Wildflower Tiles

    In 1959, the summer I turned fifteen, my family made a two-month-long trip to Alaska, seven of us in one station wagon, from Loken (our house outside Atlanta, Georgia) to Fairbanks, Alaska, camping out all the way. My little brother was two. My older sister was sixteen.
    Many stories arose from that trip, but only one is built, literally, into the wall of my house.
    Like me, my mother loved wildflowers. On this trip she collected, identified, and, because she was an artist, painted wildflowers. Even while my father was driving down the highway, she would suddenly exclaim, “Oh! A new flower.” He would always pull to a stop so she could walk into the field and pick a specimen while all the kids piled out of the car, stretching our legs, glad for the diversion, looking in wonder at the flatness of Wyoming or the snowy peaks of the Rockies or the forests of the Alcan. Back in the car, Mom would balance a sketchpad on her knee and draw the flower while it was still fresh. She and I would look it up in Peterson’s wildflower guide, and she would carefully note at the bottom of the painting its common and Latin names and the date and place she found it. Later, at the campsite, while the rest of us were taking a swim in a lake or exploring the creek or the woods, Mom would sit at a picnic table to paint the flower.
    After we got home, she reproduced those paintings on a set of clay tiles for the wall around the fireplace. They were a part of the lore of Loken.

        After my parents died, my siblings and I knew we had to sell the house. We also knew that a developer would tear it down, so before we sold it, we met at Loken and took everything from it that we could, not only the furniture and rugs and paintings, but parts of the building itself. My brother took the flooring. My sister took the flagstones from the front walk. We took shutters and boards and doorknobs and doors. With great satisfaction at destroying what we loved in order to keep it in other forms – and to keep the developer, who didn’t love it, from destroying it without love – we tore into the place with crowbars and hammers, screwdrivers and pliers. As I passed through the living room, I paused at the fireplace.

“I wish we could take the wildflower tiles,” I said wistfully. Without a word my brother started prying the tiles loose from the wall, one at a time. Some broke. Some chipped at a corner. Some were smoke damaged. Many came out whole. We divided the undamaged tiles and the slightly chipped or edge-burned ones among the five of us.
    A year or so after that, back in Oregon, I was building a new house and thought about how I could incorporate the Alaska-trip wildflower tiles into it. I wrote my siblings, who, I knew, had not used their tiles, and asked if they would contribute any tiles to my project. Two sisters gave me all of theirs. One gave me some. My brother wanted to keep his to use somewhere some day. But now I had eighteen tiles of eighteen different wildflowers, each identified by name, place, and date. I wanted to build them into a wall.

                       The friend who was building my house was dubious.

He suggested it would be better to frame the tiles as a group, so I could move them from place to place in the house. But I knew what I wanted – I wanted that wall – so he devised a way to do it that wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive, and now the tiles my mother painted of wildflowers we collected on our trip to Alaska are imbedded on the wall in my entryway. I have the love and generosity of my siblings, the ingenuity of my builder (and of my brother, who figured out how to take them off the fireplace), the art of my mother, the memories of my childhood built right there into the wall of my house.