My grandparents live in a wooded suburb fifteen miles north of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan. A summer outpost for wealthy urbanites at the turn of the century, the area has since been pie-sliced by developers. Large-scale, Fischer Price-like homes now preside over diminutive lots in artificially genteel, countrified enclaves, while gravel-edged roads wind round too-green lakes. My grandparents’ more veteran subdivision demonstrates its solidarity against the newness by holding seasonal festivals, from autumn corn roasts to Christmas caroling to springtime egg hunting to full-blown summer patriotismos. Year-round, my grandparents’ modest two-level colonial stands in full salute, its white siding, blue trim, and red brick lending it patriotic panache, a star-spangled banner and an Irish Republic tri-color flag flying at jaunty angles on either side of the front door. Grandpa keeps the lawn and bushes trim with his push mower and shears, while Grandma tends aggressively to the rose beds and other more delicate accessories. From the front lawn, you can catch Lake Michigan winking behind their neighbors’ homes, a coy reminder that the lake serves as source of water, weather, and direction. I may not be the ocean, it seems to say, but as compass I rival the sun.

Our family’s waterfront walks begin with an obligatory visit to the small, blufftop clearing we call “Grandpa’s Lookout,” where the cautious naturalist or eager swimmer can gauge the tide and the mood of the lake by its color. A steep gravel path winds from lookout to shore down the face of a ravine, cutting through a small tract of forest that was set aside as a preserve in the 1970s. Turning the bend halfway down the hill, a visitor comes in sight of a small hesitation of water that collects its thoughts, logs, and moss before making its way slowly into the lake. This pond is all that remains of a considerable reservoir whose now-antique concrete dam has slowly resigned itself to water level, providing a flawed crossing to the far bank where a red canoe waits for paddles in the undergrowth. Over time, five larger fragments of this dam have drifted and resettled down the shore in a solemn gathering I once took for a north shore Stonehenge or midwestern Easter Island. The slabs’ rough sides and oxidized piping provide ample foothold for anyone seeking mystery at the water’s edge.

As a child, I feared that my grandparents’ house would make its way down that slope as well—with my grandparents in it. Erosion does threaten the integrity of many nearby properties; several neighbors have expended considerable sums in the attempt to prop up their lakeside bluffs. But erosion also makes for constant transformation: on every visit, the beach reveals a different face. We return to the waterfront with fondness and reverence; it is a living metaphor of our own ongoing transformations. No family gathering is complete without a walk to the lake.

After attending college out of state, I returned to Lake Michigan by way of Chicago—place of my grandpa’s childhood and my grandmother’s young adulthood, origin of their courtship, and a city for which they harbor a great affection. They interpreted my move as a kind of unspoken tribute to his heritage. As the unofficial family chronicler of my generation, I delighted in the newfound proximity to my mother’s parents, both geographically (Milwaukee is but a short drive away) and historically (my first apartment was located within my great aunt’s former neighborhood), while the difference in our ages allowed me to pose them questions that their three daughters might consider taboo. It is not surprising, then, that during a recent visit, I was the first to hear a family story that had not before been told:

The day after their first unofficial date, my grandfather sent my grandmother an orchid. The parcel traveled by rail from Chicago to a juncture in north-central Illinois and then by bus to my grandmother’s small hometown, where she was visiting her family for Easter. Grandma received a call from the bus depot, which was then housed in the town's only café; she drove downtown to pick up the unexpected package. Five months later, the two joined lives in a ceremony whose 50th anniversary we celebrated only recently.

Despite its apparent importance, the orchid has, until now, made no appearance in family lore, while the humble carnation held floral court, largely in commemoration of my grandfather’s very first courting gesture: weeks after they met, he placed a bunch of green carnations on Grandma’s office desk St. Patrick’s Day (she worked in Personnel; he, in Engineering). Today, on the feast days of his favorite saints, my grandfather bestows upon wife, daughters, and grandchildren a single carnation color-coded according to holy personage (red for Valentine, green for Patrick). None of us, however, had heard the orchid story until it was retold to me half a century later.

At first glance the orchid, a flamboyant hothouse cutting, seems out of place in our homegrown family album. The union of my grandfather—a southside Chicago Irish tough and former seminarian—and my grandmother—a citified farmer’s daughter and aspiring painter—took place in the post-war forties, before thrift was chic or even optional. Shipping a flower across the state was an extravagant gesture for a man who today wears his sweaters until they unravel and keeps financial records so tight they’re waterproof. The act, like the flower itself, was singular and unlikely. I also found it terribly intriguing: how had the orchid remained outside our family tradition?

To investigate this story was to take an amateur's crack at the Sistine Chapel: I’d fill in the gaps, remain as loyal as possible to the original, and forge the rest in colored pencil. Perhaps write a poem. But even a poet’s approach to history requires a foundation of actual evidence. Did Grandma expect the flower? Did it change the way she felt about him? Why did Grandpa choose an orchid? Should either of them fail to provide adequate detail, the poet would step in, and memory might be reconstructed.

And so one evening, as the October sun was setting outside my window, I called my grandmother. She answered, I imagine, sitting at the kitchen desk in her tennis socks and shoes, handkerchief wrapped about her head, one leg bouncing, a To-Do list half-checked before her. “I want to ask you more about the Easter orchid. The one Grandpa sent you before you were married."

"What do you want to know?"

I paused. “Did you blush when you’d opened it?”

“Oh, no, I didn’t blush.”

“Was it on a stem, or in a box?”

“It must have been in a box, because I could tell it was a flower.”

“What did you do with it?”

“I wore it to church on Sunday, pinned to my Easter suit.”

“Did you change your outfit to match the flower?”

“No. The suit was blue with purple trim. It matched perfectly. We wore hats back then, you know.”

I saw the orchid, singular, beautiful, fastened to proud cloth, Grandma’s bosom trained to attention in a tailored navy suit, her back straight, eyes high, hair tucked neatly beneath a matching hat. I saw pews of nodding headwear and, outside on the lawn, an early garden of straw disks, pillboxes, fruit baskets, bird perches, scarves, and widows’ veils, bright against the still-frozen April sky. I saw Grandma returning to her parents’ modest but canary yellow two-story home, removing the corsage in the kitchen, and placing it in a bowl? In a vase? “What did you do with it afterward?”

“I think I wore home to Chicago.”

“On the train?”

“Sure. When you had a flower in those days, you wore it. I probably wore it until it died.” She paused. “We didn’t see many orchids, you know. How many do you get in a lifetime? Two, maybe three? How many orchids have YOU had?”

“None,” I said.

“See. When you get an orchid, you’ll know.”

At twenty-seven, I have exceeded the ages at which my mother and grandmother reached the milestones of marriage and children. My grandmother considers my “freedom” to be a great responsibility, even a gift, one I suspect she somewhat envies. Grandma stopped painting after the birth of my mother, her first child, and did not seriously return to her paints until her youngest child had left for school. She and Grandpa, however, raised three daughters with noticeable abilities in music, storytelling, and personal reflection: my aunts are professional musicians and song-writers, and my mother is a pianist and a psychologist. In some ways, their work stands as an alternative to landscape and portraiture. My siblings and I (to simplify) include a writer, a musician, and a visual artist; we therefore carry on the tradition as well. Grandma is a most vocal champion, coach and critic of our creative work. Grandpa is a staunch supporter of family members as well, although his emphasis on the literal is quite renowned: a ledger man and former military cadet, he is known for his withering bluntness and remains unwilling to submit his intellect to any kind of cultural hogwash. “What do you poets do, just talk to each other?” he asked me once after reading my work. Still, before sending a poem to any reader or literary magazine, I think of my grandparents, gauging the poem’s accessibility and appropriateness by their anticipated reaction: would Grandpa grasp the metaphors? Would Grandma be proud of the piece? Little material has passed that test, I admit.

Both grandparents reflect the environments in which they grew up: she, farmland; he, city. As details of the newly-discovered orchid story unfolded, I grew surer that this flower was a surprisingly appropriate symbol of my grandparents’ union and life together, one of small surprises, gentle beauty, and enduring love and faith. It was as though the bloom had arrived again, fifty years later, to thrill and puzzle us. Or at least to puzzle me: my Grandfather, for one, does not consider the orchid story to be an anomaly. “I have always been a flower man,” he asserted in a recent letter. At first, this entailed bringing cut flowers to his mother; and now: “Each year at Easter I still give [Grandma] an orchid; each year I give her one green carnation; during the year I try to keep her supplied with one long-stem rose. The flower man. That’s my simple language of love.”

And what of that first orchid, which my grandmother tells me were primarily “wedding and funeral flowers?” His answer: “I sent an orchid to Grandma to get her attention…It did the trick.”

My investigation of the orchid story has enabled me to collaborate with my grandparents in reconstructing a memory scrapbook. Every time we spoke or wrote about the orchid, a new detail would emerge, much to the delight of all. At one point, however, my grandmother, weary of inquiry, demanded, “Can’t you just use poetic license?” Grandpa asked me, “Why don’t you write about something more interesting?” I thank them for their assistance in shaping this piece and the following poem_my pursuit of whatever truths or beauties lie in their stories, translated to the page.

Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine
Volume 6, Issue 1