Wildflowers by Kate Snow

My body holds the history of so many Mississippi summers that a bead of sweat rolls down my back in anticipation. I leave the relative cool of the house and step out into a predatory heat that envelopes the landscape in fever. I breathe in heavy air and let the screen door slam shut behind me. Floorboards creek beneath my bare feet and rocking chairs sway on their own. If I close my eyes I am eight, twelve, sixteen. I am drinking sweet tea with my sister; I am French braiding her sun bleached hair; I am kissing boys goodnight on the steps at curfew. 

When I open my eyes I am sixty-eight. I am drinking unsweetened tea alone; I am contemplating property I never wanted; I am thinking about what it is to be an orphan.

In the distance, I register a silhouette pushing through the far end of a field thick with wildflowers, waist high. As the figure gets closer, I can see that it’s Roger, Raymond’s son. Raymond owned the land next to ours and died a number of years ago, and Roger has managed the farm ever since. Our history is deep, the fossils of our first two decades etched permanently into the land. But then everything changed, and I moved away, and the earth thereafter was smooth, unblemished by a story that was never finished. If I wasn’t already so overwhelmed by the past, watching the absence of our timeline move toward me from across the dry sea would drop me. But now it is just one more match on an already raging fire.

Reaching the border where our properties meet, he stumbles a little as he tugs his leg free of the last possessive stalks. He makes his way across the lawn and I observe the long familiar stride, baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, shirttails lifted by a merciful breeze. He stops ten, fifteen feet from the steps, hooks his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans and shifts his weight to one foot like he’s in a Ford truck commercial. If I brought him back to Los Angeles with me everyone would think he’d just walked off a set.

From this short distance I can see that he hasn’t changed. Everyone always says that, even though a seventy-year-old man can’t possibly look like a twenty-two-year-old boy, but I understand what they mean. Yesterday his hair was the color of cinnamon and the hat he wore was from the high school baseball team. Now curls of salt and pepper (more salt than pepper) peek out from under a John Deere cap that came with the new tractor. His arms, hands, and face are all tan and weathered by years of working in the sun, but his eyes are still the color of ferns and telegraph the curiosity of a much younger man. I wonder what I look like to him.

He doesn’t say anything and we stand awkwardly, ten seconds, thirty seconds, a million. I tuck a loose strand of hair (all salt, no pepper) behind my left ear out of habit. Still, rebel strands escape, and stick to the sweat on my cheek. I cross my ankles and lean against the post. The expanse of quiet is unnerving and suddenly I am very conscious of my hands. I smooth them down my light blue shift and find my dress damp at my belly. The linen has done nothing to help in the heat. Even covered in sweat, I feel overdressed and I’m glad that I left my shoes in the house. I play with the rings on my fingers and note the wrinkles and loose skin. When did my hands get so old? 

Finally, I can’t stand it anymore and I say, “I’m glad you left the field wild.”

A beat, and then he says, “Just made sense, really. All this land’s got to be more than I can manage and the flowers keep the soil down.”

“You shouldn’t have told me that,” I say. “I liked it better when I thought you left them for me.”

Roger sniffs out a small laugh, “Well, you haven’t been around in a while. How was I to know you’d ever see ‘em?”

It’s not a dig. Roger isn’t like that. He’s just stating what’s true. I haven’t been around for a long time. I don’t have a reply.

Instead I sit down on the top step and gesture for Roger to join me. His boots land heavy on the stairs, but when he reaches the top he turns and sits with a grace that should surprise me but doesn’t. All hardened rancher on the outside, Roger has always been more than he seems. 

My back against the banister, I angle my body slightly so that I can see him better. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees and looks straight ahead. We listen to the wind in the tall grass and the birds and the cicadas. We watch the first whispers of pink appear in the sky. I can hear him breathing next to me, slow, thoughtful breaths.

He glances in my direction and then turns back to the field as if he’s scouting. “I’m sorry about your mama,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say. He means my mother’s recent passing. Her death. Her leaving without saying goodbye, never to return. I am thinking of this, the leaving and the not returning, when he asks.

“Why didn’t you ever come back, Carolanne?”

I close my eyes around the sound of my Christian name. In California I am Carol, Carolyn to some. Carolanne is eight and twelve and sixteen, drinking sweet tea and braiding hair and kissing boys. She is eighteen, going off to college and leaving her sister behind, confident in the knowledge that the universe will look after Grace in her absence and is wrong. She is twenty, realizing that she will never be whole again, and that her own survival depends on burying the dead half of herself before grief consumes her living half. She is twenty-one, shedding Anne like a lead jacket and kicking to the surface. 

“I couldn’t,” I say. “Why didn’t you ever leave?”

“Couldn’t,” he replies, and we keep it there.

“What’ll you do?” he asks. “Sell it?”

He’s speaking of the land and the house. Some of the property was sold off after my father died almost twenty years ago but we still own acres. I don’t even know how many. I’m sure the lawyer will go over all of it. 

“You want to buy it?” I ask Roger.

He laughs, “I can barely handle what I’ve got. Look at that, half my fields are wildflowers!” 

He shifts, leaning back on his hands and stretching his legs. “Naw, forty, fifty years ago, maybe. Course, all kinds of things were possible when we were forty and fifty years younger, weren’t they? Don’t know if buying more land to farm would’ve been what I chose.”

He looks at me to see if I understand and I do. I nod and return my gaze to the field. Colorful blooms dot the green like an ocean of confetti, and I have the urge to wade in, let it swallow me whole. My coming back has unsettled the space-time continuum. Now all of the pasts and presents and futures echo together like an exquisite symphony, gorgeous and wrong. I shouldn’t be here, but I have to be here, and it’s all too much. I wonder what would happen if I just surrender, slip below the surface of the petals and disappear.

The quiet of dusk makes the cicadas louder and I focus on their sound. I tell them, I am listening, and hope they hear me. My chest pulses in harmony, and I let the biography of the world fill my veins. Their vibration of life and death and copulation and everything we’ve gained and lost causes real pain; and I ache, willing my ribs to bend and clack like the cicadas’ tymbals, so that I can weep and thrash and proclaim, along with them. Their energy builds to crescendo and feels electric, barely contained. I let it beat against my body until I can hear nothing except the truth. I can’t keep the land. I won’t keep the land. I won’t disappear into a field of wildflowers. I will go back to Los Angeles, to my apartment, to my job. I will go back to Carol. 

I reach over and Roger takes my hand. I lean my head on his shoulder. He hears the same song I do, and we both know that I will not be back, and that this is the last time we will touch each other. So we sit and lean and hold hands and listen, and let the universe say what we can’t.

Kate Snow is a painter and printmaker in Cleveland, OH. She began exhibiting in 2015, and her work has since been shown across the United States and in Germany. Most recently she was a recipient of the 2021 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award from the state of Ohio.