Dahlias and Delight in the face of our Turbulent World

                  I am on a zoom with my daughter, her future wife, and my daughters future in law's. We are doing wedding planning, since they are on the East Coast, and I am in New Mexico. My daughter is gay, a democrat, and works for the government. She is about to lose her job, and is living in the crazytown of Washington DC. We are planning their wedding for later this summer in New Mexico. I can see my daughters bottom lip start to quiver, and her eyes filling up with tears. "I just wa-wa-wa-want it to be Ma-Ma-Ma Magical", she says, her voice wobbling with all the stress she is carrying. "IT WILL BE MAGICAL!!!" Cindy, my daughters fiancé's mom, and I both declare, in unison, our Mama Bear energy uniting fiercely through the airwaves of zoom.

           I can't control the country. Politics. The increasingly disturbing disappearance of civil rights in our country. What I can control this summer is my garden and magic. I plant cosmos, and whirling butterflies, zinnias, delphinium and bunches of lavender I am planting joy for my daughter. I order dahlia tubers, and decide this is the summer I will figure out growing dahlias. I plant three new rose bushes, one a red and white candy striped variety, that I have always coveted. Every day of the summer I deliberately sew some beauty and delight into my small slice of the world. I don't ignore the world. There are still protests to attend, and resistance groups to be a part of. I am not letting myself fall asleep, but creating joy, alongside the chaos, feels essential right now. Toi Derricotte, the black American poet, is credited with coining the phrase "my Joy is my Resistance." Creating a joy filled wedding for my queer daughter and her wife, is part of my resistance to the government in this moment.

              In 1983 I started college at the University of  California at Santa Cruz. I had left the East Coast, my all girls education, and my sheltered, privileged upbringing in New York City. I signed up for a class called Intro to Feminism with the professor and radical feminist Bettina Aptheker. On one of the first days of the class, an earthquake shook the entire lecture hall. It was the first earthquake I had experienced, and it felt like it mirrored my interior world, as I was exposed to feminist thought and theory for the first time. Everything changed. I read Alice Walker, Kate Millett, Zora Neale Hurston, the Yellow Wallpaper, and Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic. For the first time I saw how women were left out of history books, art history, medicine, psychology , and literature. From that moment on, what became most interesting to me was finding all the places women had been left out of, which turned out to be everywhere.

             Bettina Aptheker's intro to feminism class was the slow beginning of trying to understand my own family system. My father, an overbearing patriarch, and workaholic, who was physically and emotionally absent from the family. My mother, who had to drop out of art school, to return to live with her family on an island, who married at twenty one, and had four children. My mother who oozed dissatisfaction and unhappiness with her chosen life.

        I read Alice Walker's essay "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens" . Alice Walker discusses black women, and her mother and grandmother, and how even in their oppressed and trauma filled lives , they produced art in their gardens. I was  so excited to share this with my mother. My mother who had had to leave art school , and never quite found her way back to her creative life, but was a passionate gardener. My mother, who I found distant, and scary, shrouded in her all consuming depression and unhappiness, in her garden, in her denim shirt and shorts, usually with a cigratette hanging out of her mouth was the softest , most accessible version of my mother. My mother, who never went to college, after dropping out of art school , but who could recite all the latin names of the plants. And now as I work in my garden, I hear those plant names in my head, that I didn't even know I knew.

        I sent my mother Alice Walkers book, and a letter explaining how I understood her now: that her garden was her art. I don't know how my mother received any of this.  I don't know if my freshman zeal at figuring her out was disturbing or uncomfortable to her. I don't remember her responding. I am sure she was most likely confused to be compared to poor black women.

       My garden is in many ways an homage to my mother. My mother planted a lot of purple and yellow flowers. And that is the palette of my garden. Her mother, my Granny Grace's favorite color was also purple. I plant pink echinacea and black eyed susans because my mother loved them. I understand now all the hours she spent in the garden. If I can get into the garden a little in the morning, and in the evening, I am a calmer, happier person, If I can pull a few weeds it will be a better day. Life settles and quiets as I walk through the scramble of flowers, and weeds. I have planted dahlias and roses, cosmos, orange poppies, and bachelor buttons for my daughter this summer. I want it to be riot of joy for her . As the wedding nears I hang hummingbird feeders too, I want to maximize the possibility of joy. At their ceremony in August, on the edge of

a New Mexico mesa, my daughter and her wife recite their vows to each other. My daughter references Andrea Gibson's poem "First Love" and talks about being truly seen and herself for the first time. Her partner exudes the joy they share together, in her vows. As the vows end, a hummingbird hovers just above them, and lands on top of the bough of the arbor they stand in front of. A kiss of joy from the Universe.