Author: Phyllis Swartz

My brain is too tightly strung, so I go to my garden. It’s a potager, a pocket-size plot that intermingles flowers, herbs, and vegetables—food for the soup pot and beauty for the eyes. And where plants grow up, not out.

The evening is perfect: a white crescent moon rises over our small town, a playful breeze ruffles through the tea, and a hummingbird comes to visit the honeysuckle. Ground cherry plants are just peeping up.

I was six when I decided God’s angels would serve ground cherries at the banquet table in heaven. Healthy candies, that’s what they were, each wrapped like a gift in a papery-thin husk. I sat in my mom’s garden, unwrapping and eating, trying to decide if the taste was pineapple or strawberry or orange. Small wonder that sixty-some years later, I make room for this delicacy in my garden.

Across the brick walkway, I pull a weed from under a rue plant. In Richard II, Shakespeare calls rue a sour herb of grace, linking it with regret. In Hamlet, Ophelia brings an armful of flowers to the royal court. She presents them to the king and queen and gives her flower speech, using each flower to make a point.

“There’s rue for you,” she says. “And some for me.”

And she exhorts the court to wear rue with a difference.

Like it’s my confessional, I bite into the rue’s bitter leaf. And I find comfort in the pairing of sour regret and grace.

In the next bed, painted geraniums creep onto the path. In Victorian gardens, these plants were placed so their scents would be released when brushed by the skirts of passing ladies. In my garden, however, the scent is most likely released by a stray basketball.

Nearby is the moon flower nursery. The plants are waiting to be dug up, one at a time, and scattered though the garden, where they’ll branch out and up as the sun warms the earth.

Some sultry summer night, I’ll come late to the garden, looking for a breeze blowing in the tea. And bright-white, dinner-plate size flowers will bloom under the night sky. Each bud blooms only once. And only at night. Each flower will be dead by morning. But the next night, new buds will bloom. Angel trumpets, some call them.

My brain will calm as I sit under the moon among the moon flowers. I’ll breathe in the mint and the sharp spices of sage and cilantro and parsley and basil. The night lights will show that tomatoes have grown up their trellises and that squash has covered a v-shaped arbor. I might sample a ground cherry.

And if regrets push into my peace, I’ll think also of grace.

We’re driving through a bumpy stretch of Route 76 in Pennsylvania, coming back from our fiftieth wedding anniversary trip. For five days—a day per decade of marriage—our scattered family came together, first on a ship and then on the island of Bermuda. It’s likely the last time for such a family fling. We’re about to get even more scattered as our young adult grandchildren head into their own lives.

During this celebration,” our children said, “tell us your stories, a decade a day. We want our kids to hear.”

Every day they showed up, these big, beautiful grandkids, leaving waterslides and pools and basketball courts and ice cream shops to hear two old people talk. And with such good grace, even asking questions to extend stories.

After we told the last story on the last day, they gave us a jar of their memories, fifty of them. And now, as my husband and I drive home through the bumpy stretch on Route 76, we read what they remember.

• A terrifying hike on White Mountain during a thunderstorm at night.
• Watching Grandpa lose it during the tarantula scene in Home Alone.
• Walking around the art museum with Grandma.
• Watching A Christmas Carol.
• Playing tickle monster with Grandpa.
• Bible school during Cousin Week.
• Playing Monopoly with Grandpa and slowly getting decimated.
• Walking around UK during Jon’s track race and talking about my future plans.

We’re glad we did these things. This is what we keep saying as we read. Glad we showed up for basketball games and track meets and graduations. Glad we cooked for Cousin Week and dug through compost for fishing worms and helped with science projects. Glad we sat on the porch swing and held them as we read endless stories.

For sure, we didn’t do it all right! We bumbled and fumbled, learning to be grandparents in much the same way we learned to be parents. Sometimes we said too much, sometimes too little. Sometimes we said the wrong things. Other times we said the right things in the wrong way.

But we kept showing up.

And maybe this is why they showed up at story time this week. And listened, really listened.

Or maybe they had some good parental coaching!

“Eine blinde sow find alsemow ein chest,” my dad says to me the other day.

He does this occasionally—breaks out into Pennsylvania Dutch, the language of his childhood.

So I’m not surprised. But I can tell he’s said something about a pig, so I’m confused.

What we’re working on has nothing to do with pigs. It’s a history presentation he hopes to give next year when he’s 93. And we’re constructing a chart for an accompanying slide, trying to get numbers to line up in a grid. As he watches me work, he’s the one who figures it out. It’s supposed to be the other way around.

“Good for you, Dad!” I say.

And that’s when he spouts out the Pennsylvania Dutch, which translated means Even a blind sow once in a while finds a chestnut.

But this isn’t a good analogy. For one thing, the pig part doesn’t work. And besides, for being ninety-two, he isn’t blind about technology. Actually, for any age, he isn’t blind.

He might no longer travel with ease. Or walk around his town. Even moving from room to room brings challenges.

But secure in his office chair and using his computer, he reads documents in national and state archives. He accesses newspapers from far away and long ago. He traces ancestry and accesses personal collections through history websites. He reads out-of-print books in the HathiTrust Digital Library. And from what he learns, he creates documents, saves them in files, organizes them in folders, and backs them up on an external hard drive. And when he doesn’t know how to do something, he figures it out.

He does all this to follow his passion—teaching people about history, especially the church history of his beloved Casselman Valley in western Maryland and Pennsylvania. And he sticks to this task for hours each day, scouring source after source, looking for exactly what he needs.

Come to think of it, maybe my dad’s analogy does work. He probably does feel blind sometimes, as he searches here and there, often with no results. And he’s sure got a pig-headed tenacity when it comes to this foraging.

“Look at this!” he says when I poke my head into his study.

And sure enough—he has found a chestnut.

For our family, it happened four times last week—the turning of tassels, the tossing of hats, and the taking of family pictures. And in each grandparent picture, I felt dwarfed by these young men I used to carry in my arms, sometimes two at a time.

These graduates, who seemed to come all at once, helped us start the Cousin Week tradition that has continued for nearly two decades. During each of last week’s photo shoots, an old picture kept coming to my mind—the four of them lined up during an early Cousin Week. And when I got home, I found it.

They kept us busy that week. And busy last week, traveling some 1700 miles to get to their events.

When we opened our car doors at the graduation party in Kentucky, we could hear the singing of over a million uninvited guests, cicadas—specifically, Brood 14 of the 17-year periodical cicadas. They were babies together, these noisy guests and our four grandsons, the cicadas spending their pre-emergent lives underground, and the boys in the safety of their parents’ homes.

While our grandsons were drinking milk and eating pizza, the cicadas had been feeding on xylem and drinking sap from tree roots. And while the boys rode scooters and bikes and played basketball and ran the fastest miles they could, the cicadas were busy too, excavating tunnels through the soil.

But this spring, when the soil warmed and the flowers bloomed, the cicadas came up to look at the earth through their red, popped-out eyes. In Kentucky, which is the epicenter for the emergence of this brood, they blanketed trees, fences, sidewalks, and decks decorated for graduation parties.

But only for a few weeks. After the males “sing” to attract females and females click when they like a song, they mate. And after the females lay their eggs, the adults die—not living to see their young, who burrow underground for their own childhoods.

Unconcerned with their coming demise, the emergent cicadas partied right along with the boys, singing and clicking and dive-bombing people, and drinking plant juice from young twigs and small branches. No cares encumbered them. There’s no room in their miniscule brains, after all, to fret about college majors and scholarships and summer jobs.

Our grandsons ate homemade soft pretzels and ice cream treats, chatted with friends, accepted cards and gifts, and treated their elders with due respect and appreciation. But under the gaiety, background thoughts likely looped through their brains. They’re heading out to perhaps the most uncertain and thrilling parts of their lives so far. They’ve got choices to make and consequences to go with those choices. They’re stepping toward independence.

Sometimes I’d like to take them back in my arms, to keep them safe and solve their simple problems. But I’m glad they’re emerging. And though my arms aren’t large enough to hold them, my heart still can.

“How are you this morning?” I asked my ninety-six-year-old mom about a month ago.

She barely looked at me.

“Weary and worn on the pathway below,” she said.

And without a smile.

But not anymore. Her neck still hurts. And her hands. Her steps are still slowing. And her memory fading. But she’s got her pluck back. Spring is here.

So I took her to London Florist the other day. For a week before our outing, she pored over a photo album, one that showed her flowerbeds of past years. One summer, she won the Prettiest Porch Award in our town. Not because she applied, but because someone drove by, took a photo of her porch, and submitted it.

But now the beds around her porch have been modified. After she broke her foot while gardening, we convinced her to reach out for help.

And so her grandson, who studies landscape architecture, redesigned the beds for a college project. He filled them with flowering shrubs and blue holly and perennials, aiming to make them beautiful. And low maintenance.

But he left her two beds—a narrow plot along the driveway and one set apart by a semicircle of rocks—which is why we went to London, Florist, where she was treated like a queen.

“Come with me, ma’am,” said the owner, who offered an arm.

And he took her to find what she really wanted—a plant she remembered from her mother’s garden. Scarlet sage, she thought it was called.  But it wasn’t the right plant.

My mom explained some more.

“Red salvia,” he said. “You want red salvia. I’ll order it for you.”

Back at home, my mom consulted her photo albums while I planted the flowers.

Most days, we work together outside, pulling weeds, giving some Miracle Grow here, and extra water there. My mom might be tired at the end of these sessions. But she’s no longer weary and worn.

“I wish,” she said this morning, “that I could tell my mom what we’ve been doing out here in the garden.”

And the premonition came to me that someday I’ll wish the same thing.

“Just once,” an anxious teenager tells me, “I wish someone could get inside my brain and see what it’s like.”

And I wish I could.

A few days later, I sit in the waiting room of a dermatologist. Behind the counter, two receptionists chat about a twenty-year old man who had left their office.

“Screaming like that!” one said with a shake of her head. “Like a child.”

And I wonder—was he a wimp? Or did pain pass through his brain in an unusual way?

What would the receptionist say if she could crawl inside his mind?

The problem is that we’re all stuck inside our own heads. Yet, we operate with the belief that we’re not, that our own experiences match the world as it is, and that others who differ from us are wrong, maybe even crazy.

It’s easy to forget that what we experience is highly governed by how our bodies and their systems are put together. If the munching of potato chips caused your heart rate to increase and cortisol to course through your veins, as it does for people with misophonia, you’d find eating in a lunchroom to be an entirely different experience.

We can’t be blamed, of course, for having to stay inside our own heads. Our brains won’t let us out. But there is something we can do—have the humility to be more curious than certain about other people’s experiences.

My problem is that I like to feel certain. This puts me in the role of an expert, able make judgements, give advice, and take control. But this impulse for certainty hurts relationships. Even when I think I’m acting in another’s best interests, I can come too close to making that person over in my image.

It’s only when I quiet my problem-solving impulses, when I become curious enough to ask questions, only then do I have a chance to understand what otherwise seems utterly mystifying. I can’t get inside an anxious teen’s head, but I can discover more of what’s in there.

The season is upon us. So we drive four hours through pelting rain and snarled-up traffic and across the Ohio River to attend a grandson’s piano recital, one of the many short concerts that pop up each spring.

One by one, pianists leave their front-row seats to play—a kid with big glasses and a cowlick, a silver-headed retiree on a new pursuit, a girl whose feet reach the floor only because she wears platform shoes, and another whose legs dangle all the way through her three short pieces.

“We’ve heard this piece before!” my husband whispers once.

And we had, a hundred times, forty some years ago when our son practiced “Für Elise” for his piano recital.

As the recital nears its end, our grandson takes the stage.

“Are you nervous?” his dad had asked Ben that morning. “Excited?”

“I feel nothing,” he’d said, “absolutely nothing.”

He must have saved his emotions. Now, his hands seem to caress the keys, playing sometimes with strength and sometimes sweetly, sometimes fast and sometimes leisurely, sometimes in short, detached notes and sometimes smoothly.

I’m proud of our grandson. But at the end of the recital, his teacher plays, showing Ben and the rest how it’s really done. He’s perhaps the most exacting instructor Ben’s ever had. And he looks the part—a snowy-haired, bearded man with an erect bearing who sports a bowtie, even while giving piano lessons. Now, under his hands, the piano thunders and trills and sings.

His students lean forward. Even the kid who played “Bullfrog Blues” from a Level 1 book. Besides hearing our grandson play, this continuum of competence is my favorite part of the evening. Like an old country school, all the players are in the same room. And learning at every level is celebrated.

The girl with the dangling legs has reminded everyone else where they started. And the snowy-haired teacher has shown them how far they can go.

Don’t miss this season of spring recitals. If you look, you can find one near you. And you may not need to drive across a river and through snarled traffic to get there.

It used to be the other way around. I’d stir up hot chocolate and tell him a story. But this week, he becomes the storyteller.

No hot chocolate. He’s not even with me. But his voice rides the radio waves across the miles into my kitchen, where I sit with my Diet Coke.

A spider, according to the story, goes to a high spot and casts a thread, which blows in the wind until it sticks to another spot. This becomes the bridge thread.

And from this thread she builds a web. Her silk, which turns from liquid to solid as it leaves her body, is stronger by weight than steel, can stretch up to four times its original length, and can even be layered to form a bulletproof mesh.

Her weaving shows foresight. It’s tightly spiraled, framed, and anchored. And she tailors her web to fit available space, the size of the local prey, and even the weather. She plans for contingencies, fashioning the netting trap so she can tighten the strands when she’s hungry and become quickly aware of snared prey.

But life comes at her. Wind blows. Rain pelts. Animals smash through her work. And despite her competencies, the web breaks down.

So what can a spider do?

Many rebuild, the storyteller says, strengthening their framing threads and securing their anchor points. Some take a temporary rest and scavenge for food. Others move on to a better place. And start again.

Here’s the thing about spiders—they don’t weave in naivety. They sense danger in the world. With their eight eyes, they see it. And with highly sensitive hairs, they feel it.

But they have another sense, as well—that they can always make more silk. And they live in this double knowledge.

This story will likely stick with me, especially when I demolish a spider web. Or when I’m called to make silk in dangerous times.

We’ve found the right place. We know as soon as we step inside. The Schuster Performing Arts Center is full of grey heads and lines for elevators. Some of us eschew the elevators and climb the elliptical staircase to the balconies. But though we think ourselves fit, we stop at each landing—to admire the Wintergarden in the lobby below. And to catch a breath.

The 2,300-seat theatre begins to fill. The couple beside us discusses orthopedic shoes. Just over from us, a woman moves to a row below.

“Down here, I can see better through my bifocals,” she says to her husband, who follows behind grumbling.

Just a few seats away, a couple holds hands, wrinkled, blue-veined hands. A young guy walks in. He’s escorting a woman with a cane, probably his grandma. Nice guy to come with his grandma. Wise grandma to show him bygone days.

Finally, the show begins: The Simon and Garfunkel Story.

This touring show tells the story of the rise of Simon and Garfunkel by blending their songs with original film footage of the times.

We were young once, the show reminds us. And cool. We see the evidence on the screen—beads, long hair, tie-dye shirts, daisies, hippie buses, bell bottoms, and peace signs. The musicians sing about how groovy we were back then, how inclined to drop out of the rat race:

Slow down, you move too fast
You got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobblestones
Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy
Ba da da da da da,da, da, feelin’ groovy.

But if we were chill, we also lived through turbulent times. That proof’s in the images, too: war, draft-card burning, tear gas, generational conflict, and protests over racial injustice. The musicians sing about this:

And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence. 

Way back in 1968, when they released “Old Friends,” Simon and Garfunkel must have foreseen the future gatherings of grey-heads who lived through this turmoil.

Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be 70

Old friends, memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears.

There’s a pause before the pickup notes of the performance’s climax—“Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water.” This song brings a promise to the weary, to the crying, to those in dark times.

Like a bridge over troubled water, the musicians sing, I will lay me down . . . I will comfort you. . . I’ll ease your mind.

Back when this song was new, we were young and mostly absorbed in our own pain. But we sang those lyrics like we meant them. And maybe we did. Because now many of us care for two generations or three or maybe even four. Over and over, we lay ourselves down. This is the calling and privilege of being 70.

We’re a bit sobered, thinking of those we love. But the evening isn’t over. We come alive with “The Boxer,” a song about someone who doesn’t give up the fight. The lyrics and music are punchy. And during the filler syllables between the stanzas, those of us who, back in the day, waved flashlights at rock concerts, now pull out cell phones and move them with the music.

Simon and Garfunkel are right. It’s terribly strange to be 70. And fun. Even somewhat groovy.