...and on that...

Sometimes the most important phrases are very, very small.

And spoken, softly, by voices only you might recognize.

Actually, there'd likely be a handful of people--some of whom read this blog--who recognize the slightly acrid, earnest, and always determined voice that says, as it pauses for its owner's brain to catch up in the story:

"...and on that..."

It's Caroline Schorge I am thinking of, a compact and forthright she-bear of a woman who lives not far from my adopted family in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts.

That's heaven to you. And it's right here.

Carol has a habit, as ingrained as her pack-a-day smoking, of holding the floor as she holds forth by inserting the phrase "...and on that..." every other sentence or so. It's partly a regionalism, I think, but mostly it's a CarolSchorgeism.

She's had a helluva life, which it's not my privilege to reveal. Suffice to say three or four things about Carol: she used to clean houses and offices virtually nonstop, and still cleans my dad-in-law's Northampton office; she's the one who found an absolutely amazing and very sensitive seamstress to restore my mom's 1950s taffeta wedding dress so I could wear it at my own wedding in 1995; she once found and planted a lily called the Mona Lisa Lily (pictured) in honor of the birth of Gil's and my daughter Mona Lillian...

....and last but by no means least, she's the one who first, really, convinced me that it is possible to be both a self-taught gardener and a brilliant one. She has reclaimed, almost singlehandedly, about a half-acre of property next to her house over the years, throwing this here and that there, until now what grows on that site is a botanist's dream, and the impression it gives--rightly, I think--is that Carol Schorge can grow anything.

Anything.

Even cactus. In New England. All winter. It flowers. Without props.

I kid you not.

She's given me dozens of clumps and cuttings from her yard over the years, and only a scattered handful have taken, though I live in the more hospitable clime of the mid-Atlantic.

She's just got magic, that's all. That's all there is to it. That's all there is to say....

...and on that...