She heard the distinctive rattle-clacking of the rattlesnake before she saw it. At first she’d paid no attention to the sound, blending as it did into the leaf-sway swish of the cornstalks. She’d disturbed the snake as it basked in the nourishment of morning sunlight that spread like golden butter over her garden, unseen while she was busy puttering about pulling out dandelions and crabgrass. The snake presented a new obstacle amidst the everyday tasks of eradicating bean beetles, attacking weeds, and outsmarting gophers and ground squirrels in her nearly quarter-acre garden. Cautiously sidestepping away from the agitated rattlesnake, she was stymied by the new obstacle. She’d known of only one person who’d been struck by a rattlesnake; and thankfully, he’d lived to tell about it.
He’d been foolish enough to go off-trail while climbing Mount Saint Helena and had attempted to pull himself up by placing his hand on a boulder amongst the scree, and since he’d startled the snake, hadn’t been warned by the vibrating rattles emanating from keratin at the tip of its tail. Pam Zielinski pondered feasible scenarios for eliminating her garden’s latest pest. Poison was not an option in her organic garden. If she chopped it with a hoe, she might miss it, angering it and causing it to strike. Crushing it with a brick would bring her much too close to the lengthy serpent. While she shuffled these ideas through her mind, the snake leisurely slid behind a boulder near the pergola. She hadn’t really wanted to kill it, understanding that it was a part of the natural environment. It may assist her with the gophers and other garden pests. Rattlers were said to be reclusive and rarely aggressive, but she’d panicked.
A gardener from the get-go, Pam grew everything from Asters to Zinnias, and most of the vegetables they ate had been coddled and cultivated here for decades. She’d seen her share of reptiles in the garden– gopher snakes and alligator lizards, but this was the first rattlesnake she’d witnessed here. She bravely carried on, weeded the radish patch, then thinned the second-crop beans that, if left undone, would crowd out a good harvest. She thought, “If I take flight now, I may never return.” The old, ‘once you fall off the horse you better get back on’ routine. The repetitive pleasure of working with her hands in the compost-enriched soil was spoiled by her need to continually peer over her shoulder for the rattler’s return.
Finally, the morning’s gardening chores completed, she pulled off her gloves, stood and stretched, breathing deep of the sugary-scented sweet peas that climbed along the fence. In the distance, moss green hills of the Mayacamas range were reassuring sentries informing her that all was right in her world. The snake forgotten, she fretted instead about Gary and his diatribe of the day. She gladly performed household chores for him, such as mending, shopping, and cooking, since he’d become a widower two years ago and moved into Pam’s spare bedroom.
Now they had something besides their childhood in common– they’d both lost their spouses. Gary was her older brother who’d suffered from anger issues and PTSD for years– decades, really, since the Vietnam War. Her sister-in-law, Dawn, had been at her wit’s end so many times throughout the years, unsure what to do for him, not wanting him to suffer. He wasn’t physically abusive, but his mental anguish and anger were to be avoided if at all possible. The Veterans Affairs groups had slowly evolved over time to aid him and so many like him, but each day was still a test. Dawn had been a saint, in Pam’s eyes, repeatedly talking him down during his episodes with her quiet demeanor.
When Gary and Pam were kids, he’d been drafted into the war like so many of their friends. Didn’t they need to grow up first? She thought of his childhood plastic soldiers and the zillions of battles and strategies he’d planned and executed back then while she’d played with her dolls and stuffed animals. Then, all of a sudden, a window had closed, and he’d been shipped off. At first, Vietnam had been some indecipherable spot on a globe that most people had never heard of, and before you knew it, it was in the air we breathed. You couldn’t not know of it. She’d suffered both fear for him and guilt pangs for being a girl and not having possession of a draft card. Sure, there’d been military nurses and volunteers back then, but she’d never gone out on a limb like that. Since Dawn died, Gary has been deeply committed to his new survival strategy.
“I’m fully aware that I’m just as close to death now as I was then. It’s all meaningless drivel, and I’ll never find anything valuable to achieve ever again. Dawn was my life.” Pam understood, but cajoled him into sharing her home. Initially, his answer had been, “No thanks.”
“But why?”
“Pointless.” He’d never been loquacious.
Pam cited various reasons: “We could reconnect and find clarity and purpose together in our twilight years.”
“I can really do without your woo-woo gibberish.”
I reminded Gary that we’d both endured dark times and could make use of one another’s support. “You have a green thumb. You like puttering. We could help each other with chores and gardening projects.”
“I’m an arthritic old fool. Useless.”
“Take an ibuprofen. You’ll be all right.”
A month later, Gary showed up with his pickup truck full of the remains of his old life and what he’d deemed necessary to start his new life.
“I’m so happy, bro,” she said. He slammed the truck door, and she tweaked his whiskery cheek with her rough fingers, then hugged him. They looked like siblings with their matching grey hair and blue jeans.
“We’re going to be just fine.” Pam felt that they’d come full circle: they’d started out as brother and sister in the same house sharing significant hunks of their young lives. Back then she’d gathered shells and rocks, and he’d been enamored of anything automotive, collecting and fixing old Fords. She’d lived for her weekly visits to the library, reading Nancy Drew mysteries and later, Thoreau, Muir, and Audubon. He’d almost sprouted gills living as he did for water polo.
At home, he loved to blast his LP collection frequently and loudly, to the consternation of our parents. The Stones, Kinks, Creedence Clearwater Revival all cranked up to full volume. His bedroom walls had been bedecked with lyrics of favored songs, scripted in ink that glowed under his black light. Now, here they were once again, ensconced in one another’s lives. She was hopeful that their late-life reconnection would have a profound effect on one another or, at the least, provide something placid and still like an unfolding prayer. He remained generally resistant to the idea that cementing sibling bonds could provide peace or anything approaching the life-changing state of affairs that Pam suggested, but by just being here and showing up, he was colluding in the endeavor. Brother and sister linked by past histories. She read his silence as he went about his daily tasks. As he rabbit-proofed the garden fence, she’d been like a fortune teller reading tea leaves for his moods.
Once, his anger slithered out like a den of snakes at her failure to patch up the pockets on his favorite cargo pants. His arthritic hands both frustrated and pained him, preventing him from accomplishing many routine chores. He’d soon reigned himself in, but the specter of his wrath lingered. This week she’d forgotten to give him a phone message from the VA, triggering a fresh rant. They shared an old-fashioned landline telephone since they had no cell phone reception out here. She’d suddenly remembered the call while folding laundry. As she’d placed a set of flowered napkins into the kitchen drawer, she’d been reminded of a pair of Gary’s jams– those colorful surf shorts worn on the beach in the 60s. She wondered how it was that she could recall what he wore to the beach in those days, but not an important telephone message he’d been expecting. Some of her brain’s wifi connections must be flying off.
Rueful, she vowed to pay closer attention to his needs and to her daily tasks. Mindfulness. That’s what is needed now. To be more mindful of each undertaking. When Gary had moved in with her, he’d been heedful of her penurious ways, and had constructed several more raised beds in the garden. There was nothing like fresh vegetables, and the money saved by ‘shopping her garden’; canning and freezing foods all served a purpose with her modest history teacher’s pension and his monthly benefits check. The newly constructed veggie beds had been a boon to the garden’s output.
She hadn’t known, back when she’d initially selected the site, that her garden was situated on a bed of California’s state rock, serpentine. The winter runoff through that section of her property should have alerted her, but she’d not been much of a winter gardener, and hadn’t really known how shallow the topsoil was there. Serpentine, although beautiful in its many hues of waxy green, yellow, and black, made for poor conditions for vegetable gardening. The raised garden beds were a necessity that aided in foiling gophers and ground squirrels and allowed her to amend the soil with rich compost made from household scraps such as vegetable peelings, eggshells, and coffee grounds. Back before most of the raised beds had been constructed, she’d witnessed a cartoon-like occurrence when a thriving green bean bush she’d nurtured from seed in the shallow soil had suddenly burst into life, quivering and shaking, then astoundingly disappeared underground, having been pulled under by a gopher. She’d been a proponent of raised beds ever since.
Preparing their lunchtime salads and grilled cheese sandwiches, she heard Gary’s ever-present television reciting the dour news of the day, including the weather forecast. Dry weather conditions persisted, rekindling a deep anxiety of yet another disastrous summer of wildfires. Wouldn’t that be nice if her aging mind’s preponderance toward forgetfulness could include the devastating wildfires that now seem to occur on a regular basis? It didn’t take much to experience the gut-wrenching fear that had a way of engulfing her. Anything from dry winds to the rotor sound of helicopters was likely to produce her own form of PTSD.
She fixed her eyes out the kitchen window on a hawk soaring the pellucid skies above the garden. It must live in the old oak tree close to the garden. Twisted oaks– some over two hundred years old- and dusty-hued grey pines positioned above burnished grasses that ringed the valley are all allies in the narrative of aging. Age happens if you’re lucky, had been their mom’s refrain.
Gary and Pam had always been close to their mom. Pam wondered if she’d ever get over her tendency to reach for the phone to relate both big and small news events to her mom as she’d always done before her death– a struggle with a work-related problem, national news events that were life-altering like terrorist attacks and climate change or, conversely, a sighting of a pileated woodpecker or eye-catching bracket fungi could all be conferred upon with mom.
They’d spent considerable time discussing their shared concerns about Gary’s inner sense of chaos after his return from the war. Pam’s one-sided conversations with her mom continued. When you were that close to someone, death did not extinguish your relationship. The stately oak had endured the loss of limbs over the centuries and a multitude of woodpecker holes bored into its trunk like so many war wounds. Her mother’s osteoporosis had limited her normal routine, but still she’d found enjoyment in her life to the very end.
Mom hadn’t made many visits to the property over the years, preferring the amenities of town life to casual country life. Paradoxically, she’d appeared to enjoy the limited time she’d spent here. Then, she’d taken purposeful walks under the gnarled oak while gathering acorns and oak galls, mosses and dried leaves with which she’d constructed lovely wreathes. The minutiae of the present, with its daily gifts, whether it was the garden’s bounty or the breathtaking beauty of a hummingbird hovering nearby, all converged with memories that swirled about. Details from decades of living here. A kaleidoscope of recollections. Pam felt rich, then, as if her bank account had mounted to something substantial.
Gary’s television suddenly muted, creating a void of abrupt silence and bringing Pam back to the present. “What’s wrong with you, Pam? You know I can’t miss my VA appointments, and they changed the date,” Gary had sputtered at her back as she’d scooped the sandwiches out of the pan, startling her.
“I know, I blew it. I wrote down your message, but I’ll be darned if I know what I did with that slip of paper.” More than slips of paper were slipping her mind. As she attempted to placate him, a younger version of her brother came to mind. She’d been in their childhood backyard swinging on their swing set while the boy from across the street had been yelling at her to get off, that he wanted a turn. She answered him by pumping her legs harder, flying high above the ground. The boy then picked up Gary’s child-sized handsaw from his junior construction set and threatened to throw it at her. She wasn’t sure which was the scarier scenario —swinging so high that the chain jumped, or facing the boy’s threat.
Two things happened next. The boy made good on his promise and threw the saw, which lacerated the skin under her left eye, while at the same time Gary had come down the back steps and observed the scenario. Gary had screamed for their mom and took off after the punk kid to pound him, ever Pam’s protector. Pam had walked into her childhood kitchen, cupping her eye, blood dramatically dripping down her face. She’d required five stitches and still carried the scar, which now blended into her wrinkles. He’d been her big brother-protector all of their young lives. Now it was her turn to provide him with whatever care she could gather.
Setting his sandwich on the table, she excused herself to go to the garden to pick another tomato for lunch. In her core, she knew Gary meant her no harm, but his moods always unnerved her, producing a tightening in her stomach. As she entered the garden, her pant leg grazed the lavender plant near the gate, sending up calming woody scents, so she paused to breathe deeply. Bees floated above the purple blossoms, their hind legs packed with pollen.
As she reached the tomato patch, the now-familiar diamond-shaped marks of the rattlesnake created a focal point near her peripheral vision. It had been lying in wait by a ground squirrel hole. She forced herself not to revile the snake, while keeping her distance. Standing stock-still, the snake’s proximity glued her in place. She sweats, summer’s heat and fear commingling, stinging her eyes. It’s as though she’s in a glider flying without propulsion. The pilot plane has relinquished its pull, and she’s incapable of flying away of her own accord. Or, she’s in one of those dreams where you try to run, and everything is in slow motion.
She dreads aggression from both the rattlesnake and Gary. As the snake flicked its forked tongue, she thought, ” I can come back later.” And then, ” I’ll probably forget, for criminy sake.” Which is worse, her malady of forgetting things, or his pervasive memories of the war? The hawk cries out above her as she contemplates leaving the garden empty- handed. She waits, motionless.
Her persistence has paid off. The snake retreated to what she assumed was his den by the boulder, allowing her to pluck the warm, red globe– her trophy. The tomato is cracked where the fruit meets the stem, due to growth spurts caused by uneven watering; it’s not perfect but salvageable. She can’t comprehend the reason the snake did not strike.
Pam composes herself to return to Gary in the kitchen. She has tried to put herself in his shoes throughout the years, considering what he may have endured in Vietnam, imagining only the worst since he never wants to talk about it. She presumes the fear she feels now is only a fraction of what Gary felt. A person would have to cultivate a particular mindset to withstand a war. But somehow the thought persists, ‘Had this been a mistake, inviting Gary to share her life?’ She shakes her head, ridding it of flawed thinking.
There is something vigorous going on aside from the connection to her brother and their shared past. It’s much more than the fact that he is the only one left who ‘gets’ the lexicon they share from growing up together. Also, she thinks she should look at it as a work in progress for refining, like marriage has been, like friendships are. Or, like cultivating and nourishing the garden, an accruing of the good plants and weeding out what we don’t want. It’s the unavoidable cadence of life; problems are. Just because things are mooshed up between us, doesn’t mean it can’t work. ‘Don’t flee,’ she tells herself. We’ll work on it. Gary, the garden and the snake.
The wildness of her garden’s inhabitants- the ground squirrels, the snakes, and the hawks is all a beautiful and terrible prayer. Just then, the shadow of the hawk meets her eye; then it glides into the garden, talons extended, reaching down to where she last spied the snake and, gripping it expertly, swoops it up. Gone. Just like that. Taking flight and leaving terra firma. Astonishment and wonder wash over her. She feels relief from the potential violence invoked daily by the snake’s presence.
