nonfic by sarah disney

Through a Sage Meadow, Home

I dig alone in a dark corner of the cemetery. Manicured grounds stretch behind me. Patches of dew shimmer under artificial light. I shiver in the breeze, sweaty from shoveling. This is how my dream begins.

It is night, almost morning. I stop to rest on the earthen bridge between gaping grave and mounding dirt. I look at my hands, brown from digging. Nail edges black with trapped soil. On the ground, I make out a low rectangular marker with my mother’s name etched in stone.

Almost there, I say to the stirring air. A little further now.

*

It is April, almost May. The day is mild. I look down at my dirty hands, nails edged with soil. “Salvia,” I say when my daughter asks what I’m planting. “This one is called May Night Salvia.”

“It smells funny,” she says, crinkling her kindergarten nose at the indigo flowers.

And she is right, though the bittersweet scent comforts me. I inhale, letting myself smile.

I went out to buy creeping phlox, imagining how it might sprawl over the stone wall in our front yard. But I am not planting phlox. I am planting salvia because I saw it at the Garden Center and recalled how my mother used to grow it in her yard and Mother’s Day is coming and I miss her.

On a walk I notice a neighbor’s mottled granite address marker, squatting like a pale tombstone in the yard. The marker makes the house look like a memorial. Sometimes, passing, I think of the house as a hologram. A flickering replica of a solid house in a parallel realm.

This Mother’s Day marks three years lived in our house. There is no address marker in our yard. Nothing belonging our house to the street. Perhaps our house, too, crosses dimensions, like a portal.

*

In the dream, I wipe my forehead and climb back into the hole. I bend to my shovel, hurrying. The sun is rising, and I dig with despair. Not the despair of getting caught in the light of day, although I think of that, too. Mine is the despair of knowing I will never finish digging.

And I don’t.

Instead, I wake to the world my mother left years ago. I rise and wash and dress and sip coffee and wait for my children to stir—all while wondering: What happens if my shovel strikes something solid? What will I do? Or see?

*

Months after my mother died, my father sold our family home—a once-immaculate, split-level on a suburban cul-de-sac. Now strangers own my childhood home. Strangers own the salvia, if it still grows in the yard.

Day by day, I find more varieties of salvia, commonly known as sage. I bring home a pinkish salvia whose specific name I lost when its white tag blew across the parking lot of the Garden Center. I accidentally purchase a couple pots of nepeta—also called catmint—mistaking its blue florals for salvia spears.

*

At home I dig holes in which to plant my haul. A worm wriggles up from the earth I’ve turned. I see my mother’s slender lips shaping the sounds:

“Salvia.” Mouth like a cave. Sighing out the “ah.” Sounding like salvation.

“Forsythia.” Cheeks pull corners to an incidental smile.

“Liriope.” Tongue pulses on the first syllable. Wet lips clap on the last.

She was my teacher, as well as my mother. She taught me the beauty of words and the glory of what they could name. Planting salvia in my yard is one way of growing near to her. Or, perhaps, a way of growing her near to me.

*

Every year, Mother’s Day looms like a blot on the horizon. As a mother, I enjoy the day. As a motherless daughter, I dread it. Resent it. I never know how I will feel when the day arrives. Maybe this year I will walk from my house to her grave, a mile away. Or, perhaps, I will lie down among the salvia for a rest.

The dream first appeared after an early-March flurry of Mother’s Day marketing emails. Somehow, in the dream, I am aware that my digging is a gift to her. My gift for my mother for Mother’s Day. What could it possibly mean—digging as a gift? Is she alive in my dream? Does she need to be freed from the ground?

I have been dreaming about digging for eight weeks. I wish the dream would stop, or continue with a different ending. I imagine seeing her walk toward me as I dig. I want to feel the relief of releasing my shovel.

All this digging, day and night, reminds me of a childhood dream about tunneling to another side of the world. I stay with the image between digs, entertaining the wonder of crawling into a hole and popping out in a completely different place.

*

Six years ago, when my mother passed from metastatic cancer—propagated through spinal fluid to her brain and all over—I often spoke to her out loud. I was at home with a new baby, my first. And I was awake around the clock in a lonely twilight state where nothing seemed quite real.

In those hazy hours, I pretended my mother into the room and talked to her about the baby. “Aww, look at her, scrunching her face. Think she needs to burp?” I’d say, lifting baby to my shoulder, offering a few pats on her back.

Conversing with my mother in my mind, sometimes I received answers. How else would I have known to test a bottle’s temperature by splashing milk on the inside of my wrist? How else would I have remembered the right folds for swaddling or the soothing songs to sing? How else would I have navigated the rawness of those days?

No, she was there. Near as breathing.

*

These days, when I think of my mother, I am usually digging her up. My day thoughts sprout from the night dreams in which I am digging at her grave.

My sadness has softened in the years she’s been gone. My grief still hurts—less like a throbbing wound, more like a tingling phantom limb. Am I forgetting her? Is that why I am dreaming this dream?

Sometimes, thoughts of my mother arrive in big colorful bursts of memory. The smell of Boxwood shrubs, brassy and acrid, projects an image of her walking before me in her classic navy blue windbreaker. Her feet crunching along the crushed shell paths of Williamsburg. Blonde hair bouncing about her face. Her smile shining back at me through the Virginia sunshine.

She brightened in historic places. She adored every living connection to the past.

*

When I am not planting salvia, I read about it. I learn salvia is an old-world growth, rooted in the Latin word “Salveo” meaning “to feel healthy” or “to heal.”

Salvia leaves contain Salvinorin A, a compound with hallucinogenic properties. In certain ancient and continuous Shamanic healing traditions, salvia is ingested to expand states of consciousness.

Perhaps I could take some salvia and hallucinate an end to this dream, I think.

Salvia induces the perception of not having a body. Users of salvia describe the trip as completely dissociative—like traveling through a tunnel to other, more colorful dimensions. On salvia, one’s body seems to dissolve away. 

*

I cannot keep my hands from the cool, sticky dark of the soil. Salvia wants pure sunlight. Our rounded front flowerbed is bright all day and vacant where oversized shrubs once hunched.

I plant until the path to my door runs through a periwinkle meadow. Mounding Marcus Salvia spreads amethyst spires. Bushy Steel Blue lifts icy lavender spokes. Lush Spring King offers plumes of plum.

As I stand in the yard to admire my work, imaginary years of salvia curation unfurl before me.

*

One morning I wake from the digging dream recalling Bronte’s Catherine and Heathcliff. What might be a random firing of neurons feels like a hint. A clue.

At the bookcase, I flip through a faded copy of Wuthering Heights. The same copy my mother and I swapped back and forth at night when I was in high school.

I scan for the scene where Heathcliff tells of embracing Catherine’s disinterred body, in the moments after digging her up. It’s a famous scene! I think. But I cannot find it.

I have misremembered the text.

In the story, Heathcliff begins digging, but never reaches Catherine’s body. He stops because she reaches him. “Her presence was with me,” he says, “It remained while I refilled the grave, and led me home.”

*

My mother is with me.

She is alive in my waking memory and my strange dreams.

She is present in my acts of mothering.

She is rooted to my sense of home.

And my mother is blooming in my front yard as salvia—a healing salve for the dark nights of May.

Sarah is a dimensionally-curious writer from Louisville, Kentucky. She lives with her husband, two daughters, a cat, and the belongings of many dead relatives. She likes bourbon and braided rugs. Her work has appeared in The Rush and on the HerStry blog. Find her lurking in the liminal spaces, or online at www.thatsarahdisney.com.