Our theme for the month of June is “snapshots.” Writers were asked to submit a piece with a cover photo that they took or created.
Like many people, I’m named for a distant relative that only exists now in a few black-and-white photographs and in the memories of increasingly fewer people.
Aunt Beth, who hides within my monogram as my middle initial, is technically my great-great-aunt. She’s the sister of my grandmother’s mother, and she’s always been known as “Aunt Beth.” I can’t even recall her last name.
From what I’ve been told of Aunt Beth, she was extraordinarily generous, sharing her clothes and money and color televisions with her family. My grandmother, who is now in her seventies, speaks of Aunt Beth with a reverent fondness.
One thing I do know: Aunt Beth loved irises. From the sounds of it, she cultivated a whole garden of the showy flower, edged with ruffles and six draping petals and colored pale pink, sweet lavender, icy white, and royal mauve. Every spring, the flowers unrobed themselves from their long green stalks, like indigo flags declaring the end of the winter—and their own ability to survive it.
Irises are resilient. They thrive in full sunlight, which can wilt other plants, but they’re not afraid of the summer haze. They’re perennial plants, meaning they survive cold winters to return, blooming, year after year. Adaptable in a variety of soil conditions, the flowers can be troweled out of the ground, tossed in a plastic grocery bag, transported, and tapped back into another garden to bloom magnificently the next season. Aunt Beth’s irises are no exception—when my mother moved from Michigan to Mississippi, she carried those irises with her.
My grandmother also keeps a patch of Aunt Beth’s irises in her garden, planted beneath a maple tree only a few yards away from the pond. It’s a constant battle between her and turtles that live in the pond and target the iris bed each year for a nest. The turtles waddle over to the garden, scratch out a hole right next to the irises, and dump their eggs, which hatch and mess up the garden all over again—that is, if a raccoon doesn’t discover the turtle eggs, a tragedy made even more lamentable because it disturbs the flowers all over again.
But Aunt Beth’s irises are sturdy. I’ve seen them survive turtle-nestings and Mississippi heat waves. They’ve been passed from Aunt Beth, nearly fifty years ago, to my grandmother, who let her own daughter dig them up and replant them in her gardens, wherever she goes.
I, for one, killed a two-dollar basil plant from Trader Joe’s. It came potted and fresh. Within three weeks of my care (or, should we say, the lack thereof), the basil plant was droopy. But when the time comes, I’m praying I have the maturity to protect the iris that’s handed down to me, or that the one handed down to me is particularly tough. By the time these bulbs come to me, however, they’re not just Aunt Beth’s irises. They’re my mother’s and grandmother’s.
Another thing I’ve been told about Aunt Beth: she brought my grandmother to church when her own mother didn’t. “I became a Christian because of her,” says my grandmother, who then raised her own children in the church, which is not necessarily a surefire method for encouraging kids to love God, but in the case of my mother, it stuck. So then I learned about God from the very beginning.
We don’t get to choose what we pass on through the generations. We draft wills and testaments, which gives the impression of control: dividing assets, divvying out wealth, deciding who gets the house and who gets the furniture. But we don’t control what happens next. We can only hope we’ve invested in things worth planting and protecting year after year—and strong enough to keep on propagating.
Hannah Riffell has landed in Lansing, Michigan twenty-three years after she was born there, nineteen years after she moved to Mississippi, seven years after she moved to Northern Michigan, and two years after she graduated from a university in Grand Rapids. You probably can’t find her because she’s either exploring the state, wandering around her city, or just lost in her own head.
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Exceptional work Hannah. I loved reading your admiration of Aunt Beth’s, iris. Because of her sharing of her iris, they have traveled from state to state and added beauty to many gardens of relatives and friends since the late 1950’s. From Aunt Beth’s daughter, Joyce