Everyone stood around the flower bed as I walked through the gate, and I had a three-ring binder under my arm, which is not what you bring to a memorial garden.
My cousin had ordered eleven flats of annuals out of a garden center in Asbury. Marigolds and salvia. It looked fine. It looked like a bank parking lot.
Here is what that bed is.
Grandma planted the memorial bed at Saint Anne’s for thirty-one years. One plant for one person, every time the parish buried somebody. She picked the plant to fit the person and she wrote it down.
The binder lives in a cabinet in the parish office and I got it Thursday from a secretary who did not know what it was either.
Two hundred and eight entries. Name, date, plant, and one line about why.
Lila Brennan, 1997, lily of the valley, because she was small and stubborn and came back every year no matter what got done to her.
Marv Sedlacek, 2003, horseradish, which she planted in a memorial garden on purpose, because he was difficult and she said the bed ought to be honest.
Grandpa is a Harison’s yellow rose on the northeast corner. Nineteen years old this June, and the cousins had a flat of salvia sitting on top of it.
At the front of the binder, in her hand, on the inside cover:
This is not a flower bed. Every person in this parish who has been buried out of this church since 1988 is in this dirt as something living, and somebody has to know which is which. If I am gone and nobody has taken this book, then I have failed at the one thing I was any good at.
Then there is the last entry, and it is dated 2019, and it is in her handwriting, and it is her own name.
Peony, west end, by the fence. She planted it herself six years before she died and left the date blank.
I read names out at that dedication. Not all two hundred and eight, but forty of them, and about half the people in that garden are related to somebody on that list and did not know their people were already growing in there.
My cousin did not say anything about convenience again. He got down on his knees in his good pants and moved the salvia off Grandpa’s rose himself.
The parish put the binder in the case in the vestibule. There is a copy in the office and a copy at my house, because she lost the first eleven years in a basement flood in 1999 and rebuilt it from memory, and I am not letting that happen twice.
I keep the bed now. Tuesdays, which is a joke I make to myself.
We buried somebody in October and I planted a serviceberry for her and wrote the line. My hand looks nothing like my grandmother’s and it is in the same book.
He said she only called me because I lived nearby. That is true. She called me on a Tuesday in 1988 because I lived nearby, and thirty-seven years later I am the one holding the book, and near is not a small thing to be.