SOS

I have always been easily overwhelmed. A personality flaw, no doubt, led me to carve SOS with the push mower into our front yard when I was 12. The grass had grown high, and the task before me was more than I believed I could face. Clearly, it was one of those times where you think that you can’t make it through the job. So at that time, 54 years ago now, I clearly felt it more meaningful to carefully maneuver the power mower, pushing down the handle to raise the housing that contained the blade so as not to mar my handiwork, and brand SOS into the grass. I told Mother and Daddy and the woman working in their market with them that day that I had hoped a pilot flying over would see my distress signal and come to my aid.

I came home to Texas this Christmas holiday for the first time in three years, the first Christmas since our mother’s death. I had sufficient cause for wanting to escape the high desert, even though Santa Fe is remarkably beautiful this time of year. “I’ll get to see my sisters for Christmas, and I can get a jump on my winter gardening,” I told friends who asked. And I fully planned to engage the help of a local Mexican worker who—yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus—weeds flower beds. He weeds them meticulously. My oldest sister had made arrangements for Carlos to work for both of us the entire week.

Arriving here Tuesday afternoon, with the first signs of my first cold of the season, I felt compromised physically. That afternoon was about getting my internet and cable television service reconnected and sweeping up the bugs that I knew would litter every room downstairs after a two-month absence. As it turned out, Carlos was finishing up a job for someone in town but would be here Wednesday. Early that morning I gathered the electric pruners and outdoor extension cords and began. Three Viburnum bushes quickly gave up their excess from a flourish that began once this part of the world started getting rain at the end of the summer. As it turned out, no Carlos. I continued half-heartedly, hoping that he would show up. We learned late in the day that he had to take one of his two babies to the doctor.

Thursday brought a cold front and rain, and so I nursed my cold, read, and made a pot of chili. Early today, I knew that the promised sun would shine, and it would be perfect gardening weather. Yet something told me that Carlos would not make it. As the morning wore on, there was really nothing else to do but hunker down and continue working. Wheelbarrow in tow and rake in hand, I began picking up the debris—wet from yesterday’s rain. I thought of making my SOS, but I knew I had to just push ahead. There were no Mother and Daddy to hear my story. Those days are done.

My sister Joan, who lives in the house on this land that our parents bought in 1973 as a retirement place, told me yesterday that she wasn’t going to worry about the thick carpet of Post Oak leaves around her house, leaves that our mother could not have tolerated. The yard had to be raked for the holiday. And the yard, through four houses since we were children, was always big. Now we don’t have to rake the yard to please Mother. It’s true. My garden, the entrance marked by a stone I had made after Mother died—RUSSELL AND TENA HOLLIS GARDEN—well, it doesn’t have to be maintained for anyone, really. I live away most of the year. It has become part of my trips home to this land in Texas, however, that while here I make the garden pretty—not neurotic pretty—it was never that—just pleasant.

And so today, in the absence of Carlos, who I am told will be here at 7:30 in the morning, I made pretty in the garden. I abandoned the childish urge to carve an SOS, acquiescing to the truth that this place is mine and I’ll make the best of it in the manner that I make best. And though I grumbled about how I don’t want this responsibility anymore, like the two-story barn house-turned-warehouse that gets a lick and a promise each time I’m here, maybe if I keep practicing, I can learn to really like it this way—no rescue needed.

SOS—Normangee, Texas (December 18, 2009)
R. Harold Hollis