Milkweed
Part One of a story about my dad and the milkweed
My dad had lived out in the country near Buffalo for more than thirty years, but in 2020 he was in Colorado with his step-family when COVID hit. My brother and nephew were living in his house then, and I kept tending the yard he’d left behind, including the milkweed I learned to mow around. This was written in the late fall of 2020.
Years ago, when I started mowing his yard, I asked my dad what the pink flowers that looked like small berries were. He told me that was milkweed. “You’ll see it transform through the season. Butterflies hatch from their leaves.”
So many of the plants in my garden started at my dad’s house that I decided to figure out how to harvest the milkweed. After my final mowing of the year, when the first snow patched the grass, I brought my nephew Enzo and my son Cal, both eight years old at the time, to one of the milkweed stands that dotted the acre of lawn, each one left standing in a halo of mowed grass.
That day, Enzo, Cal, and I pulled the fluffy “milk” from the pods into a brown paper bag and tossed in a few pennies. I had the boys shake the bag to separate the seeds from the fluff. They were only interested for a minute before running off to kick off their shoes and jump in their stocking feet on the wet, snowy trampoline.
I realized that if Dad had been home, I would have brought the bag inside. As he cooked lunch for me, the boys, and Nana—his mother, who had lived with him for years—we would have had a good laugh as the bag exploded with fluff. I would have said, “who the hell figured out that penny trick,” and he would have said, “and who thought to put it on the internet.”
If Nana were here, she would have giggled till she cried as the two of us created an ever bigger mess trying to catch the fluff. Strange how, in knowing what would have happened if Nana hadn’t died and my father had still been around, I could almost create a new memory.
We would have chased the pappus like our own ideas, trying to pin it down before it blew out the door. The afternoon would have been spent in a mess of talk, laughter, and milkweed.
But it didn’t happen, and so it isn’t a memory.
I worried then that I wouldn’t see my father again. He had been in Colorado with his step-family since before the pandemic and intended to stay until there was a vaccine. Was the time we’d had together—that long stretch when I healed from his long absences throughout my life and began creating a new generation of memories after I moved to Buffalo—already over? Or was I just being that little girl again, unsure and sad about not having him in my everyday life?
I sorted the seeds outside. My fingertips numbed from the cold, and I cried a little.
I always forget this part of life, when you are between this and that and you don’t know what will happen. I guess you plant the seeds anyway.
And I did. At the time, I thought the planting was the whole point. But what you plant grows into a life of its own, however unruly and dramatic.
That happened last summer. That’s Part Two.