My Grandmother's Peonies

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I remember her explaining about the ants that crawled over the peony buds. Without their help the sticky bud would remain locked, would blacken and shrivel without unfolding, and maybe this describes the way she felt about her own wealth and position. Money as tool and liberator—or what, well used, might simply make for gaiety, the release of bloom. I say it might have been better for her to be less protected, to have lived outside the hothouse, but she wouldn't have agreed. And I admit my dour objections are beside the point. It might be the same to say that peonies would be better off with less, when they're so heavy in their bloom and weak in their legs that they collapse under the added weight of dew.

Peonies—the herbaceous ones I'm talking about—require for good flowering 30 to 60 days of frost: They're fussy, in other words, not for warmth but for cold. This is contrary and endearing, the bloom of tropical appearance that asks for snow. I've spent some years on the ever-temperate West Coast, where winter does not bring this month of freezing nights and where I have tried to feel the absence of peonies well compensated by other plants. But I'm giving it up. Kennel dogs find a home range somehow, however arbitrarily: I return to the Northeast in part because I'll go without fuchsia and agapanthus and a hundred other species before I will the jump-up and drop-dead glory of herbaceous peonies.

The last time I saw Gran she was slumped in the middle of her enormous bed with the window curtains drawn, in her bathrobe, and with her hair not yet brushed. Her swollen legs were splayed before her and her hands hung limp. She was too sick to make the usual presentation of herself, but I want to think she also intended to be seen "as is." When I recall this last meeting, I have a recurrent imaginative vision: It is of Gran pulling aside a curtain with a smile. There's a depth of space beyond her, white and without movement, and there's nothing in that space to focus on—there's nothing much to the vision. She's only opening a divider to invite me in—an admission of frailty from a matriarch, unveiling a greater grandeur of acceptance and grace.

Her last words were to her daughters: "Oh, girls, isn't it wonderful? It's working already." The doctor at her bedside who had administered the lethal dose put away his things. He had been spirited into the house just minutes before, after the home-care nurse, a good woman of problematic religious convictions, had been taken to the movies for the night.

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