In every rose... The Lone Cypress Tree... Brazil?

The next-to-last installment of Boardinghouse Reach

I forgot, in my last post, to include the good news part of my good news-bad news scenario!

I wanted to be the best friend I could be to my friends, and the best friend I could be to myself—dancing with joy, feeling both the good and the bad with honesty and ownership, finding the humor wherever I can winkle it out of a situation, and planting as many flowers as I can in my garden.

Here’s the good news: we’re alive. As far as I’ve been able to tell, it’s much more wonderful being alive—for all its ups and downs—than being dead.

Photo by Jonathan Falcon on Unsplash

I was at the wheel of one of two cars in our caravan inching north through traffic along Highway 1 toward the turnoff for Pebble Beach. My sister-in-law and nephew were wedged into my car’s minimal backseat. My brother Gabe rode shotgun, holding our mother's mortal remains between his knees in a copper canister—something that looked as if it might have been designed to hold flour or cookies—provided by the Neptune Society.

Gabe, who is a sculptor, had had to pry the lid open with a chisel. Inside the box there were two plastic bags closed with twisty-ties. The larger bag held Mom; the smaller of the two held something like one-third of the ashes left over from the cremation of Maury, the man she met and fell in love with when she was in her late sixties and he was seventy years old. They had a passionate love affair that lasted for two years, until Maury's death. At Mom's request, Maury's kids had some of his ashes sent to her. It was her final wish that her ashes be mixed with Maury's and scattered over the roots of the Lone Cypress Tree along the 17-Mile Drive.

My sister's boyfriend drove the car in front, with Dori navigating. During the weeks leading up to my mother's death, and the two months afterwards, my siblings and I spent more time together than we had in the past three decades. I'd dedicated much of my writing life to documenting in various surreptitious ways what a dysfunctional family we'd been. But then, as if an evil spell had been broken, we all rallied with the unanimity one would only expect from the sort of family I'd always wanted to be part of.

It was much later than it was supposed to have been by the time we set out for Carmel-by-the-Sea; and then the sky let forth a torrent of rain. Traffic was so snarled up that it took us an hour to cover about two miles. We finally reached the kiosk at the start of the 17-Mile Drive and paid our eight bucks per car for the privilege of driving among the multimillion-dollar houses there in the haunted-looking pine and cypress groves. The normally spectacular views were hidden by a curtain of fog.

None of us had been on the 17-Mile Drive at any time within recent memory, and we had no clear idea of the lay of the land around the Lone Cypress Tree, which was number 16 along the map of landmarks given to us at the entrance kiosk. We'd been advised by the lawyer we'd hired to help us sort out Mom's estate that scattering ashes any closer inland than three miles out at sea is strictly illegal. So we'd all reminded each other and the kids of the importance of discretion on our mission—the last thing we wanted to do was call attention to ourselves.

I was glad to be driving, as being a passenger along such snaky roads usually makes me carsick. I pulled up behind Dori's rented sedan along the shoulder across the road from marker number 16, where a large tour bus was just disgorging its passengers. As Dori walked toward us from her car, her eyes met Gabe's and they both doubled over with suppressed laughter. Flanking the tour bus was a ranger wearing a shiny brass badge. My then-sixteen-year-old nephew Paul, all got up in a black trench coat, made himself even more conspicuous by donning a pair of mirrored sunglasses. The rest of us stood around Gabe's open doorway while he tried to pour the contents of one bag into another, spilling little bits of Mom and Maury onto the rug of my car. “It looks like we're doing a drug deal,” I murmured.

My little niece yelped, “The man with the badge is coming this way!”

Gabe stopped what he was doing and we all looked around, trying to appear preoccupied and innocent.

The ranger continued on his business, which was across the road from us. The rain had stopped but the wind was blowing hard. Gabe stuffed the two bags into a small glazed paper shopping bag he'd brought along, something with a silky rope handle and a brown paisley design. Like a chorus of magpies, we all murmured, “What are we going to do? What are we going to do?” as we crossed the road and mingled among the picture-snapping tourists who seemed undaunted by the bad weather.

I think all of us imagined that the Lone Cypress Tree would be somewhere just along the side of the road, perhaps with a low fence around it. We were wrong. The area leading down to the coast was all blocked off with a shoulder-high fence and No Trespassing signs. There was a railed, gray-painted wooden stairway that led in three flights down to an overlook from which one could gaze at the Lone Cypress Tree, which stood on a rocky point that jutted out into the sea far below us and to the west.

I shook my head. “What was Mom thinking of?”

“She liked the idea,” said Dori. “That doesn't mean she thought it through.”

There followed various desultory yet affectionate mutterings about Mom's narcissism. Meanwhile, Gabe was taking nervous pinches of ashes and throwing them under the railing, from which they were blowing back up into our faces. There were cries of “Gabe, stop that!”

He looked at us as if to say, “I'm not doing anything!” and yet the nervous fingers kept plucking at the ashes and throwing them under the rail.

“That's not what Mom wanted. She said the Lone Cypress Tree. Not the wooden railing where you can stand and see the Lone Cypress Tree in the distance.”

“But, Jasmine,” reasoned my sister-in-law, “We can't get to the Lone Cypress Tree.”

We heard the roar of the bus as it started up its engines. The tourists mugged their final smiles for their photos at monument number 16 and trudged up the stairway.

When the last of them had turned his back on us, I said, “Gabe, give me the bag.”

I knew I would never forgive myself if I didn't seize the moment and carry out Mom's final request to the letter, no matter how impractical the logistics proved to be.

Gabe handed me the bag and I went running up the walkway two steps at a time. The bus was starting down the road to lookout number 17; the ranger was nowhere to be seen. At the side of the road I climbed over the fence and then went running back down the hill, trying not to step on any of the little plants that were part of the reforestation project and the reason why the area was cordoned off. When I got to the place just below  the lookout platform, I heard my brother, my sister and my sister-in-law yelling at their children, who had followed me over the fence. “Paul! Penny! Go back! It's too dangerous—you might get swept over the rocks. Let Aunt Jasmine do it!”

My plucky niece and nephew sighed, waved me on, then headed back up the hill.

I had no idea when the next tour bus or the next ranger might be pulling up alongside the road, so I ran as fast as I could down a hill then up a hill then out over the rocks toward where the Lone Cypress Tree hugged itself against the blistering wind. As I got close I suddenly saw myself as someone from the road might see me: a dark-haired woman sprinting with a small shopping bag toward a national monument, exactly two months after the September 11^th attack. It occurred to me that someone watching might well shoot at me.

Breathing hard but grateful for the three-mile jog I'd taken that morning, I reached the little fenced-in area where the tree stands all alone, battered by the wind. Waves were crashing up against the rocks below. “Here you are, Mom,” I called out as I rained ashes down on the breakers and over the roots of the tree. “Here you are, Maury.” The ashes mixed with the spray from the sea, rising up in a cloud, covering the front of my jacket, getting into my teeth and under my contact lenses. I blinked furiously, waved at my family, then ran back down to the forest path and up the hill and climbed back over the fence posted with No Trespassing signs—and threw the glazed plastic shopping bag and the two, now empty plastic baggies into the metal trash container chained to the fence by the side of the road.

My family was pleased, although I imagine that my brother and sister both thought I was showing off again. I felt relieved and tired.

We trudged back up the wooden stairs and into our cars, changing who was riding with whom, although my brother still rode shotgun with me. We hadn't gone half a mile when Gabe told me to pull over, saying something about a rainbow.

We got out and there it was, arcing across half the sky, one end looking as if were emanating from the very spot where we'd just been.

“Your mother's happy,” said Peg, my sister-in-law.

About a dozen pelicans flew in silhouette across the rainbow. Mom loved pelicans. I shouted out some requests toward the westering sky. “That screenplay, Mom! And the new novel!”

Peg was laughing at me.

“And Mr. Right!” I croaked through my tears.

“You want your mother to pick out Mr. Right for you?” asked Peg, wrinkling her nose.

“People get wiser after they're dead,” I murmured. “At least they're supposed to. That rainbow's pretty good.”

We stood and watched it until the colors faded and then disappeared into the gray clouds in a sky that seemed held between my mother's hands, as if she could swirl the rainbow into a cone of cotton candy, as if we were all little again and she had just given us the very thing we wanted most of all.

***

My mom gave me more than a psychic reprieve when she died. Even though it looked as if she was doing her best to spend all the money Papa had left her, there was enough left over for each of my siblings and me to get a fairly big chunk of change.

I wanted more than anything else to find a house where Kyle and I would really get to stay as long as we wanted to. Where I could plant my favorite roses and fruit trees and know that I’d see them bloom year after year. I wanted a place that Kyle would be able to visit years later and say, “That’s the house where I grew up.”

My mother made that possible. I put every penny of my inheritance into a down payment. I had to turn somersaults to qualify for a loan—but I did it. I planted lots of roses and a big wild-looking flower garden, and lemons and figs and plums. Our cat loved it there—and Kyle and I did, too.

That’s why it was so scary—mostly for me, but probably for Kyle, too—when I was actually contemplating the idea of moving with him to Brazil.

To be continued next week!

Photo by Barbara Quick