Story 5: Deirdre in Xeriscape: PlantTalk

From my stone bench between the spruces, I call Planttalk on the cordless phone. Even though the sound isn’t as good as our other phones, I like using it from the bench in the yard, where all the neighbors can see me and my cordlessness. If they are looking. I want to hear that man’s deep buzzy voice again. It’s Friday night, and since I’m stuck here at my parents’ house for spring break and Jodi is on vacation with her parents, I have no plans other than to garden tomorrow.


Depending on which way I face and whether I bring my binoculars out with me, from this seat I can peer into the other houses perched on this hill. I always think they look like those big gaudy pins that old ladies wear, hanging off their chests and weighing down their polyester blouses. Our house is the hill’s cap, and it fits, snugly. Or I can turn inward to the yard I have been slowly revising, square foot by square foot, since high school. My neighbors don’t understand xeriscape. They don’t think it applies in a mountain town like Evergreen. That’s why we’ll have a water crisis in twenty years. Just you wait.

I settle for number 2013—“spring frosts and snows”—and wait for the voice, which really says, “Snow is a great insulator.” But I hear, “You have great tatas! Lay here!” Well, I do. Even if lay isn’t grammatical. I wonder if this man’s voice would sound sexy in my bedroom. The log walls tend to absorb sound, but I’ve never had a man there to really test them. After I listened to this entry the first time, two falls ago, I dug up all the south-facing tulips and planted them on the east side of the house. My tulips will not be seduced by the southern sun, at least, not before they are truly ready. Now they bloom long after the ones at the University of Colorado, which I secretly enjoy. Everyone else is talking about summer, but at home, in the mountains, the seasons take their sweet time. And I have the latest tulips. I want to have the latest of everything.

Sweet time. I lie back on the cool stone and absorb the man’s voice for a little longer. Then I turn off the phone, close my eyes, and remember the night Josh and I made love in the grass along Boulder Creek. We had been walking along the creek, using a book I had just bought to identify plants. In one especially marshy spot, he took my hand in his and ran my fingers along the sedges. “Sedges have edges,” he said. “That’s how you tell them from grasses.” We teetered from one hummock of grass to another and happened on a meadow surrounded by bushes. The ground there was dry but cool. I told him the sound of trickling water soothed me and lay down, propping the book on my chest. Neither of us was wearing a coat. An extremely warm night for March, that’s what it was.

“I need a pillow,” he said, rearranging himself with his head on my stomach. After a while, the feel of his hair through my thin shirt drowned out the creek, and I reached down and mussed his hair, not that it was ever that neat. He turned over and kissed my belly.

Jodi had told me all about Josh: he was exactly as slow and thorough as she’d described. Jodi doesn’t love that about him; she likes men who take control. I don’t know exactly what type I like, since Josh was my first, but I didn’t anticipate a problem with sharing. Jodi, it turns out, had a different view. When I told her, she acted as if Josh were a plant in her garden. I explained that I’d always liked him but that she got there first. Then when she said how gentle he was and how she thought he might bore her, I decided I could like him again. It didn’t help. I don’t understand why she wants to claim plants for her garden that she doesn’t love. And I never got the impression that Josh thought he belonged to her.

The bench is cold. Even the memory of Josh doesn’t change that. I want to see how long I can stand it against my shoulder blades. I try to flatten the part of my back between into the bench but can’t. The stars are really clear now. The phone is silent. Tomorrow I’m going to buy a plant that reminds me of Jodi and install it in a secret corner of my yard. Maybe pussytoes, with its soft flowers and distinctive gray leaves. I won’t tell anyone, but that way Jodi will have to forgive me. It will be like casting a spell.

Sometimes people remind me of nothing so much as perennials. When they overgrow one bed, I can divide them and move part of them to another. To make a match, I can try one plant and then another for the contrast—as long as their seasons of bloom follow each other from June until September. In the mountains, with their abbreviated growing season, that is all I can hope for.