Gardenias & Roses

I saw her there in my garden. This wasn’t the first time she had been traipsing through the grass and dirt to smell my rose bush. She’d smell for a few minutes, making sure to sniff each one before she’d put her hand on the stem of the one she smelled last and plucking it from my garden. And every time, I would see her flinch as she got poked with a thorn here and there as she carried away her prize, a flower to give to her mother. I would see little drops of blood fall to the dirt floor as she skipped along our dead end road into the horizon where she faded down the hill.

Some might ask why I didn’t go out and ask her not to pick those flowers every day or at least help her clean off her hands from the battle wounds she endured while fighting with the thorns, I guess I was just scared that she would stop going to the rose bush and start looking at the gardenias that were near the oak tree. I couldn’t let her do that. I didn’t want her smelling them or touching them. They weren’t prize gardenias or anything; they were just too special to me to have a little girl near them.

I knew who she was, but now I can’t think of her name without looking it up in the village newsletter from two years ago. It takes me awhile to find it, I have run my finger down the list of people and by the time I find her name the tip of my index finger is black from ink. She had won that poetry prize down at her middle school back then. I think her name is Cassie Mills, but memory doesn’t serve me very well I am most likely wrong. I guess we will call her that for now anyway.

Every once in awhile she would bring me something that she made in class or Sunday school, and I would hang it on my fridge like she was my own blood. I’d invite her in for cocoa in the winter, lemonade in the spring, fresh orange juice in summer and iced tea in the fall. She would say yes occasionally and we would sip our drinks with whatever snacks I had made for the day, she would check her out-of-date watch and say, “Thank you for the snack Mrs. Astor. I have to go though, mama will be looking for me and I need to get home for dinner. I will see you next week.” That is when she would hug me and skip out the front door. She’d peek around after I’d latched the lock on the old wooden door and she’s take a rose from the patch. I never considered it stealing, I didn’t really mind much, I just wanted her to stay away from the other flowers.

Cassie was a smart girl. Outgoing, enthusiastic, beautiful, Lord was she ever so beautiful. She had the thickest red hair and millions of little freckles all over. Every once in a while she would come over to my house after school and I would have to wash the marker off her face where kids tried to play connect the dots with her freckles. Poor girl, always nice to everyone and she always got picked on. So on some days I would go pick some flowers from the garden and make her a salad to take home to her mama.

Her mama had some sort of disease back then and was very rarely seen out and about. Cassie did her best to take care of her mom; made dinner, brought flowers (from you know where), stayed home every once in a while to clean the house and tend to her mom when she was too weak to get out of bed. I don’t know why they didn’t have a live-in nurse; it would have taken a lot of stress off Cassie.

Eventually I heard that her poor mother died from that horrible sickness. But for some reason, Cassie still took flowers from my garden. I can just assume that she takes them to the cemetery where her mom was buried next to her daddy. He was a jerk that died in jail shortly after he was arrested. Cassie doesn’t talk about him much, but I know that she wish he was around to get to know her. And for her sake I wish he was able to see the beautiful girl that she grew up to be since he had seen her last. He died when she was three, so she doesn’t know too much of him, just anything her mama told her and that wasn’t a lot either. I didn’t ever have any insight. I steered clear of him myself, he was covered in tattoos. All inked up and pierced… defiantly not what God had intended for our bodies.

I am not sure now, who was taking care of Cassie, she was considered an orphan now. I think her Aunt Lily was taking care of her for a little a bit at the house down the road still as things were being thrown away or picked at by family of the deceased. Cassie would spend more time with me than down there. She would tell me she couldn’t stand watching her family just go and throw her mama’s things away. She was 15 years old then and she asked if she could stay with me because her Aunt Lily wasn’t paying any attention to her. I said yes and had hoped she was going to ask me that sometime.

I made my spare bedroom in the house especially for her. Milli Vanilli posters were hanging around along with Paula Abdul. I remember shortly after she moved in, she would play her music loud enough for me to hear. I never asked her to turn it down; it was great seeing she had so much life in her. I figured I’d let her sing, it was best she was doing that rather than moping around after losing her mother. She was a great singer anyway and I never minded the racket. She would hum Straight Up by Paula Abdul, and every once in a while she would catch me singing along because the song grew on me.

Still, as she lived here with me, she would walk to the roses, smell for a few minutes, making sure to sniff each one before she’d put her hand on the stem of the one she smelled last and plucking it from my garden. This time though she brought the flowers to me. She still never said anything about taking them; she must have known I knew she was taking them. I’d fill up a vase and by the end of the week; my kitchen would look like a garden. She still never went by those gardenias.

My husband Lloyd Whitney Astor died in 1943, two years after we got married in San Jose, California. Just five weeks after our wedding, the inevitable happened: he was shipped off to the war. We had always worried it would happen. He didn’t wasn’t to go, of course; neither of us did, but we spoke of it often-­­ because we knew his time would come. We had married on a Saturday night, March 17, 1941 in a church downtown, the same church that my mama been married in. I was just 24 years old. The next day we left for our honey moon to Boston, Massachusetts. Shortly after arriving, Lloyd took me to the house he had bought as a wedding gift, a beautiful little house in Medford, with a white picket fence and a garden in the front. Three days after we moved in, he got his orders calling him to duty. Before he left, he planted the gardenias out in the garden and told me that if I sat there next to them, I would always and forever feel his love while he was away. He wrote many times and called as often as he could. He would always sign saying, “My deepest love to my new bride and forever my wife, Lloyd.” Two years later after never coming home for a visit, the letters stopped from him and I received one instead from the Sergeant stating he had been killed in battle and that his things would be sent home right away along with his body for proper burial. When his body was shipped home, we buried him next to the gardenias. I never got married again and I never once missed a day when I went out and sat in the garden near the gardenias.

After awhile, Cassie started to get sick. She wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t eat, and barely leave her room. I called the doctor on May 28th, 2008 but by the time he arrived, Cassie had died in her room. The doctor said she had Huntington's disease that was passed from her mother.

I laid Cassie under the rose bush with a nice head stone that read, “The Daughter I never had or never will have, a loving girl whose life was cut short, may she rest in peace with our Lord our God.”