The Rest is Silence by Scott Fotheringham Page B

for the room, her easel went into the closet and she stopped painting.
    They should have had another kid. It might have saved them.
    On Saturday afternoons Dad and I built things. The spring I was nine I wanted to enter the science fair at school with an astronomy project. He bought me a telescope, and we sat on the patio at night, all the lights in the house turned off, and looked at the moon’s craters and the Galilean moons of Jupiter. He helped me build a planetarium in our living room for the fair. We superimposed a star map over a piece of cardboard and poked holes at the location of all the largest stars. This was mounted on the rotor from our barbecue and a light bulb was connected behind it to project the stars onto the ceiling. He told me that this was an inversion of how Stone Age people viewed the night sky. They imagined it was an opaque dome with holes poked through it and a light shining behind it.
    There is one spring morning I remember when I ran home from school for lunch. After the long winter of streets and driveways never being clear it was wonderful to be running on dry ground. It was sunny and warm, and I wore the green sweater Mom had knitted me, with the zipper undone. I wore sneakers instead of clunky boots, and I was so light that I floated as if I could fly, in love with life. I was brushed by the warm breeze, the smell of lilacs on the breeze, and robin’s song. I glided over the grass, breathing in the fragrant air on my way home. I ran at the fence, thrust my right foot into the mesh, levered my left onto the top, pulled up, crouched, and jumped to the ground on the other side. I passed lilac bushes on the way and plucked a few purple and white sprays to take to my mother. Our lawn was covered with dandelions. Yellow disks everywhere on a sea of green. I picked some of these too.
    â€œWe won’t keep these,” she said, separating out the dandelions and throwing them in the garbage. “They’ll just wilt.”
    She reached into the cupboard for a drinking glass, half-filled it with water from the kitchen tap, and put the lilacs in it. She placed it on the windowsill above the sink.
    Gardening, 1985
    The days had begun their descent into the heat and humidity of summer. Our vegetable garden was in the backyard beyond the patch of grass we turned into a skating rink in winter. It was bordered on three sides by Scotch pines with their scales of bark, sharp needles, and branches growing in angled paths. The garden was open to the south. The clay soil was heavy to dig, sticking in clumps to the rusted blade of the shovel. The last weekend in May was the official start to the gardening season. There was no peace on the day Dad took our archaic Rototiller from its resting place in the garage for its annual senile perambulation. It was a wheezy old asthmatic, belching blue smoke, hacking and coughing as he clutched the handles and guided it around the garden. I stood in the shade under the pines, certain that it was the sort of diseased vagrant that should not be polluting the soil and air of our garden. My dad’s biceps bulged in his short-sleeved buttoned shirt and his whole torso shook from steadying the vibrating machine. Sweat dripped from his brow onto the white headband he wore. As he circled, he stopped to pull his rubber boots out of the muck and wipe his brow with a handkerchief pulled from his back pocket.
    Once it was tilled — except for the asparagus patch and the raspberries — I joined him to plant the seeds. Beans, potatoes, carrots, and pumpkins. We transplanted tomatoes that had been started indoors, weeded and harvested the asparagus for dinner, and propped up the raspberry canes after cutting out the previous year’s growth.
    We weeded around the tulips in the triangular bed at the end of the driveway, as well as among the roses and peonies under the pines that grew along the side of our property. Once the tulips had died back, we dug them up