Columbine Ripples

 A personal essay by Ariel Hochstrasser

“We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.” - Liam Callanan, The Cloud Atlas

Columbine

A bouquet of wildflowers formed in the dense forests of Idaho, then placed in a plastic children’s cup half-full of water, has always been my favorite souvenir. The Queen Anne’s lace, the bluebells, the Bird’s Foot Trefoil, the elusive Mariposa Lily – whatever found and picked and plopped into a container reminds me of childhood bliss at our family cabin. One bouquet brings back a wave of nostalgia. Finding pools of butterflies forming around puddles near the dirt road. Hunting blue-bellied lizards. Fishing up tiny gray fish from the creek with butterfly nets, collecting them in scotch glasses. An occasional visit from a neighbor’s free-spirited dog or almost-domesticated cat. Collecting lost turkey feathers. My family’s silhouettes passing through my memory. 

My favorite wildflower, however, is the orange columbine. 

There was an old knoll along the pathway up to the cemetery where they started growing one summer, and they couldn’t hide even for a second in the greens and browns of the forest flower like other flowers. Their bright petals, an adorned hive of trumpets clustered together, were always special. They were the only orange flowers I’d seen there, and so big and warm and inviting. You’d never find them anywhere else on our property. You’d never see them as plump and vivid as you could in the hot summer. They were perfect.

When they stopped growing, I was old enough to know why. And it was okay. Giant, manmade machines terrorized the property one summer. The trees had to be thinned out, so a logging company felled what they wanted to collect. It was that or allow an infestation to plague the entire forest and kill them all. New pathways were formed, trees stolen, and the ecology was left to heal. Most of the scenery was left the same, like the marsh where the well nourishes itself, the pines and foreign apple trees, the creek itself, the pioneer cemetery. But not the orange columbines. Something caved in the knoll just ever so slightly and they disappeared. I’d search every chance we’d go up. Every visit, I’d take a walk to the cemetery alone, holding onto the last shred of hope I could muster that maybe my flowers would be there again. The knoll is bare.

Visiting the cabin now is rare, and more mundane, but even when I go, I check the knoll for any clue of their presence. New signs of life have appeared since the fellers came that I’d never seen as a child – dozens of wild turkeys flocked together in the open, a beautiful Stellar’s Jay serenading the hilltop, skeletal remains of poached wildlife, secondhand stories of a towering elk stalking the nighttime woods like a forest spirit. They’ve been exciting, but I feel something missing there. 

Daggett

Our property is a beautiful resting spot, even a final one for some. There are the two previous owners of our cabin – who’d visit the cemetery regularly before they passed, not realizing it was on my great-grandfather’s land; three little pioneer children, all siblings, each died one year after the last due to illness; and a basic headstone carved with a simple name: “Daggett”. All we know about him is that he was a man who died in a sawmill accident on our land – and we’ve found the foundation hidden away beneath the forest floor to confirm that much – and that the creek is named after him. The descendants of the cabin’s previous owners have visited the land, and their ancestors, for family reunions once or twice. The pioneer children aren’t buried with any other family, so we assume their long-suffering family relocated. But Daggett? He’s alone, in a sense. Buried in a makeshift community of others who get to rest in true peace, but he’s with no story. I appreciate Daggett more since my grandfather passed away.

Grandpa

When grandpa died, I was old enough to know why. And it was okay, or so I thought. Eight years of preparing for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to take him away didn’t matter. 

He was the workaholic, wanted to die on the job like his father. When grandpa would hold a baby – and he loved his babies – he held them the same way: in the crook of his strong arm, a big warm smile on his face, looking at them and not the camera. When interviewed as a local Boise senior getting ready to major in History at BYU, he wanted to become a teacher – a dream he never could reach, and far from the job he built as an electronic salesman. Another interviewer heard him explain how working at our family store feels like “everyday is like Christmas” with all the new technology he sold as of 1984. He hated computers. He was the local farmer on the big, red Ferguson tractor. Nature took his breath away and reminded him of how much God had given him, how he felt inadequate to receive all his blessings.

He sat in a chair all day, looking out the window to the garden we were raising for him, living a life inside his head. He’d try to get up each evening – as his Sundowner’s syndrome told him to – telling us he had to go home to beat the storm or before it was dark, but his legs would fail, and we’d have to be there to walk him to bed. He slept in between watching Lawrence Welk, Polka, Country’s Family Reunions, reruns of football games, or whatever else was on the TV. His mother and deceased brothers visited him sometimes. Nurses came and left, doctors saying it’s our fault he was still alive – he loved us too much. He was a strong man, then a frail child. Then, a vegetable.

Funeral

Saying goodbye to him was something I never thought I’d have to do. On Monday, he entered the final stage. On Wednesday, we said goodbye. On Saturday, he was gone. 

At the funeral, COVID-19 couldn’t ruin the event that was already difficult. Grandma sat next to me, shaking like a leaf as she wept and pulled at her smothering face mask. Having the meeting broadcasted through Zoom for out-of-state family felt wrong, like George Orwell’s Big Brother placed his hands on the nape of our necks during the program. Dry Creek Cemetery made us stand at the top of the veteran’s section for his burial due to COVID restrictions – up on a hill, over a block away, clustered near the cemetery’s towering American flag outpost. The wind was sharp. The ant-sized crew used a Caterpillar to bury him. We could go to the gravesite an hour later. Everything was cold, suffocating, an eternity.

I still hear his voice. He’s shouting, “Hey!” when he thought the TV was acting up, not realizing elementary-school me accidentally sat on a remote until I yelled back, “Sorry!” from the other room, and he turns sheepish. He’s quietly laughing at work when he goes back to the office of our store to see me, bored on a Saturday, sitting in a new position in his chair every single time he walks into the room. I hear that soft voice trying to make conversation with us while he sits in his recliner with a dinner tray in front of him, shakily wiping his face with a tissue. He tells us faintly about his day at “work” and how someone came in and bought this and then went and did that, “but that’s okay,” he says.  He shakes his head when we offer him a spoonful of food, but gives a little, “yeah” when we grab a bowl of ice cream. A gentle, “Love you, too” when his wheelchair is inched out of our house for the night. He’s breathing his last few breaths of air. 

Memento

The sweetest detail of the funeral itself were the flowers adorning his casket. Mom said if he could’ve
had the funeral his way, he would’ve been buried in a cheap pine box. But my grandmother and dad picked the best one they saw, and my aunt bought the flowers herself. She said they reminded her and my grandma of the cabin – something he’d want to be reminded of, at least one more time. They were red, orange, and yellow, arranged like a summer ray with flecks of earthy pinecones and dry grass. When we got down to the gravesite, they left the flowers on a pile above the grassy carpet above him. I picked two yellow flowers from the bunch. Is it blasphemous to steal from the dead? I gave one to my grandmother. I kept the other. Dry-pressed the other and framed it with a picture of my grandpa. 

Orange and yellow flowers remind me of the cabin, too, now. They remind me of those photos of grandpa from the sixties and seventies. They remind me of the yellowed newspaper articles my grandma kept of him. Of hot summer days on the farm, of straw bales and Grandpa’s red tractor. They remind me of the columbines I lost. Of Grandpa’s voice.

I think about Daggett when I think about the cabin now. Who was he? 

Ripples

He deserves red, orange, and yellow flowers near his grave, too. Embellished with pinecones and dry grass. He and grandpa both do. They were close to nature. They worked too hard. Their legacy is felt the strongest at the cabin.

There’s something hopeful in buying columbine seeds. Not just my orange ones, but reds and pinks, blues, and yellows. The subtle, indigenous wildflowers need another strong, warm voice like the orange columbines, but those are for Daggett. All five occupants in the cemetery can choose a color. Maybe they’ll wither, maybe they’ll blossom. But if they make it, I’ll give them everything I can until it’s time to bury them with Daggett. He gets to enjoy the forest in all its entirety, having the flowers blanket his final resting place like a starry night sky. 

I’ll steal some of those sunny stars for my grandpa. He can’t visit the cabin anymore, but when I go, I’ll pretend he and Daggett are finally getting a chance to talk to one another somewhere nearby. Like old friends. In a sense, I think they are. I’ll bring Grandpa a souvenir of wildflowers and columbines. Hopefully, the plastic cup won’t tip on the drive home.