IN THE EARLY seventies, Ann rented an old farmhouse in upstate New York. Intending to follow Mama’s example, she planted a garden. Albert had sent her a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog. He was living in California again and had helped found the Catalog, a resource guide for people wanting to live authentically. (In recent years, Albert claimed the Catalog, with its complex network of information, was the infant Google as well as a foretaste of Apple.)
Ann began with an idea of a garden. It pained her that March and April in the North were such cold, bleak months—T. S. Eliot months, a wasteland. She waited. Mama wrote about the March flowers blooming. She was planting lettuce and radishes, clearing brush. Memories of the mellow spring breezes in Kentucky filled Ann with longing. The deep spring snow in the North made her tremble with urgency, an awe of nature. It stupefied her that most people did not embrace its intricacies or notice the tracks of mice in snow or the shiny oval of a frozen farm pond. Instead of observing the grandeur before them, they gabbed about God the personal overseer.
Ann, nostalgic for mild southern rains, was critical of northern rain. She sought spring in Kentucky. On a long visit there, she jotted down what she saw before her—the first glimmers of leaves on trees, the pale green pointillist shimmer of spring, the parley of cardinals in a budding rosebush. She watched spindly granddaddy spiders performing procreation. She saw box turtles doing it.
She regretted deeply that she hadn’t brought Jimmy to Kentucky before he went away.
Back in upstate New York, Ann emerged slowly from her dark trance. She learned an alertness that she had not possessed in school without the aid of Preludin or coffee. She began filling a notebook with her wildlife observations from her porch. In particular she watched a short-tailed deer she called Tillie. At first she thought Tillie had been injured, but through binoculars she saw that the bobtail was normal, just short. It was a pleasure to recognize the graceful, slender doe by the blaze of white on her rump. Gradually, Tillie grew somewhat trustful and approached the porch with her fawns.
Ann savored the workings of a day, its preciousness. She noted patterns in the grass, the subtle stages of blooming trees. She transcribed her telephone conversations with her father—exchanges about horses and cows and cats and dogs and mules and goats and hay fields; the hollow tree along the creek, the spring rains that overran the creek banks, the thunderous, rushing water that ripped roots bare with its force. He never mentioned God. He told her about the oak trees. “We have water oak, blackjack oak, red oak, and post oak. Post oak is easy to split—for fence posts.” He told her how squirrels calculate the time to cut down the nuts to ripen on the ground. She learned from him how important it was to notice the progression of the seasons. You could slow down a day, make it timeless. Each moment is only now, the only now.
Ann seized time in a late-season snowflake. She could be a robin concentrating on a worm, a cat studying entomology.
Pay attention. Jimmy would have said that.
Ann called her notebook her grief journal. Each day she noted the weather and the view from the porch. In his journals, Henry David Thoreau had always recorded the weather because it seemed so important at the time and it set the tone for the day. In the summer, Ann walked miles of woodland trails, her painful memories fading into her notations of the ducks and hawks, the mountain laurel and moss. She gawked at a bank of gaywings blooming flirtatiously. She tramped alongside a lake. The birch trees tempted her to try swinging them. The clarity of a northern forest made the tangled, snaky woods of the South seem irritating. She recorded the red flash of a cardinal, the misleading mew of a catbird, the silent, slow daytime cruise of a low-flying owl. She scribbled drawings and maps and copied passages from her mother’s letters.
A pale bluebird, a female, kept attacking her own image on the side-view mirror of the Mustang. She perched on the arm of the mirror and pecked around, then returned to the mirror and flailed at herself, then hopped back to the metal arm. She was seeking a nest site. Ann moved the car several times before the bluebird gave up and sought a new place to dwell. But when Ann drove, she sometimes glimpsed an alarming mental image of the bluebird in the mirror.
To Ann’s surprise, a New York editor asked to publish her journal. Ann had typed her notes, rearranged them, fashioned a narrative through a year, and interspersed the pages with letters from her mother.
Ann called her manuscript Grief Garden, but the New York editor didn’t want the word grief. Such an uplifting, intimate text had to exude positivity. The book wasn’t classifiable, confusing the marketing department. Ann suggested that it had an Emily Dickinson edge and a Coleridge flourish and a skittish Beatles irony, but this wasn’t a university press book. The letters from Mama made the detestable phrase “down home” dance upon the page for the editors. They toyed with titles.
Letters from Down Home
From Down Home to Upstate
An Upstate Journal
Journey North
Deer Diary
It wasn’t any of those titles. It was her Grief Garden.
New York settled on a title: You Are the Bluebird, which Ann thought suggested some cute symbolism for the reader to decipher.
You Are the Bluebird
By
Ann Workman
She could not have been more astonished by the book’s popularity. It was the word bluebird, she was told.
It was hailed as an intimate journey into the female mind. Ann was called “the Walden Woman,” “a feminist Thoreau.” Feminist was far too limited a term for anything about Thoreau, Ann thought. Her weekly column was gender oblivious. She wrote about the flora and fauna of both Kentucky and upstate New York, with an annual dispatch from Walden Pond.
On this cruise to nowhere with Richard, she made notes about the “dazzled seabirds” she saw—birds confused by the ship’s lights had crashed onto the deck in sad heaps.
SHE HEARD RICHARD calling her name. She opened her eyes. An orderly was wheeling him into the stateroom.
“Is Janis here?” he asked, as he settled into the armchair.
“Not till we dock in Miami.”
She moved the towel giraffe and sat on the edge of the bed. She arranged the thin blanket around Richard’s bony shoulders.
“I dreamed you were a certified public accountant,” he said. “You are so good to me.”
“What song is in your head today?” she asked.
Richard claimed he always woke up with a song playing in his head, sometimes a song he hadn’t heard in decades.
“‘Sea Cruise,’” he mumbled.
“You’ve been on that one ever since we signed up for the cruise.”
“Can’t get it out.”
She realized that “Within You Without You” from Sgt. Pepper had been playing in her own head. Her memory faltered on some of the words.
She shrank into the diminutive bathroom, where she flushed the toilet and ran water to conceal her sudden burst of crying—the spasms and gasps that overcame her. As she removed the stretchy bandage and cotton ball from her arm, the scent of eucalyptus shot forth, and she heard Jimmy quoting Shelley. “‘I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’”
SOMEWHERE
April 1, 1968
Dear Ann,
I owe you an explanation.
I see now how much I hurt you last August when I finally told you I had joined the army. I can never make up for that. I didn’t expect you to understand my reasoning then. I see now how arrogant and hurtful I was. I didn’t want to burden you with my shame and self-loathing, and I didn’t want to ruin your life with my pathetic needs before I got myself straightened out and did what I knew I had to do. I thought you would see what a pain in the ass I would be in that state of mind. But I wasn’t really listening to you.