In a Different Version of This Story

(There are things that will never be)

In a different version of this story, my mother comes to visit me. My mother
comes to visit me in Portugal because she still remembers who I am. She still remembers who I am because she has not lost her mind. She has not lost her mind
and so she comes to visit me in Portugal and she hides in the pocket of her oblong quilted bag five paper packets of hollyhock seeds, my father’s favorite flowers.

Every time I have ever moved anywhere, my mother has visited and planted flowers. Just after university I lived alone in a musty one-bedroom apartment in Woodstock Illinois. It didn’t have any outside space so she brought me a potted purple violet. The next apartment in Crystal Lake I shared with a photojournalist from Hawaii. There was a strip of hard-packed dirt outside our front door and my mother took it upon herself to beautify it with brash pink petunias. Once I moved to San Francisco and had a yard, however postage stamp-sized, my mother gave herself permission to go nuts. A one-woman landscaping crew. Tiger lilies sprouting in the front and rosemary bunched in the back. She even marched herself across the street to pull weeds in front of the block’s one vacant house.

“Mom,” I protested, “no one has lived in that house for 20 years!”

“Yes, but,” she said, “every time you look out your front windows you have to see that ugly place. At least now you’re not staring at weeds. Come help me plant these tulip bulbs!”

At every new address in every new city, no matter how far from her farm, my mother would arrive with her seeds and her weed-pulling gloves. Together on our knees we’d plunge our hands wrist-deep into the hole of the earth. Together we’d make each plot of dirt more beautiful, no matter how miserly the soil.

Once Marido and I bought a place of our own, she expanded her ministrations from gardening to baking. I showed up to work one morning balancing a cling-wrapped pan of cinnamon rolls. My office mates gathered around like cattle in a feedlot, licking cream cheese frosting from their thumbs.

“I didn’t know you could bake,” said John the receptionist.

“It wasn’t me,” I answered. “This is my mom.”

To this day John remembers my mom and her sticky buns. To this day he remembers, though my mother does not.

If she did, she’d cross oceans. If she did, she’d be here.

She’d smuggle in shoots of rhubarb wrapped in a wet paper towel and tin foil. She’d pull from her suitcase a manila envelope leaking coupons clipped from the newspaper for grocery stores that don’t exist in Europe. She’d bring a kind of luck I can’t manufacture on my own.

We’d have already weeded our way across the Iberian Peninsula while she refused all my offers of sunscreen and hats.

“The light is stronger here,” I’d warn, “you’ve got to protect your skin.”

She’d hold up an age spotted arm like it’s too late for that nonsense and we’d laugh. Oh how we’d laugh.

“Maybe I don’t want to meet all the neighbors, Mom!” I used to groan and she’d pop her eyes wide like a can.

“Why not?!” she’d exclaim. “Why ever not?”

In a different version of this story I would fly her here first class so she could stretch out her feet. I’d tell her she needn’t pack extra shoes. We wear the same size.

“You can just borrow my shoes,” I’d say. “We’re going to get them covered in dirt anyway.”

“Oh honey, that’s perfect,” she’d reply, “because I brought my gardening gloves.”

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Copyright © 2025 LaDonna Witmer • {all photos by author}

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