Winter Cherry, or, How We Began

“How many lifetimes does it take to learn the facts of life? (And how long do you have to live to recover from them…?) Is it fact that helps us recover – or is it metaphor? Is it the hard knowledge of what really happened, like actual botanical material? Or is it the flesh of comparisons between what happened and what that was like, the blooming of explanations?” --Molly Peacock, The Paper Garden: An Artist [Begins Her Life’s Work] at 72

I was cleaning the basement as I wrote this. Or I should say, I was supposed to be.

I had stared at that quote by Molly Peacock off and on for weeks, since the first time I came across it on page 63 of a book I was reading for work. That is how life, and grief, catch you: when doing or supposed to be doing something else, getting on with this flimsy business of living. For the first few weeks of spring 2015, as Dead Housekeeping launched to a stunning response of gratitude and warmth, it happened almost out of the corner of my eye, done mostly with my left hand while my right hand continued….whatever it is a right hand does. In my case, I was reading dozens of books for a client in education, skimming the cream from thousands of years of human culture and serving it up for educational assessment in a dry state a long way from where I sat.

This book of Molly Peacock’s was on an approved, pre-licensed list of materials, and so I checked it out of the library and brought it home. That was all. Just a day in the life of a worker and survivor.

But then it subtly blew my mind.

The story behind The Paper Garden is a story of how housekeeping and care can have a fragile but definitive triumph over loss. Poet Molly Peacock weaves her own story of loss and creative life with that of Mary Delany, the 18th-century British artist who seems to have invented the modern paper collage. That’s sort of our story, too: The story of this website and this human project, this pixel garden, this well-kept House of the Dead.

It started, as many important human events do, late at night, between two people, in the dark.

Meredith Counts and I were shooting the breeze with a host of other shouty humans we like to hang out with on Facebook, leaning hard on our ALLCAPS buttons, when I happened to tell about my first husband’s technique for folding towels. It’s more impressive in caps, really: “MY DEAD HUSBAND TAUGHT ME A TECHNIQUE FOR FOLDING TOWELS I WILL NEVER FORGET.”

Off-list, Meredith came to me with an idea: A literary project devoted to these sacred daily gestures, the preserved and re-enacted memories of the dead through what they did with their hands while they were here. Thus was born Dead Housekeeping.

Which brings me back to The Paper Garden, and to my life as it was when I wrote this: my messy basement full of inherited and broken things, my paying projects beckoning, my sleeping family upstairs, my dead husband relentlessly still dead, my living husband very much alive…And meanwhile, too, the birds in my yard, the friends and colleagues and the contributors who have helped us breathe life into this project, their trust and enormous concentration toward telling the ways and habits of their loved ones, alive despite the unfairness of their loss…even so, sometimes, these we loved who cared for us do live again as we stir at our stoves or plump up a pillow or put on the music…meanwhile the messy, absorbing business of making home and keeping on, even in the face of such loss and such waste.

How? How can we live on? And how can we not?

My Father's Things

In my father’s things, I find a paper bag containing hair from my grandmother, from a haircut she received in 1926. I find paperwork from my father’s first stint in rehab, completed just a month before I was conceived, during the holiday season of 1985 and 1986. The doctor had written that Allen’s prognosis was good. He seemed capable of making logical decisions about alcohol.

My oldest sister finds naked photos of our parents, whose divorce--each from their second go-round at nuptials--was finalized on my 21st birthday. Oddly, she insists I have to look at them too, but I refuse, and into the trashbag they go, along with the hair. The discharge paperwork from in-patient treatment goes into the growing pile of things to recycle, along with boxes of documents from the custody battle that won a different sister & I a life not spent in fear & battered women’s shelters, greeting cards, and progress reports from each of my father’s five children. There is a paper figurine in my father’s likeness, with string running from the popsicle stick on his back to the parachute made of coffee filters, made fifteen years ago when we sent him sky-diving for father’s day.

Months and months later, there are still stacks of boxes containing old photographs and scrapbooks in my basement room, pushed up against a wall and semi-hidden behind the futon. I cannot bring myself to sort through them, and only open one enough to see a bag full of dozens and dozens of headshots of my grandmother, some blurry and some in focus. Her hair is curled beautifully. I see my father in her face. On top of this box is also one of my grandmother’s diaries, this one written between May or June of 1938 and January 1939. She writes of opening a gym in Eugene, Oregon, with her first husband named Don--the father of my Auntie Karin who lived in Redondo Beach and liked ice cubes in her glasses of red wine--and of studying massage and kinesiology. She writes of financial worries and losing an oar to their boat in the river on a sunny day. She writes of arguing Hitler late into the night after her shifts at the salmon cannery, and she writes of hearing the War of the Worlds broadcast that Halloween night, thinking it was real and walking to her mother’s house with her husband, carrying what they could.

photo by the author

I think I know her better now than I did when she was alive, when I was seven or eight and she was a terribly old, thin woman who lived in a maze of a house, surrounded by stacks of newspapers and to-go containers. When she stuffed napkins in her sleeves at restaurants, “for later.” I don’t know if this is the case, but I’ve read the thoughts she told only to a page in a notebook, so maybe so. In one of her planners from the early nineties that she saved, and then my father saved after her, I see written on September 1st in her scratchy old woman’s hand, Ashley’s birthday, and then after, celebrated at the Hogranch, the name we Bensons adopted for our Woodinville home. I have no recollection of this celebration, but I think I know a photograph taken that day, of my sister Scarlet & me on Grandma Doris’s lap. Grandma Doris, I know, is smiling. My hair is white-blond. We are just back from Las Vegas, moving home to Washington after a four year absence.

I save my father’s writing, bits of prose tapped out on typewriters and dating from the 70s, the 80s, the early 90s. Less from later. I save his art, an old sketch of a shoe leaving through the Hogranch’s front door, another a self-portrait of an anguish. I can’t read the prose or hang the portrait, but I keep them now. Maybe when he is gone.

photo by the author

- Ashley Benson is a teacher, baker, small-time farmer, and writer from the Pacific Northwest. Her written work has only ever appeared on her own blog and her sister’s refrigerator. She lives in the Frelard neighborhood of Seattle with her cat, Clementine, and her partner, Patrick--although not for long. She can be found online at http://thisisnotreallife.tumblr.com/