May 1: May Day, a chance to gather flowers and give them to my mother, not just because she was movie-star beautiful and smelled liked cinnamon, but because she was my safe place to stand as a child.
Much like the flowers I picked for her, she was soft and velvety. I could stand and rest my confused heart and body against hers and everything felt better. Her bare arms were silk scarves for my face, and she'd give me long hugs and let me twirl the doughy creases of her elbow around my fingertips. She'd tuck me in at night and never failed to return when I'd desperately call for her to come back and give me extra hugs.
She brushed and cut my hair and made almost all of my new clothes from scratch, mostly dresses I hated, attempting to make my older sister and I look like twins, even though that sister and I were opposites.
May Day was my chance to thank my mother the way I wanted to thank her, with roses. I’d pick them from our neighbors' yards, carefully plucking all the thorns off the stems, then running back down our hidden street to the dead end where our house sat. We didn’t have rose bushes in our yard, because they were likely too expensive and my father was always trying to save money. I’d get up early so no one would know and dine on honeysuckle for breakfast before heading up the street. The only other souls up that early were the mourning doves, cooing on the branches of the Pepper Tree that sat on the empty lot. I'd climb up to my favorite branch, hear the flutter of the doves' wings as they scattered, and reach for the wad of honeysuckle I'd tucked into my pockets from the bush that nobody owned near the fire hydrant. From my pepper branch, I'd scope out which rose bushes on the street were the ripest for my May Day bouquet.
There were many things happening in my house that I didn’t understand in those days: Why did my father get so angry? Why did he have to hit my brothers? Make them scream so bad? Why did I barely see or know my older sisters? Why did I have to clean my closet and take “inventory” on Saturdays, the way they did in the army barracks where my father once lived? I just wanted to ride my bike, sail down to the beach on it and ride the waves. My mother tried to protect us -- I know she did -- but there were times when she couldn’t, days when she was teaching or at the grocery store, and my father would switch and transform into someone that I didn't recognize. I'd lock the door to my room so he couldn’t get in, and I'd pray that he’d be too tired afterwards to climb the stairs to my room. My “twin” sister, who was four years older, would disappear, hidden I suspected, in one of the many closets in our old house against the hills of Southern California. I’d listen to my brothers being beaten and look at the phone in the spare room that was connected to my room, desperately wishing I could call my mother to come back home. No one ever wanted to tell her what had really happened when she got back, least of all, my father.
Five years ago, when I'd written a first draft of this piece, my mother was still alive. She would transition three days later on May 4, the bouquet pictured below near her bedside.
[From May 1, 2015]
"I'll call the Japanese florist I always turn to in California to pick the colors and shapes for my May Day bouquet. The owner will put them in a clear vase and deliver them for me. I will ask her if she has any honeysuckle this year, but I already know the answer.
“No,” she’ll say, “Just roses. Yes, many roses.”
It’s never enough, but it's all I have on May Day.
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