I come from a long line of control freaks.
The kind of people who hold firm opinions about proper dishwasher loading and communism.
Judgmental people with indomitable wills.
How control freaky are they?
Once upon a time my grandfather wanted to spend the summer at his cottage in northern Michigan.
The snag he was dying and lived in Naples, Florida.
I know this, because like every other alarmed family member, I called him.
Hows it Up North, Grandpa?
Not good, he grumbled.
The beach … there are weeds.
Clearly, you never met my grandfather.
The next day, he hired a front loader and bulldozed the beach.
He died five months later.
Defiant to the end, railing against untidy bramble.
What happened to the garden?
Where there once stood an obsessively manicured garden, now were waist-high weeds.
My mother is a person who cannot walk past a plant without dead-heading it.
She can spot bindweed at 50 paces.
My childhood was one of indentured servitude to her garden beds.
Something was clearly wrong.
I immediately confronted her.
What happened to the garden?
I gestured madly at the underbrush, channeling my grandfather.
Its FINE, insisted my mother.
I called her bluff.
It is NOT fine.
I like to sit on the porch and see what comes up.
Who are you and what have you done with my mother?
