Earlier this week, the day before July 4th, before snow coated the hillsides and frost visited valley gardens, our son took on the task of mowing the grass around the buildings. Rain and moderate temperatures had created a tangled mass of grasses and weeds.
He wheeled the mower around to the south side of the old ranch house; and there, standing proud above the knee-high grass, were the rows of iris that have always grown below the front-room window.
But childhood memory is not the purpose of this piece, for those flowers are more than a childhood memory.
Like museum artifacts, these iris have a history. My mother’s German immigrant family carried the plants among the possessions that they brought from their home in Nebraska in the early 1900’s.
The trek my grandparents made across the prairie to their homestead at the base of eastern Montana’s Sheep Mountains had begun in a recently unified Imperial Germany ruled by Emperor Wilhelm I. It was a country in the throes of change. Rapid growth and industrialization had made it a sweeping powerhouse. The lead-up to World War I stewed in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, and Germany scrambled for colonial power in Africa, challenging other European nations. Uncertainty ruled, foreshadowing the war to come.
Half a world away, the iris survived the journey the family made to Montana.
When my mother was grown and married in the 1930’s, she dug up and divided some of the iris and brought them west with her to a new home on this ranch in north-central Montana. The iris flourished, surviving drought, heat, bitter cold, and wind that drove the snow ahead of it in its wintery blasts. Winds to lean into.
The iris not only survived; they thrived.
They outlasted the dogs digging in them to find cool earth on hot summer days. They endured my mother walking over them in her weekly forays to scrub all the windows with a long-handled brush and hot ammonia water that often sloshed over the sides of the bucket.
And, during recent years, they have endured benign neglect. Rarely if ever watered, they haven’t been “divided” or cultivated.
Still, year after year, they have grown, producing their subtly-colored flowers, proof of their toughness.
This iris microcosm reminds me of people and their movements. Moving to another environment is neither a facile decision or an easy task. Desperate circumstances beyond an individual’s control usually push the decision to seek safety and opportunity.
Then it takes time and testing to determine whether one stays or goes, moving on. Whether it is a move into a new state or a new nation, whether it was two hundred years ago, one hundred years ago, or just last year, it is difficult. This is not an endeavor for the faint of heart. It takes heart to come here; it takes heart to stay. And, it takes heart to accept those who follow.
I find in that heart my own beginnings.
And, in this afternoon’s heat, I pulled out a hose to water our iris.
[Revision of 6/17/11 post]
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