I know I promised you bad, bad love in Ávila, and you will get it. I promise. In next week’s post, cross my heart and hope to die. But this weekend I’m putting in my garden, which means flowers. Flowers remind me of my mother—my mother lived to put in her garden every spring. So while I’m outside, with my hands in the dirt, the tender little plants nestling into the brand new holes I’ve dug for them, it’s impossible for me not to think of my mother. And therefore impossible for me to post about Bad, Bad Love—I don’t think my mother even recognized its existence. She was convinced my father had hung the moon, and the sun while he was at it. Most of my bad, bad loving came about after she was gone–she died when I was twenty-five, of metastatic melanoma.

I never knew my mother as one adult woman trying to relate to and understand another. If I had, it is entirely possible that my reading of her relationship with my father would have been a much more nuanced one. As it is, I remember her as the peacemaker—my relationship with my former-Marine, authority loving, conservative and deeply religious father was a troubled one. My brother’s relationship with the same man sometimes became openly violent, and even when not openly so, the violence simmered under the surface like a cottonmouth floating shallow in murky water, ready to strike. The violence often burst forth at the dinner table, or the supper table, as we called it. It’s probably a surprise to no one that I suffered, as an adolescent, from a variety of eating disorders.

And I wondered at my mother’s unwavering insistence that her life as a housewife was exactly what she’d always wanted, that she’d never dreamed of anything else, that she would never dream of wishing things other than what they were.

My mother was a talented seamstress. I believed she was a frustrated fashion designer. Which became my truth throughout my adolescence and the early years of young adulthood. She may have felt no such thing. And it’s also possible she wouldn’t allow herself to feel any such thing. She was, at any rate, an offhandedly brilliant designer of clothing (sans patterns) for her beautiful daughter, who had no idea she was beautiful—I spent most of my youth worrying about being ugly, and now when I see photographs of that young woman, I just want to slap her silly.

My clothes were the envy of all the girls of my elementary, junior high and high schools, and the marvel of my entire college dormitory. I had no idea how to even shop for clothing when, during my second year of graduate school, my mother was no longer able to sew.

The most joyful moment of my mother’s horrific final hospital stay involved a dress, covered in flowers. She was thin to the point of transparency, her skin dry like paper. She was bald under colorful bandanas with attached faux bangs that only made things worse but she never wanted my father to see her without them. On the day of the joyful moment, my father was absent. Which I remember, somehow, as key. As something to be desired—his grief swallowed up the room, the hall, the hospital, the universe. In the presence of his grief there was no room for joy.

And my mother always, somehow, found joy.

Everything went according to my plan. I showed up just after her breakfast tray had been delivered—she was no longer touching food—in the dress she’d been making for me when she became too weak to lift the scissors, and so she put them down.

One of her dearest friends, Virginia, wife of the mayor in our small Tennessee town, was also a seamstress, also talented (though not nearly so much as my mother, as she declared over and over again as my mother marveled). Virginia and I, together, had finished the dress. And it brought my mother joy.

My mother called it “the mermaid dress.” It molded itself to every curve of my body like the glimmery, shimmery, scaly skin of that fantastic creature, flaring out into layers and layers of ruffles from knee to ankles, after the fashion of a flamenco costume. Fuchsia, red, butter-yellow, lime green. Turquoise, ruby, tourmaline. My red hair loose down my back like a Titian river. And of course the platforms. My oh my, such smooth skin, my mother said, caressing my back like a lover–she’d left it mostly bare. She touched my waist, my hips, naming the flowers—I don’t remember them all, I wasn’t yet into flowers—and said I looked exactly like life. Smelled like it too.

Still today I marvel at the idea of my sweet, chaste mother coming up with something as unabashedly sensual as that dress, that had no place in any place like a hospital. And she knew that, and it brought her joy.

My mother believed she had good love, the best love. Which was married love, the only kind there was. She, therefore, knew very little of what I got up to when I wasn’t at home. I made sure of that. When she died, I was in Palermo. She’d entered a coma two weeks earlier, and her bedside physician, together with my father and my aunts, convinced me that she no longer knew the hand holding hers was mine. That I should do what she’d been wanting me to do all summer—take my fellowship money and fly to Italy and see those medieval monuments she was so proud of me for studying. She’d never stopped talking to the nurses, the doctors, the radiologists, to anyone who would listen (and pretty much anyone would listen to my mother, she charmed everyone with her sweet innocence), about her brilliant daughter. Whom she asked, every day as that daughter entered the room to take up her bedside seat, just after lunch time, what on earth she was still doing there, wasn’t she leaving for Italy soon?

I received the news of my mother’s death in Italian, not in time to make it home for the funeral (my devastated, distraught father would eventually place a cassette tape into my hand; to this day I have not been able to listen to it). I did my first weeping of bereavement (I’d wept many times previously, of course: diagnosis, new diagnosis, first little stroke, second one) in that other tongue. Which maybe put me outside myself (in addition to beside myself), and maybe explains my behavior the following day, when I was scheduled to take a ferry back to the mainland, to spend a week with a friend and her family near Naples.

I picked up a guy on that boat. A photographer (yes, perceptive and attentive reader, another one). He took my picture, over and over—those shots might be out there, somewhere, from when I was young and beautiful, even with my eyes swollen from weeping. We got drunk on white wine from Sardinia as the sun, that fiery sun, dropped into the water in an unbelievable ball of flame and fuchsia. Then we had sex. All over the boat. For hours. Inside the emergency skiffs, strung up to the sides of the ferry in case of a Titanic sort of incident. In a linen closet left carelessly open—neither of us, probably goes without saying, had access to a cabin. Behind a pile of ropes, right up against the guard rails. My ass got a soaking, rope burn streaked the backs of my thighs. I felt my head sticking out over the edge. Wet wind in my hair. I slid an inch further out, and then another one. I could so, so easily have slipped right through, vanished into the ocean in the middle of the night. Pulled him with me. Vanished us both without a trace.

I cried throughout most of the sex, sometimes I sobbed. My legs twined through his, I told him about my mother and he hugged me and untangled himself from me and brought me more wine (there were moments of extreme tenderness that night, strange as that may sound). By breakfast time, I was all cried out and we were all screwed out and he sat me on his lap so we could take bites from the same pastry at the same time, and drink from the same (innumerable) cup(s) of coffee. He begged me to come with him to Corfu, where his mother lived. I didn’t have a mother any more but I could enjoy his mother for a while. She would cook for us, and not mind us sleeping in the same bed. She would love me. She loved beautiful things. She had a flower garden, glorious now in early August.

I didn’t go, of course. I don’t know quite why. Going would have been reckless, and in those days I was always up for reckless.

My mother loved Aaron Copland. She especially loved Appalachian Spring, which she liked to listen to through the open living room window as she put her garden in, the music floating out through the screen window, from the old slide-top stereo, the aroma of new blooms and fresh dirt finding its way inside too. The title “Appalachian Spring” only came to be attached to that piece of music long after its composition, somewhat haphazardly, in Copland’s mind it had nothing in particular to do with Appalachia. These are facts of which I hope my mother was blissfully ignorant because they would have disappointed her. She said Appalachian Spring reminded her of our family vacations to Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. We used to go every summer; there were violent moments around the dinner table even there, between my father and my brother. I imagine my mother edited those out, replaced them with joy.

And so Appalachian Spring—I’ve been streaming it while writing this post—reminds me of my mother. Who was a deliriously happily married woman. Or maybe a determinedly happily married one. I will never know. I do know that I would never have been able to stand being married to my father—too authoritarian, too set in his ways. I’m pretty sure I would never be able to stand being married to anyone. But when I hear Copland, I imagine other people being happily married, somewhere, being happily able to do that, somehow, and that makes me wistful.

For something I know I do not want. How’s that for effed-up?

Happy weekend, y’all. I’m spending it with flowers. Putting in my garden. With my mother, or with her memory anyway. I’m pretty sure my father would have been appalled at a good 80% of my adult behavior in the realm of Love (Good, Bad, Whatever), but I’m equally certain, though I do not know why, that my mother wouldn’t judge. She’d just listen, have her hands in the fresh dirt, brand new flowers at her feet, and she’d tell me I looked like life. Smelled like it too.

Next week the love will be Bad again. 100%. And that’s a promise. Till then, go plant some flowers.