CHAPTER 14
ABI
Dandelions
Music pours softly from the portable radio at my side, making the perfect backdrop for a beautiful day in the sun. I’m digging up weeds. Not the most glamorous activity, but it feels like less drudgery with warmth on my back and harmony in my ears.
I tug at the roots of a flat, ugly thistle weed. Momma called them sticker bushes. I smile when I think of how many times I stepped on them as a child while playing in the yard barefoot. I’d limp to the house, yowling in pain, and my mother would set me up on the counter to patiently pull thin, white thorns from the arch of my foot and from between my toes. We went through that most every summer during my youth. Not once did she complain.
The roots are stubborn, but they finally turn loose, giving up their stake of land, but taking a chunk of dirt with them. I shake the soil off the roots and back into the hole, hoping it will make the cavity less noticeable.
Lawn maintenance was not part of my rental agreement to stay here, but I needed something to do, something to at least keep my hands busy. Being outside in the sunshine, beside the lake, digging in the dirt seemed like a good choice to me. Luckily, there were tools in the partially hidden shed that sits behind the cabin. Gloves, too, for which I’m particularly thankful as I toss the prickly weed into my steadily increasing pile.
For the hundredth time, I glance up at the wedge of beautifully manicured lawn across the cove. I can’t see Sam’s house from here, but I can see a portion of the yard. I don’t need to see it for it to wreak havoc on my mind, though. After last night I know what his house looks like, so now, when I imagine his perfect life, I can do it in Technicolor, with great detail.
I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
I shouldn’t be thinking of Sam at all, of course, but I can’t get him and his wife off my mind. What she said last night has haunted me. Those words have rattled around in my head like the chains of a ghost locked in the attic.
I know what it is to live with pain, Abi.
But we have to keep on living.
Right until the end. No matter what.
Although everything she said bothers me, what plagues me most are the words she spoke right before we were interrupted. Maybe we can help each other.
How could she possibly know what I need? How could she help me? And what help could she require of me?
My mind has raced from one end of the spectrum of possibility all the way to the other, and back again. I’m trying to put pieces of a puzzle together without knowing a thing about the overall picture. Things that could be related might not be related at all. So while, yes, my pondering is futile, it’s therapeutic in its own way. I tell myself that’s why I indulge the wondering. Therapy.
I sit back and survey the progress I’ve made. After a minute, I realize I haven’t thought about my own dismal circumstances in hours. I’ve thought about other people’s problems, and words, and lives.
See? Therapy.
As I’m bending back to my mission of eradicating weeds, a lone dandelion standing just behind the mound of lawn scruff catches my eye. Its puffy white head sways gently in the breeze, a nod to the force of Mother Nature. As I watch, a few bits of fluff are torn away. My eyes trail the pods as they float away, and only then does my predicament come back in a rush.
I crawl over and snap the weed low on the stalk, near the ground, then hold it up for closer inspection. Delicately, I brush my finger over the fuzzy head. As with us, the tiny white hairs are a symbol of age, of dying. Of death. They are an indication that the end is near.
I consider the similarities between a dandelion and a human. Between a dandelion and me. My life started out bright and beautiful, like the wide, yellow head of a young dandelion, face held to the sky, the future an exciting and mysterious expanse that stretched as far and wide as the horizon. But like this weed that I hold, the beautiful part of my life has past. Withering has set in, prematurely, considering my age (a scant thirty-five years).
But there’s a reason.
Tragedy struck.
Again and again and again.
It stole the brilliant, vibrant future of the girl I once was. Now all that’s left is a fragile collection of parts that the stiff wind of time will one day blow through and dismantle, and carry into oblivion. Then I will be no more.
That’s the consequence of living—dying. Life leads to death. It’s unavoidable. It’s an inarguable fact.
From the moment we are born, we are dying. Little by little, day by day. We have limited minutes and hours and days and choices within that short span. Depending on how we spend those minutes, how we make those choices, we can live in the bright sun, with our vivid yellow faces tilted boldly toward it, laughing and happy, or we can make bad choice after wrong step and end up like the dandelion in its last days—withered, frail, and waiting to die.
Tears pool in my eyes and the dandelion swims for a few seconds. I inhale as deeply as my lungs will allow. With one sharp push, I blow out a stream of air that scatters the delicate downy of the plant and it’s quickly carried away by the wind, never to be seen again. Everything that once made it beautiful is just…gone.
I’m holding the naked stem between my fingers, my lips still pursed in a kiss, wishing I could drift away, too, when movement catches my eye.
It’s Sam.
He and Noelle are standing on the shore across the cove, watching me, watching me fall apart bit by bit. I wonder if they can see that from over there. I wonder if they know that, as they smile across the lake at me, the broken and splintered shards of my heart are drifting away on the breeze. I wonder if they can see that I, too, am a gust of wind away from disappearing.
Sam is holding Noelle’s hand and she’s waving her other arm as big and as fast as she can wave. Even from this distance, I can see the happiness on both their faces. They’re the yellow dandelions, vibrant and full of life. They haven’t withered yet. They aren’t holding on to dirt and memories, waiting for time to pass and death to find them.
Just seeing them makes me feel both overwhelmingly happy and overwhelmingly sad.
Noelle continues to wave as vigorously as she can, so I raise a hand to wave back, tears streaming down my face. Still watching me, she takes her father’s other hand and begins to pull and tug on them, a puppeteer forcing her puppet to dance. Obligingly, he moves, pausing to twirl her around a couple of times. I listen closely for the sounds of her giggle. I can just barely hear them. They’re carried to my ears on the same wind that’s taking the dandelion fluff away. Life trickling in to fill the spaces death leaves.
As I watch, other sounds reach my ears as well, and I realize that my own music has died. The only music I hear now, penetrating the absolute silence all around me, is coming from across the cove.
The only music I hear is coming from Sam’s.