s not a Liz, then what is?”
I could argue that it sounds an awful lot like a Chris, too.
Maybe it’s a Virgo thing.
Will this go at the beginning of your book? Or more toward the middle? Because you are so ready to make a book. It’s gorgeous.
That's a wonderful family story and kind of an awesome "step-father's" day gift.