From Sybil Bruncheon’s "My Merry Memoirs"... a not-so-merry memory of Springtime and my childhood garden:

I used to have a stand of miniature white irises in my garden that I planted with my grandmother. They were absolutely beautiful; almost too perfect to be real… and they made me feel so wonderful at the very start of Spring when the first green shoots would begin to push up through the cold dirt. Iris shoots have that satiny silvery-green sheen to them, and they’re laid out in flat fan-shaped forms like little sword blades that are so distinctive and sculptural in their own right even before the buds begin to climb out of them and develop into the blooms. Every year, they struck me as incredibly brave, and they warmed my heart more than I can say...

I found out later after I moved away from home, that my brother, (clumsy and not very curious about any of the world around him, let alone all the gardening I had done over the years), went to that particular bed in the very early Spring, and, seeing all the green shoots coming up, thought they were some kind of weed. Can you imagine? What an idiot. A large grouping of identical shoots, very dramatically shaped and obviously the same plant, and he thought it was just a bunch of weeds. He spent hours digging, gouging, and pulling and finally resorted to an axe and a crowbar to pry and chop "all those tangled roots" out of the earth. He just couldn't understand why they were so stubborn.

I returned one Summer for a visit, and I noticed there were no irises left in that part of the garden. I mentioned it to my mother, and she chuckled merrily as she told me.

I remember when I heard what had happened, I went to my room and cried. I imagined all those iris rhizomes wound through each other in that rich black dirt that I had tended year after year after year, so carefully with my grandmother standing by and chatting, guiding me, her eyes twinkling at the promise of beauty. And I grieved at the thought of how those brave little irises had finally been torn to pieces, pried and dragged out of the ground, by a lout, and thrown away in the garbage. I wondered if they wondered where I had gone… the person who had selected them at the nursery, and had planted and then cared for them year after year. Why wasn’t I there to love and protect them?

To this day, it still breaks my heart... breaks my heart…

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