My husband Brambrook stood in the ditch in front of our house at six in the morning, in his undershirt, holding a fistful of flattened stems like a man checking a pulse that wasn’t there. I came out with two cups of coffee and I knew before I got to the mailbox. I could smell it. Fresh-cut grass and gasoline, where three days ago there had been forty two years of flowers.
“He got the cardinal flower,” Brambrook said. He wasn’t crying. Brambrook has cried exactly twice in the time I’ve known him, once at his mother’s funeral and once at our son’s wedding, and he wasn’t going to spend a third on a man with a riding mower. But he held those stems like they mattered, because they did. He’d bought that packet two Aprils ago at Caldbury’s Feed and Seed for our fortieth anniversary, and it was the first year the flowers had actually taken, tall and red and thick with hummingbirds, and now it was mulch.
I’m sixty five years old. I have buried a mother, raised two children, run the lunch line at Dorwin Elementary for twenty six years, and sat up all night twice with sick calves before we sold the last of the herd. I am not, as a rule, a woman who cries over landscaping. But I stood in that ditch on County Road 12 outside Dorwin, Indiana, in my housecoat, holding two cups of coffee that were both getting cold, and I cried like the world had ended, because in a way, for about four hundred square feet, it had.
This is the story of how our neighbor Bramham Caldworth mowed down our wildflowers three times in two years, what he said to me the third time that I will remember on my deathbed, and how an entire street of stubborn, nosy, generous people turned a grudge into the prettiest thing Cardinal Road has ever grown. It has a happy ending. I promise you that up front, because at sixty five you’ve earned the right to know a story won’t gut you before you agree to read it. But I want you to earn the happy ending the way we did, slow, and a little bit furious, and one seed packet at a time.
The can of seed
Brambrook and I got married in June of the year gas was thirty six cents a gallon, in the sanctuary of Dorwin Community Church, and we moved into this house on County Road 12 with a wedding gift envelope of forty dollars, a truck that needed a clutch, and absolutely nothing else. We could not afford so much as a bag of grass seed for the yard, let alone a landscaper, and the strip of ditch between our fence and the county road was just red Indiana clay and crabgrass, the kind of ugly that makes a young bride cry into the kitchen sink when nobody’s looking.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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