They Will Wave Their Fronds
The mimosa trees surge toward the roads by late May.
All is green.
Their fronds wave as women might wave a church fan on Sundays. They wear pink hats, little fluffs that will darken and bloom all summer and sing to butterflies and hummingbirds. I pass a wall of mimosas stretching a mile or more along the interstate as I travel south from Kentucky into Tennessee to help my mother help my father die. This choir of trees swells and blurs as I drive toward my parents.
My father’s body is rigid and uncooperative. His right side—his foot, leg, hand, arm, brain—was damaged when he had a stroke at age 16. Seven decades later, his legs are planks, his arms are slack sticks, his memory, pruned. His care is more than we can give, so my mother secures his place at the nursing home.
It’s the same nursing home where we came at Christmas as Sunday School girls. We sang carols in the humid rooms of old people. From their beds they stared blankly, their mouths sagging. A few reached their arms toward us—brittle and spotted— and we offered them our green felt Christmas tree cut-outs decorated with red rick rack.
This is the same place where, decades before, my father had weekly visited his uncle when this place was a tuberculosis sanitarium. This place has been standing in north Knoxville for a century.
This place is haunted.
This place is where my grandmother died.
This place: my father lives inside.
Mimosas in East Tennessee are beloved and reviled. We remember their arms when children and how easy they were to climb. We spent afternoons making whole worlds in mimosa trees. People who grasp the mysteries of southern forests despise mimosas. The mimosa stands stiff-necked and stubborn in the face of all elements. Their seedpods are abounding, and mimosas grow wild and unchecked. They choke out the native ecosystem, displacing home-grown plants and wildlife.
The rows of mimosas flourishing along the fence at the entrance to the nursing home bow in unison as I pull in to face this building again and all my family ghosts who surely dwell here.
My father only makes it a month in here. We gather and stand with him as he dies one Sunday in late May. The three toes on his right foot turn blue, his legs purple, a sweet nurse reminds us of the morphine order. After one injection, his breathing slows. We are so sad, but calm. We are relieved.
The mimosas glimmer in the floodlights along the grounds of this perpetual infirmary when I go outside to call his sister. The air is sweet, not like honeysuckle, but floral like my grandmother’s hand lotion she kept at the kitchen sink. In the dark I hear the fern-like branches trembling the air. The mimosa trees, the most beautiful of aggressive weeds, will keep me company all summer. I will see them everywhere, and they will be coupled with my father and the night of his dying.
They will wave their fronds at me.
Their pink tops will shimmer in the sunlight.
They will look like psalms.
