Madeline's Hydrangea

Knowing her grandchildren would inherit the world she left behind, she did not work for flourishing in her time only—Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), 9. 

Madeline worked as a caregiver in this building. For minimum wage, she cleaned apartments; walked behind stroke survivors, holding their belts till they could manage on their own with a rollator; went shopping for those who couldn’t get out. Eventually she was old enough to move in herself, and she got an apartment the same year I did, 2008. 

Like me, she was then in her early sixties. Lean, muscular, with flyaway hair gathered into an ever-collapsing bun. She wore old print dresses, and in cool weather she added baggy pajama pants under them. Battered sandals with socks. Men’s worn-out cardigans missing their buttons. She was always squinting but never considered wearing glasses. I never made out the color of her eyes.

She was taciturn. Kept busy doing maintenance that benefited us all, as if she couldn’t give up the habit of caregiving. She sorted recycle bins, removing trash and flattening boxes. She cleaned utility tubs by the washing machines on each floor so the custodians didn’t have to do it. She hauled her own vacuum cleaner into hallways and sucked up spilled detergent, wayward grains of rice, wet leaves. It was her quiet service.

She fed and pruned the thirty or forty rose bushes that surround the building. She planted bulbs. Soon after she was given a diagnosis of lung cancer, she planted this hydrangea. It was four inches tall and scrawny. I saw her struggling to stand up after kneeling to press the soil around it. I offered her a hand. “I’m fine,” she insisted, reclaiming her verticality. “It’ll make a nice bush,” she predicted. “I think this is just the right spot for it.”