“My Mother’s Church”

As soon as the infant sprouts start peeking through the soil, my mother can be found in her garden. She takes her jug of ice water and heads out when then the sun is highest in the sky. My mother, like her mother before, is always wrist-deep in cool dirt during the summer heat.I’m not as good a gardener as she is, I can’t sew, and I can’t cook. My mother knows how to make roses out of icing and that fondant doesn’t taste good, just looks pretty. My mother hand-sewed me a turkey costume for a Kindergarten Thanksgiving pageant while all the other kids wore paper hats and face paint. My mother actually makes the recipes in magazines instead of just thinking about it. After I made her a Pinterest account, she was unstoppable.

I know when I don’t have her anymore, I’ll regret not spending more time out there with her. There have always been gardens in our family. My grandmother had beds of peonies, snap peas, tomatoes, parsley, lavender, sage and rosemary. She kept the roses separate and told us to mind the thorns. During a special time of year that I could never pin down, we got to pick berries from the gooseberry bush and she’d make a pie. My grandmother had a sign in the front of a flower bed that read, “No one is closer to God, than in a garden.”

“But I don’t know if I believe in God anymore,” I told my mother once.

She shrugged as we worked side by side in the dampened dirt, pulling at the weeds that never seemed to go away. My mother got back to her feet, and gave a long sigh. Her back and her knees probably hurt. Before she left me, she pressed her thumb between my brows and smoothed the furrow. I knew it left a dirt mark, but I didn’t mind.

I surveyed the bed and wondered how much I could get done alone. I wanted her to rest. A car wreck in her twenties, arthritis, knee surgery, fibromyalgia and time is beginning to slow her down.

I wondered if that’s faith. Wanting to complete a work so someone else could rest.

I remembered an Easter church service I attended where the pastor tried to describe medically what had happened to Jesus up on the cross. He stood on the stage with his arms outstretched, wearing jeans and cowboy boots, like he did every Sunday.

“Jesus didn’t say ‘I hope this works,’ he said, ‘It is finished,’” the pastor said.

I wanted to ask my mother what she thought, but she was almost to the front door. I knew she would only rest for a little bit. She’d drink some ice water and sigh a few times, then she might do some dishes, fold some laundry and look for another project inside if it got too hot.

I was left alone outside to ponder this with the cicadas. I waited for a holy affirmation but all I heard is the AC turning on and off, the neighbors cleaning their garage.

We talked about everything, that summer I spent with my mother in her church.

“If I pull gently, they come easy,” she would say, tossing the weeds over her shoulder. “If I yank, there’s trouble.”

I mimicked her motions, wondering if that, too, was faith. The day wore on and we admired our progress.

After we called it quits, we sat smoking, silently asking the plants around us for forgiveness. I wondered how many roots remain. A lot was done, much remained. The dirt was packed under my nails, I wanted to remember this.

Shelby Brown is currently attending the University of Louisville, majoring in Communications and minoring in Creative Writing. She holds the title of Editor in Chief of the Louisville Cardinal Student Newspaper and is interning with the Miracle Monocle Literary Magazine (a publication on campus). She lives in Bardstown, KY with her husband and cat, Puck.