It was a hot and sticky August morning. Ernestine was already sitting at her kitchen table sopping up the rest of the thick King syrup on her favorite breakfast plate with one of the dozen buttermilk biscuits she had made the day before. The sun was slowly making its way through her house, and she was just about ready to get her day started, as she took a bite of the biscuit and smiled to herself. They still tasted like the biscuits her mother used to make many years earlier. Ernestine vividly remembered sitting around the small dining table in her mother’s farmhouse with her six siblings in Hobgood, North Carolina, fighting over who would be the one to eat the last biscuit before they had to go out and complete their daily chores. It was so hot back then, you could see the heat on your skin, or at least that’s how Ernestine described it.
She had always hated picking cotton and farm life in general, so as soon as she finished school and turned 18, she married her high school sweetheart, Martin, and they migrated up north for better opportunities. Eventually, they settled in Virginia, near the coast, had two babies, a girl and a boy, and bought their forever home. They were married for more than sixty years until Martin went on to be with the Lord. She missed him so much, her lifelong love. Sometimes she’d sit on their front porch with a glass of lemonade and one of Martin’s handkerchiefs, and she’d just wipe away her tears while thinking about all of their many memories together. Now, it was just her by herself, mostly, in their house alone. Her children, primarily her daughter, would come visit for a spell, but they both lived hours away and had other responsibilities. She would chat with them over the phone multiple times per week, just to check in, but she loved the feeling of independence she still had in her 83rd year on earth. “To God be the glory for keeping me here this long,” she’d always tell whoever she could.
Once she finished her breakfast, she rinsed her plate off in the sink and headed outdoors to her favorite place in the whole wide world — her garden. Although Ernestine had hated farm life in her youth, the one thing she could never part from was her flowers. She loved them, and they loved her too, and her garden’s flourishing blooms truly showed it. Every morning before it got too hot, she’d tend to her babies. She had won awards for her tulips, roses, and azaleas over the years, but her favorite flowers were her clematis — bright purple flowers with coney yellow, orange, pink or light purple centers. They would only pop up when they felt like it, and she made sure her daughter or granddaughter would snap her photo in front of them each time they bloomed. Sometimes she’d ask one of them to print the photos out and she’d place them in her flower scrapbook. She’d even make homemade bouquets and other floral arrangements and sell them down at the local farmer’s market, every now and then, but she mostly liked to keep her flowers to herself. Her garden was her safe space. She had tilled and fertilized and watered and weeded it throughout the years, and she loved what it had become.
After about an hour in the early morning heat and humidity, she went back inside, washed her hands, and poured herself a big cup of ice water. While taking a long sip, she heard a car pull up in her driveway. It was her daughter, there to take her to a doctor’s appointment and to get groceries, among other tasks. Ernestine didn’t want to leave her house or her garden yet, but she knew it was time to run some errands. She took off her wide-brimmed straw hat, wiped the sweat from her brow, and replaced the hat with a sun visor, then she grabbed her cane before heading outside to meet her daughter at the car. I’ll see you again soon, she said to her house while locking the front door.
“Do you have time to come out back later today?” Ernestine asked her daughter as they were driving to their first destination. “I got some new blooms I wanna show you.”
“Of course, mama…”
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