Arctic Peonies
by Birgit Lennertz Sarrimanolis
In the early morning, on the wide slope of the hill behind the house, the peonies nodded gently, stirring in an almost imperceptible breeze. Ayana walked between the raised, mulched rows. The sun had not set all night, as was typical for Alaska in the summer months, and cast its diffuse, dusky light onto the homestead and surrounding hills. Even though it was mid-June, the peonies were just starting to unfurl their dark green, glossy leaves. It would take some time yet for the flowers to bud, but the plants were fortifying themselves, absorbing the energy of the sun, quietly readying themselves for their season.
Ayana ran her fingers along the slender stems. Her mother had been correct in her assessment that planting peonies in Alaska would one day become a lucrative business. In the lower 48 states, the spring peony season had already passed. The flowers had stopped producing; their supply for Mother’s Day and spring weddings long exhausted. But Alaska’s late blooming peonies provided another surge of the desirable flower when they were available to the market from nowhere else.
Her mother had followed an instinct, even if the vagaries of the northern climate posed uncertainties. When heavy snow blanketed the meadow and ice glittered on spruce branches, she sat by the fire with flower catalogs and gardening books, reading about preparing the soil in raised beds with bone meal and ash and compost, planning the peony varieties she would coax from the hard earth after the break-up season. Ayana looked at the photographs of the soft flowers in shades of coral, pink and blush. She longed for color after the long, white winter. She, like her mother, trusted the earth to come full circle.
They planted the first tubers years ago, kneeling in the soil together, choosing varieties that would flower sequentially. The Festiva Maxima, big white flowers with a red-fringed center, would bloom early. The intense red color of the Karl Rosenfields would grace the hillside next. Finally, the late blooms of the soft pink Sarah Bernhardts finished the season.
“We’ll have to be patient,” her mother told her. “It will take three or four years before we see the first flowers.”
Ayana understood patience. She knew how to wait, not so much because of the rewards that being patient would allow her to reap, but because she had no other choice. All her life she had been a backdrop, waiting for things to happen to her rather than because of her. She never pushed herself into the foreground, seizing opportunities, making friends. Like the floral wallpaper that decorated her cabin bedroom, she was a quiet only child that lived in the background.
Mousy and awkward, she was overlooked by the girls at school in Fairbanks when they stood chatting next to their lockers. When they asked her an occasional question, Ayana spoke to her shoes. She was hardly ever asked to join them with her lunch tray in the cafeteria or to sit on the metal bleachers to watch a volleyball game. Ayana breathed more easily when she was on her way home again, sitting beside her father in his pick-up truck, heading north out of town until they reached the lonely mailbox at milepost 47 and the dirt track that led back into their land and to the old homestead cabin.
Finally, sometime in middle school, Ayana’s outcast status at school became too much to bear. She came home one day and sat with her head in her hands while silent tears trickled down the sides of her nose. It was her mother who suggested the homeschool alternative. Her mother had always known what to say on such days, giving Ayana a gentle press on the shoulder, the reassurance that she was not an afterthought. They researched the curriculum and ordered textbooks. Ayana absorbed her studies, immersing herself in books, letting the world fall away. Once a week, they filed a progress report to the homeschooling office in Fairbanks making sure she was in line with her syllabus. Rather than worrying that keeping her home for her studies through the years could be a further hindrance at socialization, Ayana knew that that her mother had sensed, by some motherly instinct, that she would thrive if she remained close to her surroundings, strong in her own soil. The quiet hills surrounding the homestead grounded her in a manner that no friendship at school could.
Ayana breathed in the early morning air that was tinged with the pungent scent of the wild highbush cranberries on the periphery of the peony field. It was the time of day, cool and praiseworthy, when Ayana’s thoughts could escape to a more wholesome time. Ayana walked the length of the meadow. She missed her mother.
Returning to the cabin, Ayana let herself in. Her father’s snores came to her from the back bedroom, in fits and starts, his sleep interrupted and restless. She put on the kettle to boil water for tea, then busied herself preparing breakfast. It was Saturday and they would soon have to start loading the vegetables onto the flatbed of the truck. The earlier they got to their farmstand at the Farmer’s Market, the more produce they would sell.
The Russians, their competitors who drove up from Delta Junction each week, started growing vegetables in heated greenhouses well before spring break-up. They displayed their impressive tomatoes and zucchini and cucumbers in stacked pyramids and charged six or seven dollars for a pound. Sometimes the women added other items onto their tables: honey straws, homemade jellies, crocheted doilies, cream rolls. They greeted their customers with broad smiles and thick accents, loudly pushing their wares.
Ayana sorted the vegetables from their own small vegetable patch onto the farmstand. After her father rumbled off again in his truck, she settled herself onto her stool to take in the people. As much as she cherished the quiet of the homestead, Saturdays had become her connection to the outside world. She smiled when the Russian ladies haggled with their customers, as though their prices weren’t exorbitant enough. She enjoyed watching the woodcarver across from her demonstrate his delicate carving on birch trunks. He sold wooden benches and side tables and salad bowls. She inhaled the scent of sauteed side-striped shrimp, garlicky and pungent, as it drifted to her from the food tent.
A man approached her farmstand. He ran a finger over her broccoli but did not seem particularly interested in buying vegetables. Instead, he looked at the few early peonies that Ayana had arranged decoratively in a plastic bucket alongside. She eyed his clothing and decided he was not from Alaska. He wore the tidy look of someone from the lower 48 states. His loafers, khaki pants, and half-zip sweater were quite out of place in the northern landscape of rough dirt roads and straggly wilderness. He was perhaps a decade older than her, but his handsome, shaven features were not lost on her.
“How much are you selling the flowers for?”
“Oh,” Ayana spurted out. “They are just for decoration. If you like, you can take one.”
“Do you grow them yourself?” he asked.
Ayana nodded her head proudly. “On our homestead. Some miles out of town.”
He touched one of the large, fragrant flowers, an early white Duchesse de Nemours which exuded a sweet, citrusy scent.
“How clever of you to grow them in Alaska.” He smiled at her. “It must be difficult to cultivate such flowers here.”
Even though Ayana was not sure whether his curiosity lay with her abilities as a gardener or with the flowers, she eagerly shared with him the things she had learned from her mother. It was novel to be of interest to someone, particularly a captivating stranger. Peonies were tough and could survive the harsh climate, she told him. In fact, they even relished the cold winters because they needed chilling for bud formation. If planted too deeply, they produced few, if any, flowers. She had been cutting back the blooms for the past three years to make sure all their energy went back to the roots. She was still a small peony grower, with only four hundred roots so far, but she had followed her mother’s gardening journal closely. After three years, this summer would finally bring the fragrant blooms they had envisioned.
That evening, while serving her father a bowl of moose stew, Ayana told him about the man at the market.
“He thinks he can sell our peonies down in the States. He wants to come talk to us about it all. Something along the lines of what Mama had in mind.”
Distracted, her father looked up at her and pushed food around on his plate. Ayana wasn’t even sure he had heard her. He had become a shell of the man he used to be, eyes hollow, the vigor of youth gone. In years past, before Mama died, they had always lived off the land, following the seasons and gleaning from their surroundings what the landscape yielded. In the winter, Papa kept traplines in the woods behind the house where he snared quality furbearers: arctic fox, lynx, marten, wolverine. He skinned and stretched and dried the furs. With his trapline income he bought supplies for the winter: fuel oil, boots, grains with a longer shelf life. In the summer, when the swollen rivers were thick with salmon runs, he fished first the red sockeyes, then the large kings, and finally the coho silvers to fill their freezer for the winter. During the September hunting season, he scanned distant ridges with his scoping rifle for moose. Meanwhile, Ayana and her mother grew vegetables that exploded into tangles of colors under the midnight sun. They canned and preserved and stored their harvest. They were never short on food, even in a land that was hard and inhospitable for much of the year. In the gloaming, Papa often stood on the porch of the cabin, shoulders held back, as he surveyed the homestead. The reflection of a smile had always crossed his features.
Until her mother got sick and withered. The illness descended quickly, leaving them first dumbfounded, then grasping for time. Her mother managed to hang on through a last winter, but with the promise of spring she, ironically, let go. She never saw the peonies they had planted together. Ayana’s heart was wrenched dry with the paradox of it all.
Ayana and her father tried to manage, withdrawn, living alongside in a remoteness of their own making. Her father robotically went about his chores on the homestead, doing only what was necessary. Ayana picked up where her mother had left off, trying to hold the edges together. Over time, she finished the school curriculum they had embarked her upon and graduated without a sense of future. She heard about the girls from school leaving Alaska, some for colleges in Oregon and Washington, seeking degrees and careers. News drifted back about others who had married in haste and remained there, determined to leave the wilds of Alaska for a more civilized life. Ayana felt the passage of time and a pressure to not be left behind. Yet she could not change either.
On Sunday, Ayana stood on the porch and waited until she made out the dusty approach of a car on the dirt road leading up the hill to their cabin. She had given the man directions to the homestead, telling him to come to talk to Papa about his proposition. They sat with cups of coffee at the kitchen table. Richard spoke business with her father while Ayana fell hard in love. He was a man that knew his trade. Ayana saw only his black hair and sculpted chin and dark eyes. Her heart lurched whenever he directed a question towards her, stomach knotted in excitement, as he spoke about the practicalities of shipments and stem prices and freight charges. Her father listened, then retired to the porch swing with his pipe, leaving Ayana to handle matters with the stranger.
In her bed that night, Ayana spoke to her mother. Our poenies, Mama, out in the world, for everyone to enjoy. She told her about Richard and his intentions of selling their flowers in the lower 48 states. “As long as there are brides, there will be a market,” he had said with enthusiasm. Ayana imagined the brides blushing alongside the peonies in their bouquets, linking arms with their grooms. It was almost as good as being there herself.
Ayana was glad to relinquish the business aspects of the peony farm to Richard. She had cursorily read the notebook in which her mother had jotted down a marketing plan, but she could not wrap her head around distribution methods and profit sharing and transportation. She was glad Richard outlined the plan.
Closer to the harvest, mid-summer, he brought a huge metal container on a trailer which he called a “chiller.” The cut flowers needed to be refrigerated as soon as they were harvested so the buds would not open prematurely. There were strict parameters of what the industry would buy, he explained. Only flowers with a thick stem and tight buds would bring them three or four dollars a stem. They had to harvest the peonies as closed balls, before bloom, when the balls felt like a marshmallow to their touch.
“Be sure to clip them carefully, just above a set of leaves,” he demonstrated with a pruner as they walked slowly among the flowers. “The buds must be no more than an-inch-and-a-half to two-inches. The stem should be no longer than 32-inches, with all side buds removed and clean leaves.”
He scrutinized the plants and clipped those he deemed favorable. Ayana wondered about the misfits, ones that nature had granted an entrance, then a shun. When they came across lesser quality stems, he put them aside to sell to local bed-and-breakfasts or for the farmstand at the Farmer’s Market. Ayana walked next to him and hoped for perfection.
They worked together all summer, harvesting the succession of flowers. Carefully, they wrapped the peonies in clear plastic, then packed them into stem boxes and stored them in the chiller. In the evening, they drove the flowers to Fairbanks so they could be shipped on a midnight FedEx flight to Anchorage. From there they were distributed south to their destinations: boutiques in big cities, wholesales to supermarkets, weddings. Ayana cherished the dusky evenings when she sat next to Richard in the truck in companionable silence after the long day. She watched the rolling hills unfold in front of them and quietly celebrated in her heart.
When their first sales came in, Richard smiled and exuberantly swung Ayana up into his arms. Ayana clutched his shoulders, pulse hammering in her throat, as he lowered her to the ground again. For a moment, soft and fleeting, she looked into his dark brown eyes and the world burgeoned with possibility.
As the summer progressed, his ideas became grander. They would offer subscription services so people could order flowers online. He suggested drawing up brochures to mail to clients, with photographs of the homestead and the peonies, emphasizing that the flowers symbolized good fortune and prosperity and romance. They would expand the peony field, plant more rows and varieties with lofty names: white Elsa Sass, dark pink Edulis Superba, raspberry red Felix Crousse. Their first, tentative season had launched itself well beyond their expectations. Of course it did. The name “Ayana,” after all, meant “forever flowering.”
At night, Ayana lay awake and channeled her thoughts about Richard toward her mother. More than anything, she wanted to consult with her, to tell her of the new, burgeoning swell in her chest as well as a doubt that had settled in beneath her ribs. She was suddenly drawn to the open window, where the curtain stirred lazily in the breeze. Leaning onto the windowsill, Ayana listened to the hush of the surrounding forest as it lay still and slumbering. She could make out the remaining peonies in the half-light. She thought she saw her then, at the very edge of the meadow, among the flowers that had not been harvested yet. Her mother, with her long, dark hair, was dressed in familiar gardening clothes. Her hand seemed to float above the peonies, gesturing toward them reassuringly. Ayana peered closely, adjusting to the dimness, wanting to understand, but moments later her mother was gone again.
When August brought rain and darkening nights, they packed and shipped the last of the peonies. They had sent off the flowers nightly, harvesting the latest blooms at the end of the summer. Then Richard returned alone to the lower 48 states. Ayana stood for a long while on the porch, watching the dust behind his truck settle again. He had pleaded with her to go with him, to cultivate new clients and contracts, to work on their efflorescent relationship, to plan the summer’s next harvest. Ayana gazed sadly at him. To her, the peonies meant more than money and marketability.
“What became of that man,” Papa asked much later that winter, sitting by the fire, in the glow of the embers. “The one who was interested in the peonies.”
Ayana turned to look at her father and the fragility that now defined him. It was as though he had not even noticed how Richard and Ayana had worked together all summer in the peony field. Her father’s strength had dissipated. He had given her mother his last best effort, an ultimate gift, by letting her go. He was able to do something for her still by being left behind. Her mother did not have to bear the burden of living on alone.
“He will not return,” Ayana told her father quietly and reached for his hand.
Richard had been a summer, fleeting and grounded only in her imaginings. They had walked together in the never-ending twilight with the sound of the aspens twitching in the breeze and the scent of the peonies heady and fragrant in the air. She was caught up in his stride as he laughed and talked, but she sensed that he would be gone when autumn came.
The horizon he offered was not her home. She did not need faraway places anymore, she realized, and would never leave the homestead. She was familiar with every corner of it: the willows and the birches and the river that gurgled through the land. She loved the hillsides that turned orange and crimson in the fall. She knew that the fireweed tallied the milder days of summer, blooming up its stalk until the fluffy, withered crowns indicated that winter was soon approaching. She felt the first snowfall through her nose before she even got out of bed to look out of her window. She cherished how the winter sun cast its slanting light through the kitchen window, metallic in the mornings, golden in the evenings. And she trusted that beneath the heavy snow blanket covering the hillside the peonies waited. The late blooms of the undemanding flower would turn blousy and luxurious in their season’s full potential.
BIO
Birgit Lennertz Sarrimanolis’ work has appeared in Cirque Journal, Clackamas Literary Review, Euphony Journal, Fiction on the Web, Five on the Fifth, Medicine and Meaning, Penman Review and Shark Reef. Her memoir, Transplanted, was published by Cirque Press in 2022. She calls Alaska home and writes overlooking the Tanana Valley. Visit her website here: birgitsarrimanolis.com
