Nell

Nell loved her garden. It sustained her in a way that I suspect her husband, sisters, children, and church did not.  She and Heyward laid it out that first year they moved into the big white house on Harrison Road.  A few years later they planted a magnolia tree when their first child, my uncle was born, and another 10 years later when my father was born. The way the paths folded upon themselves quadrupled the apparent space, making a vast mysterious garden out of a normal city lot. By the time I knew her, the magnolias were giants, dwarfing the white house with dark green shutters. The azalea, camellias, wisteria, and crepe myrtle formed a dense jungle, making dim caves lit with a shifting green light..  The path was narrow and shaded, carpeted in thin zoysia grass and bordered with white-painted cobbles.

Nell was a Baptist and believed in hard work. Life was difficult those first years in Columbia, it was the Depression and she had a young son and a kind, but somewhat hapless husband. When she was a girl, she traveled all over the United States, even as far as Berkley by train to see the sights. We have pictures of her with her sisters at Yellowstone, in New Orleans, in Philadelphia. Three bold girls at the beginning of the new century, just before the first World War would leave their brothers, cousins, and sweethearts dead, lost, or forever scarred.

When I knew her she loved her God, her garden and her family, in that order. The first two restored her; the rest of us sapped her energy.  Nell was the first adult I met that was enthralled with books as I was. I don’t ever recall her reading to me, but she suffered me to sit near her in the garden or on the covered porch, sharing the space, each of us companionably alone in our book.

In the photo, she sits in her blue metal chair in the sunny part of the garden.  It was cool that day, though bright.  She’s bundled in one of her fall coats, but has her  red gardening hat on.  She's sitting in the lee of a big old azalea that hides the road and buffers the traffic noise. The dark azalea, the blue chair and the curve of the path make a quiet little oasis where a reader can hear the redbirds call “cheer, cheer cheer.”

I never really understood my Grandmother.  Granddad was a dear, sweet, gentle man. Always good for a peppermint candy or a piece of Dentine gum, endlessly forgiving of my swinging feet as we sat on the hard wood pews at the big Baptist Church.   

Grandmother loved us, too, but in a different way than Granddad. It was a love that was hard to plumb. I knew it was there, intellectually, and felt it in the way she made tiny baked treats out of the ends of biscuit dough. Small pinches of dough dusted with cinnamon, drenched in honey, rolled into pinwheels, and popped in the oven to bake.  I felt it too by the way she tucked me in too tight under the knobby chenille bedspread, and left the hall light on in case I needed to find my way down the steep attic stairs in the night. 

But she wasn’t the kind of Grandmother who would welcome a sticky-fingered child to climb in her lap the way I crawled all over Granddad, looking for hard candy in his vest pockets, fishing out his pocket watch to run the gold chain through dirty fingers and hold the golden compact against my ear to hear the tickticktick. 

For one thing, Grandmother never sat down until nightfall. Her day was full of business, errands, gardening, cooking, laundry, and darning.  She sat down in the evening to watch her beloved Braves or sat on the porch with the neighbors to drink iced tea and review the neighborhood events.  When I was a little older, she sat more and we became reading buddies, sitting on the covered porch in the hottest days; me curled up in the Granddad’s big leather chair, Grandmother poised in her armchair. 

The year I got my camera we went down to visit. I took photos of the flowers, photos of the yard, photos of the mocking birds and cardinals, photos of my Granddad’s wood shop, and this, my treasure, a photo of Grandmother in her favorite spot, on the blue metal chair, in her garden, with a book.