Ava Knipers wants a dozen daisies (Bellis perennis, a fitting name) to perk up a birthday centerpiece for friend Lydia Ivkovich’s 46th next week, December 11. Lydia loves daisies.
Where are daisies in December when it’s time to deck the halls with boughs of holly?
“In December a daisy’s like a miniature donkey among Santa’s reindeer,” Ava says to herself:
“When what to my wondering eyes should appear
But a miniature sleigh, seven tiny reindeer and a diminutive donkey.”
It doesn’t scan, let alone make sense. On the other hand, that it doesn’t make sense is its charm. Like daisies in December.
She calls Lucia’s Florist shop. Kathy, Lucia’s daughter-in-law, checks suppliers, but grow houses are brimming with poinsettias.
No deal.
Ditto with Brookville’s grocery and fruit markets.
“Such a simple flower,” Ava thinks as she stands in the center of the Christmas tree shape hemmed into crisp white cotton curtains framing her picture window. She stares toward Booth Street, pulls thoughtfully at one of her salt and pepper curls, picks a yarn nub off her dark blue cardigan. As she does, a toast-colored Lab mix frisks into view. The Lab is attached to a length of red leash held by her neighbor, Henry Irvine, dressed, eternally, like a Beatnik, black sweatshirt and beret, stained khakis, decaying loafers.
Ava has a notion Henry reckons wardrobe stops time.
“Ah,” says Ava. She waves at Zap and Henry. Zap sees Ava, being the conscious one of the pair. He halts, faces her house, and wags his tail. Henry stops, too, but he’s oblivious, looking at notes and snippets he’s collected in his pocket over the week. Something drops from the papers. Henry looks down, is startled, looks around quickly and then, “furtively?” Ava wonders, bends down, picks it up, scribbles something on it, folds it among the rest of the papers, and stuffs the bunch in his right front pocket with his pen.
Zap pulls toward Ava’s house again. Henry looks up, sees her waving. He waves back. She blows him a kiss and comes to the front door.
“How do I get a dozen daisies?” she calls.
“Get what?”
“A dozen daisies! I want a dozen daisies for Lydia’s birthday centerpiece!”
Henry stares at Ava a moment. Henry, cranking “cuckoo” alongside his head, looks down at Zap who, tres sympatico, looks up at Henry. Henry turns back to Ava and laughs.
“People in Hell want ice water…That don’t mean they’re gonna get it!”
“Don’t stand in the street hurling invectives. Come in here. I need to talk to you. Let’s have tea. I’ve got chicken for your noble dog.
At “chicken,” Zap pulls toward the door.
Zap gets minced chicken in a shallow Jadeite bowl. Ava puts the kettle on. Henry browses the books she’s reading: Scherenschnitte : designs and techniques for the traditional craft of papercutting, paper catalogs, Finn Family Moomintroll. “Momintroll,” Henry thinks, “has to be a gift from Tulip Bergson.”
“So where do I get a dozen daisies?” Ava asks, placing an orange plastic pumpkin face plate stacked with Wheatabix on the counter.
“A dothan dathees?” Henry mumbles through a mouthful of dehydrated wheat. He chews thoughtfully, swallows, then continues, “I presume you’re seeking my advice because you’ve already investigated florists.”
“Correcto. Bueno.”
Henry points at the Scherenschnitte book.
“Too obvious,” Ava demurs. “I can cut them out. I even thought of using yellow Velcro as the centers…Mmmh…”
Henry opens a cabinet and scans tins, “Do you have any of that honey Roberto’s friend Milo jarred last summer?”
“Here.” Ava hands him a green plastic dragon that sits on her sugar canister. It breathes plastic flames. “The honey is in there. Pull the flames out and squeeze the dragon’s middle. The honey will drizzle out.”
“This is a honey dispenser?”
“It was a bubble bath dispenser. I washed out the soap and used a funnel to refill it with honey. Without funnels, life itself would be impossible.”
Henry gives Ava a searching look. Throwing etiquette overboard, he mumbles, munching more Wheatabix, “I nether costhidered thas befa.”
“Think about it.” Ava smiles. “And as far as daisies are concerned, some Romanian archeologists think there’s a pictogram at Lascaux of a bison yearning for daisies.”
“What do the daisies in the pictogram look like?”
“Rough circles, some of them scalloped, surrounded by interlocking arches. Or they might be pies with enormous crusts.”
“Paleolithic bison dreaming of enormous pie crusts?”
“There’s scientific debate about it.”
“I don’t buy it. Don’t you find it hard to associate a bison‑I mean any bison, paleolithic or anthropocene-with pastry.”
“That’s chauvinistic enough.”
“Excuse me?”
“Be more imaginative. You have this marvelous dog who, on average shows more sense and awareness of the world than you and you deny the possibility of Bison dreaming of pie crusts. The idea is simply too intriguing to dismiss offhand.”
“Thank you, Werner Heisenberg.”
“J.B.S. Haldane.
“Fair enough. So,” Henry says looking at his pup, “Zap, speak. Where shall we find daisies? Perhaps in the spirit of Paleolithic Bison we might yearn for daisies a bit?”
Henry gazes yearningly. Ava hands him a cup of tea with the strainer still in the cup. Henry takes it to the compost bucket. He dips the strainer a few times for good measure, lets the tea drain back into the cup and empties the strainer into the compost bucket. Ava is loath to re-brew tea leaves. Henry looks at Zap. Zap looks at the strainer as Henry lifts it away from the compost bucket.
He takes it over to the sink, rinses it out, holds it up in front of him. Round metal strainer at the end of a red and tan handle, two little hooks like ears at the top of the strainer. “Ava,” he says, in awe, smiling at Zap, “We will fashion our own daisies. We’ll create Avatars of daisies.
“Here’s our first. We use the strainer as the flower disk, the handle as the stem. The rest we make up.”
They look around. They are on the trail of daisies’ avatars.
Henry says, “We find twelve round objects to use as flower heads. Find twelve stems…And some cookies because these Wheatabix are arid. How old are they?”
“Wheatabix doesn’t age. Howard Carter found Wheatabix in King Tut’s Tomb and when he put them in a bowl and added milk, they were perfectly good to eat…with a few figs on top.”
“I hope so. I just ate five of them.”
“Five is the number of love. You’ll be fine.”
“How many strainers do you have?”
“I have the two we used just now, the metal strainers, and I have four bamboo strainers.”
“Ah, a half dozen daisies already. We’re on our way.”
“How do we make the petals?”
“That will come to…us…”
“Wait! I know” Ava snaps her fingers, “Wreathwort.”
“Wreathwort?”
“Yes, Tulip gave me a box of wreathwort at the beginning of the month. She told me they are essential for holiday celebrations, celebrations in general.”
Ava sets her strainer in the sink and walks from the kitchen to her workroom shelves where she keeps boxes and boxes of curios, knick-knacks, pins, plastic bows, figures, fish, general what-not, filed alphabetically by type. She reaches down to the bottom right corner and retrieves a small, lidded straw hamper. She lifts the lid and troupes of bright wooden angels, carolers, snowmen, Victorian people with pipes and spectacles, manger animals, shepherds, and birds-wreathwort-smile up at her. Ava smiles back.
Returning to the kitchen, she finds Henry on the floor rubbing Zap’s stomach and mantically mumbling, “Eenie, meenie, chili beanie, the spirits are about to speak.”
“And they’re friendly, spirits,” Ava says, “look.”
On the counter, near the dragon, she places rows of wreathwort.
“We will use these for petals.”
“Zap says you are a genius, Ava.”
“We all have our moments.”
They consider wreathwort and strainers.
On second thought they give up on the idea of using the bamboo tea strainers. Too bulbous. They’ll look like daisies with Troll noses.
“That doesn’t scan, either,” Ava explains:
“When what to my wondering eyes should appear
But a miniature sleigh, seven tiny reindeer, a diminutive donkey and a quartet of trolls’ noses.”
They discover a small wok spatula, three toy truck tires still on bendable axles…
“Wait,” Henry shouts suddenly. “How do we glue the wreathwort rays to the utensil disks without destroying them? Your strainers will be useless covered with Gorilla glue.”
”We’ll use cornstarch paste,” Ava replies. I always keep a few homemade glues for household repairs.”
In the trash Henry finds a hand salve tin which he can attach to a shish-kabob skewer. In various drawers they find a to-go cup lid, a straw coaster, a reflector, a toy compass with a vivid red, gold and purple wind rose, a ribbon roll, a set of watch gears meshed and glued into a circle.
“Good Lord,” Ava declares, “I fashioned those gears for a jejune allegory about time when I was a student. I was anticipating this project in the future.
“Which is now,” she muses.
Ava also finds a plastic jack-o-lantern, about the size of a four-inch oval pincushion. It’s the wrong shape and season, but that again is its charm. Imagining it with a halo of wreathwort is too peculiar to resist. Ava sings out:
“When what to my wondering eyes should appear
But a miniature sleigh, seven tiny reindeer, a diminutive donkey, a quartet of trolls’ noses-wait, no troll’s noses-and a plastic jack-o-lantern ringed with wreathwort!” (That jack-o-lantern shtick sung to the tune of “and a partridge in a pear tree.”)
“Clement Clarke Moore got nuthin’ on you, honey,” says Henry.
“Here’s the glue,” says Ava. “Ready, set, go.”
So, as Zap snoozes under the table, they begin to sort the wort into petal crews for daisies. The to-go cup lid is painted yellow as are the toy truck tires, the straw coaster receives a light dusting of glitter, the ribbon roll gets wrapped in gold ribbon, and the spatula gets a Mr, Natural “Superior Soil Products” sticker which Henry ran home to get. It features a lemon-yellow earthworm.
By this time, Zap has won the winky game and snores on a dog bed in the living room.
Eighteen wreathwort orbit the jack-o-lantern. Its dazzle is enhanced by the addition of tiny silk bluebirds wobbling on stiff jewelry wire, and a battery powered LED light secured inside.
Ava holds it up and says, “Ah, this is good.”
They spend the next few hours painting, gluing, selecting wreathwort and attaching them. Bellis perrenis, how wreath-like daisies are, bright aureole, light center. At the end of their endeavors, they put the daisies into a blue earthenware pitcher.
“Marvelous,” Ava cries out joyously. “Art imitates Nature.”
“When Nature is the love child of Geppetto and Rube Goldberg, yes,” Henry declares, turning the spatula so the soil sticker shows to better advantage.”
A good afternoon’s work. They have another cup of tea, talk about plans for the upcoming birthday party and around 4:30 in the afternoon, Henry wakes up Zap and takes him home for dinner and their evening constitutional.
Two days later, December 9, an Alberta Clipper nips Brookville good, the temperature plummets, a picturesque foot of snow falls. Johnny Mathis singing “Winter Wonder Land” sends people out to farms of friends to sled ride and joke around pit fires.
One of those revelers is Lydia Ivkovich who, halfway through the day and three-quarters of the way through a thermos of sthenic Irish coffee decides she will attempt the treacherous tree-lined Timmons farm creek slalom on a snow disk and spinning wildly where a quartet of chokecherry trunks outline a sharp right turn whacks and dislocates her knee.
Later, Lydia, cruising with Percocet her physician prescribed, warning, “watch it!”-meaning the hi-jinx, not the Percocet-giggles over the phone to Ava about her tempestuous adventure-rugged men struggling to haul her up a hillside trail on a firewood sledge. “Unfortunately,” she concludes sadly, “I’m not going to be able to make my party.”
So, the party is postponed, and Ava puts the daisies on her mantlepiece where they luminesce in Christmas lights.
On St. Lucia’s Day, December 13, Henry and Zap help Ava decorate the pines and cedars in her back yard for Birds’ Christmas. Every year, on Santa Lucia, Ava fills these trees with treats for birds.
“Because they are angels, iconographically, you know,” Ava tells him.
They hang the treats. Zap runs around the back yard shoveling up tufts of snow with his nose and trying to snap them in his mouth before they fall. Henry is untangling a string when he is surprised to see a woman appear in front of two small spruce trees. She’s very tall and slender, with ivory skin and hair that looks like a nimbus cloud on a brilliant day. She wears a pair of gardener’s chinos, ones that have been irrevocably stained with compost and chlorophyll but washed again and again, and a knobby slate-gray woolen turtleneck with a crocheted heliotrope pansie on the collar.
Zap sits wagging his tail: “Well, a friendly spirit,” Henry thinks.
Most remarkable, she is carrying a crystal vase and in the vase are a dozen daisies. Real Bella perrenis.
She nods to Henry and Ava and says: “They aren’t bison, you know…at Lascaux…not bison in the paintings. They’re bulls. Aurochs, Ava. Bull, you know, is in the details. Anyway, these are for you.” She hands the vase of daisies to Ava.
“These are wonderful,” Ava says, and there’s a tinge of awe in her voice. “Where do they come from?”
“Oh, I grow ‘em. They grow like crazy around my patio. And they spread. I heard you wanted some, so I brought them by. I hope you enjoy them. If you keep the heads and let them dry until the weather warms up, then just scatter the seeds in some scratched earth and cover them lightly with compost, you should have a bunch of good plants this year and the following year they’ll be lush. Enjoy. Happy trails,” her voice is so lilting it sounds like she’s singing.
She begins to leave, then stops and considers Henry, looks him up and down, frowns a moment, grimaces just a little, smirks, shakes her head, squares her shoulders, straightens up and gives him a wink.
Appraised and a bit uncomfortable, Henry smiles and, not knowing what else to do, shrugs.
“And you,” she commands, pointing straight at Henry’s heart, “you go home and write a poem. Have fun, Ava!” She disappears into the trees.
“Write a poem?” Henry laughs, “What does that mean?”
“The poem?” Ava replies, “Golly, Henry, I guess you’ll have to make it up.”
“Oh, and by the way,” says Henry, finally getting the string untangled from a donut treat, “do you know that woman?”
“The wonder, Henry, is she knows us.” Ava laughs.
They string fruit and popcorn garlands with nest-appropriate threads, wedge suet-stuffed pinecones between branches and trunks or in bark fissures. Then they stand back and enjoy their work, especially upon the arrival of resident chickadees and finches. They laugh and hug. Henry invites Ava over for tea and toasted cheese sandwiches.
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At about 2 PM, Ava excuses herself. She wants to go home and work out a Scherenscnitte that’s giving her fits.
Henry cleans the kitchen. Gives the cheese scraps to Zap and then they both head into Henry’s workroom. Zap sprawls out on his green couch. Henry walks over to a small set of bookshelves he has near his desk. He digs his favorite notebook out of towers of books and manila folders. He opens his wooden pencil box and sharpens three pencils with a red resin Santa sharpener he calls Theo.
He stands by the window to his back yard. The snowy afternoon landscape, loafer pocked and shadowed, reminds him of the Moon.
He sits down at his desk, pauses for a moment with the pencil tip just above the paper, chuckles and writes:
The Moon’s a cream bakelite pierogi
