Ellen Herrick

Author of The Sparrow Sisters

Hello Dahlia!

by

Dahlias, darling

I am a gardener. I am self-taught, I am impatient, I am headstrong (I don’t winter over my dahlias after the “dreadful, moldy, dead tuber alien pods of 2012” episode). I am also blowsy, floppy, scented, undisciplined…and I like right angles. All of this to say that I am both my mother’s gardener and my father’s. My father planted the same thing each year in Zen-like rows along a Hockney-blue swimming pool: disciplined, clean, orderly—pleasing in the spareness. My mother planted too many zinnias, dahlias, cosmos and Shasta daisies so that just beyond Dad’s meditative garden, colorful cheery chaos exploded. I’ve already confessed to inheriting my mother’s nocturnal, neighborly pruning habit in The Constant Gardener. I’ve shared the story of my father’s outsized joy at the cherry tomatoes, spotty beans and wonky, pasty peaches he harvested one summer before the deer and birds got to them: “The crops are in,” he crowed holding three tomatoes and a basil leaf. I’ve made it clear that, tempted as I am, I will not use a pesticide in my garden in Not So Silent Spring… I will, however spray soapy water all over those damn earwigs. Now, with spring upon me, it is time for my dreamy plans to take shape in the salty, windy, chilly reality of my Cape Cod garden.

 

Here’s what will happen (it’s already happening…): I will start getting seed and plant catalogs. I will begin stockpiling them as if I was a survivalist and the catalogs were canned goods. I will knock over the squirreled away catalog tower next to my bed several times in the middle of the night on my way to pee. I will fold down so many corners you’d swear I was an origami-ist. Then I will plant my usual seeds and seedlings, in the places I always plant those seeds and seedlings. Why, you ask? Why be so hide-bound and unadventurous. I guess it’s because I am, in fact, pretty set in my ways. It’s kind of like that song from The Fantastiks; “Plant a carrot, get a carrot not a Brussels sprout…” Or in my case, plant a sweet pea get a sweet pea not a marigold—those are always planted around the tomatoes and basil. The carrots are next to the radishes, which march along nicely next to the arugula. The peonies and shrub roses (I’ve just ordered seven new highly-scented English roses—one is called Shropshire Lad!) play together hugging the old barn and the climbing roses and clematis scale the shingled wall behind the raised dahlia bed. Oh! Those! Dahlias!

 

Dahlias are my kryptonite. I am helpless before their steamy little bags of tubers and dirt promising giant blossoms in eye-popping pinks, purples, peaches and reds. I’m not much for the white or yellow ones, but if pressed…step away from the display, Ellen. I have never met a dinner plate dahlia I didn’t at least tolerate. There they are, flowers as big as a child’s-head, calling to me from the—misleading–photographs on the packaging. There they are, Otto’s Thrill so deeply pink it could be an exploding star, and Cafe au Lait, creamy, peachy, delicious and impossible in it’s perfectly spiraling petals. I’ll just grab one bag, or maybe two I tell myself as I start to pile them into my arms until I give up and grab an empty basket and fill it.

 

This is spring, then. The ever hopeful, overenthusiastic practice of putting bits and bobs into the ground and expecting the miracle of growth. And this is creating, isn’t it? Come with me while I stretch this metaphor to the breaking point. So, we look through our colorful catalogs. In my case for both The Sparrow Sisters and the new book, The Forbidden Garden I began with an idea of a story and then I began to think through the flowers and herbs I knew. In my case the ones my mother and father planted years ago and the ones I have nurturing for the last ten. Once you know what you know, you realize how very little you know at all! So library, magazines, gardening sites down the cheeriest of Internet rabbit holes and finally, books on the history of medicinal plants, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets and a few just a little wack-a-doo websites about witches and fairies, ghosts and myths. Such fun I had!

 

Only after I’ve chosen seeds and prepared the soil can I set loose the gardeners who will tend them. Sorrel and Nettie and Patience Sparrow, all smudged with dirt, armed with trowels and twine, clippers and cuttings, mortars and pestles. And set them loose I do. I start every writing day with “Once Upon a Time” because those words draw me into the story as if it is a fairy tale waiting to be told. So, there go the Sisters and here comes the town, the Wiltshire countryside, the boys who love the girls and the darkness that must come right along with the light. There will be failures in the writing, the telling and the story but, just like in my garden I am afraid that I am a bit headstrong and simply rip out the weeds and the duds and plant something else.

 

It is spring, or nearly so and I am ready. Come along, then, let me tell you a story…

 

 

20/20

by

It’s time to put on my reflecto-vision glasses.  What?  You don’t have a pair?  You know, the ones you buy off the back of an Archie comic, right next to the X-ray Specs and the itching powder.  Most people go for the X-ray Specs because the picture shows a lady in her undies.  But, in case you haven’t wasted that allowance yet, they don’t work.  The reflecto-vision glasses, on the other hand, are guaranteed to show you the past with a mixture of insight and nausea.  I know, mine are hanging on the chain with my readers. January is as good an excuse as any to take a look through them.

We had a lovely Christmas.  Everyone was home, we had to stack the boys like cord wood in the Cambridge house.  Once Emma was out of school we hightailed it to the Cape so that we didn’t have to circle, like jumbo jets, outside the bathroom.  Before you haul out the Bing Crosby and The Bishop’s Wife…oh go ahead, haul ’em out.  The roast and Yorkshire pudding, the capon, the chipped beef on toast and the Boxing Day lunch tradition lived on.

Satisfying on every level.  Then, we returned to Cambridge with everyone and everything in tow.  Because a family Christmas fills me with joy and sucks the life out of me simultaneously, I ran right back (screaming) to the Cape.  My husband saw my eyes beginning to take on that marginally lunatic cast and suggested I might need some “alone time” and by that he meant, step away from the…well, just step away.  So I did.  The children are fine, in case you worried.  David is recovering nicely.


I spent three days in a deliciously empty house with my reflecto-specs firmly perched on my nose.  No blinding instants of clarity, no aha! moments.  Just a little time to remember how lucky I am.  Lucky to have been slightly overwhelmed by sheer numbers, lucky to drive back and forth to Boston in the snow to collect my Dad, and then again to return him.  Feeling particularly lucky to be kneeling on the floor at midnight Christmas Eve trying to find the little green army man that made it through 16 years in London, one Christmas tree at a time, all the way back to America.  That army man belongs to William, he used to make bases behind the presents and in the branches of our Christmas trees and it was suddenly terribly important to get Cap’n Bob back up for year 17.  Luckily, I found him.

I use the word lucky a lot.  It isn’t always so smart or safe.  At the end of August, 2001 just after my sister came for a visit to the Cape I went on a “we are so lucky” spree.  I was so pleased by the visit, the way her children, mine and the rest of the cousins built the world’s most rickety tree house and sailed and swam and laughed.  I was thrilled to have David around for two solid weeks.  The whole time felt slightly enchanted.  About a week later it was September 11th and a week after that may sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, and in what felt like only minutes everything turned to shit.  But of course, that wasn’t true.  I was still lucky, because none of these horrible things happened directly to me.  Still, suddenly everything was so terribly fragile.  And, yet, here I am, feeling lucky again because I’ve got this messy, sprawly family with every ailment and blessing that comes with that.  I know I should be more careful, keep an eye out for the “Your life looks entirely too happy” Gods (they sit on a much higher level than the Traffic or Weather Gods so their punishment goes far beyond a jackknifed tractor trailer or rain on vacation) but I just spent those three days ALONE and the glow lingers prettily.

People who know me know this; I am strangely sensitive to over-stimulation.  This from a woman who can be extremely loud and incredibly close.  That is, if I love you (or don’t), think something is funny (or not), boy do you know it.  But, I definitely have a saturation point (even for myself).  It’s kind of like having a finely tuned gag reflex.  I can pack it in: the lights, the kissing and hugging, the laughing and cooking and yapping, the washing of the guest towels and sheets.  And in the flush of all that goodness, I know how lucky I am.  But then, it all comes back up in a rush of fever dreams and aphasia.  I can’t remember my children’s names or why I’m standing in the living room with an oyster knife.  I can’t bear the sound of family voices arguing over trivialities or laughing at YouTube.  When I lean over to pick up the scattered bits and pieces that spill out of their lives a headache builds and I feel as if there is a box of photographs and thread and old matchbooks and pencil stubs knocking around in my brain.  That’s when David offers the release valve–and the words “I am no Stephen King victim”–so I drive off, laughing maniacally.

After floating around the Cape for a few days with the specs on, group activity overdose hissing gently out of my pores, I did have one extremely useful revelation-ette.  I have been so busy feeling lucky that I forgot to feel grateful.  There is a difference.  For instance I was lucky enough to spend a couple of crisp November days on Nantucket with my friend Lisa (the one who taught me to swim–not how to do it but how I must do it).  I am grateful that we belong together and that she feels that too.  I am lucky to be within hours of my sister for the first time in years.  I am grateful that she stops time to spend some with me.  I am lucky that my husband still wants me by his side.  I am grateful that he stands shoulder to shoulder with me when it gets awfully dark (or when I put on skates for the first time in 20 years and my daughter hip checks me into a nearby pine).  There, you see the distinction.

So, I think I can take the glasses off now.  I passed the (hind) sight test and managed to draw a lesson from it without having the ophthalmologist of present and future weigh in.  It reminds me of the psychological experiment where they put these upside-down glasses on some patients. The whole world was stood on its head.  After a few days, the subjects adjusted.  When the glasses were removed, the poor things were already in the habit and continued to step OVER the door lintel and turn their cups bottoms UP causing hot tea to pour all over their wrists.

I guess I’m in for a bumpy few days as I try to remember exactly where it is I stand.

Lucky me!

Independence Day

by

I am an early riser and by early I mean shortly after four am.  I try to have a lie in, I really do.  Don’t hate me because I am wildly productive.  I’m not.  Occasionally in those pre- or just post-dawn hours I get some stuff done.  This morning for instance I folded laundry, made a list of editors that my ms. might appeal to, drank three cups of coffee (my teeth are now itching), went down to the beach to read awhile and then went to the gym.  There, I fiddle-faddled around on one kind of machine or another for about 45 minutes before I lost interest in everything from my maximum heart rate to the New York Times Book Review podcast (who cares that a professor from Yale has written about how our reactions to things change depending on what we are told those things are–science of the obvious to me but then I don’t have a PhD.)  At any rate, for every morning I use my time wisely, there are the ones where I paddle the internet (I scroll too slowly to call it surfing) checking on Lindsay Lohan’s SCRAM anklet, wondering what will happen to Larry King now that he isn’t CNN’s resident crypt keeper or saving dozens of recipes for complicated dishes I may or may not attempt.

Here’s the thing, I do not get up at 4:30 because I have places to go and things to do.  I get up because every morning (or at least for the last 18 months) I am awakened by a wave (no a tsunami) of non-specific anxiety.  You know the kind, it’s that feeling you have right as you surface and think, “What’s wrong with this day?”  Then you remember you have a gynecologist appointment, or better still, a colonoscopy.  It’s a feeling akin to the onset of a hang over.  Your stomach roils, you feel the corners of your mouth tighten and your toes curl (and not in the good way).  And, let me tell you, I have nothing, NOTHING, to be anxious about.  Not really.  I mean, moving back to the States was a big deal, moving anywhere is a gag-inducing proposition.  And, sure, the employment prospects are a bit dodgy these days.  But, on a scale of one to addressing the United Nations Security Council in your underpants, I should be semi-conscious with carefree-ness.

Speaking of underpants, they figure (or rather don’t figure) prominently in my personal brand of anxiety dream.  I don’t know about you but I have two kinds of anxiety dreams: the ones in which I continually get on the wrong plane/train/automobile and just can’t get to my destination (it’s a variation on the I Love Lucy episode when Lucy has a giant trophy loving cup stuck on her head and gets separated from Ethel on the IRT).  The other is the old classic naked or partially naked dream.  To this day, mine usually go back to school days although once, in real life when I was out of college and on a job interview at a magazine, my mother noticed that I left the house without hose on.  She sent some to me in a padded envelope while I sat in the publisher’s office.  What kind of madwoman does that?  I got the job.  Back to the dream world.  I have been in dream scenarios in which I am playing volleyball in nothing but a half slip–what, I couldn’t pull from my childhood memories the cotton full slip with the little satin bow on the bodice?  Volleyball, half slip, adolescence: you do the visual and then poke your eye out with a #2 pencil.  Another one in my greatest humiliation hits?  I’m wearing underpants in high school.  Well, fine but only underpants and, again, not a well-fitting pair of Hanes.  No, no, these are if not straight up bloomers, certainly bloomer-adjacent.

“Where is this going?” you scream as you pull that pencil out of your other eye.  I’ll tell you.  I do not understand why, in my little dream corner of Knickerlessville, I don’t say “I’m terribly sorry, I seem to have forgotten to get properly dressed this morning.  I’m just going to nip home and throw something on.  I’ll be back before Pre-Calc.”  Instead, I dodge behind lockers, slink down at my–suddenly–too small desk/chair combo pressing my breasts painfully against the pencil holder, serpentine down the school corridors trying to make my hands and arms cover everything at once.  You don’t have to consult that guy from Yale to know that anxiety takes many shapes (mine mostly in a half slip).  The funny thing is that once–again in real life which seems to have a disturbing similarity to my dreams–I was caught out in my college dorm hallway.  My frenemy nicked my towel as I showered and left me with only a washcloth–which is, as you get, the hygiene equivalent of a half slip.  I looked out the door of the bathroom to see the handyman moving his ladder down the corridor, checking each and every light bulb between me and my room.  I held up the washcloth and tried it on for size.  It didn’t fit.  I could cover my T or my A, certainly not both and really, only one T.  I could have waited for the man to complete his own version of the building of a Gothic cathedral but inspiration struck.  I put the washcloth over my face and ran (like a slightly drunken sprinter) for my room.  I figured he’d never recognize me since he couldn’t see my face.  I believe–and really, what else can I do–that it worked.

So, today, July 4th, I am declaring my independence from free-floating anxiety.  I will not cower by the lockers or bolt upright in bed at 3:59:59, mouth dry, eyes darting, looking for a hiding place, or a pair of pants.  I am going to throw a figurative washcloth over my face and rush headlong into whatever comes next.