My mother and father are waiting for me. It is morning. I am streaming through the air in a jetplane so I can open the door where they have been preparing for my coming. My father spent all week grooming his outdoor plants. He weeded, loosened and moistened the soil, lifted the petals of the flowers, trimmed the shrubs, tenderly picked some young beans. My mother made macaroon dreams, wacky cake and pink applesauce.

She told my father at 82 he shouldn't have a garden. It was too much. He sat in his chair until his thoughts drifted him to sleep where he dreamed he told my mother she'd better not sew anymore. It was too much. Silently she lounged in her chair until the words in her book blurred.

They got up and went to the market where the price of beans was too high. One row of beans? he asked. She nodded. Well, better make it two, he added, one green, one yellow. She watched him pick up the seed packets. They went to the clothes store to buy her some new shorts. The price was too high, the quality too low. I'm going to sew my own, she said. Smiling now, he followed her into the fabric store.

Wearing her new shorts, she waits for me, listening for my sound, alert as a doe. She opens the door before my hand reaches the knob. My father is right behind her. Well, well, he hugs. You're here.

Excited, they begin the tour. My father always goes first. We tour the yard. He tells me the story of each plant. Expensive cigar containers my brother shipped in from Havana cover daisy shoots. My father boasts he got an apricot tree for a penny. I sigh to think he will not live to see the fruit. He's happy to have planted the tree. He shows me a red maple tree trunk--diameter, 1/4 inch; height, 2 feet. I think of the huge red maple tree in my childhood in the North. He asks me to stoop down to see the tiny leaves he saw today. Pleased, he tells me of his plan to move the picnic table near this tree, so someday there will be shade for a picnic, he explains. He doesn't think about himself in time in relation to space. He is
content to paint a picture of a picnic under the shade of a maple tree. That's my last project, he says. After that, I'll just keep everything up.

We look at one of his completed projects, a trellis he built for honeysuckles to climb. A dollar and a quarter for that bulb. Worth every cent, he says, pointing to a blooming tiger lily. And there's Robin Hood Rose, and finally we come to the two rows of beans and undoubtedly some leaves of lettuce. I smile at the fence and gate Mr. MacGregor used to keep rabbits out of the garden in the story my father read to me night after night and never said, Again!? Beyond the garden of my childhood, my father pushed me again and again on a tree swing. I always tried to reach beyond the treetops. He let me be a child. He let me dream. I was lucky.

The tour tires him out. He retreats to his chair to smoke his pipe and leave me be with my mother. Giving me the tour is the most animated he will be during my stay. Mostly he will sit content to have me in the house and to hear my mother being silly over our cups of tea.

On a tray my mother brings tea for two where she asks me to turn my head to see the hummingbird suck honey from the vine. "It's special," she says. "It's the only bird that can fly back and forth." As a child, I watched the hummingbirds for hours on the vine that grew outside my bedroom window. I haven't seen a hummingbird since. She pours milk from Miss Sunderman's little glass pitcher. It must be thirty years old. Miss Sunderman was the next-door spinster I used to call Miss Cinderwoman. I look down now at the scar I got from a kneefall in her cinderfull driveway.

Running out of time, my father goes back and re-creates the garden of my childhood. Good Morning, Father Time, my mother greets him as he goes out the door wearing his best garden hat he uses "only when I'm watering," he explains. Three other garden hats are piled up on a chair. My mother shakes her head. Four hats, she says. She reminds him to pick up his hats. He tells her he will if she'll pick up her pins and needles.

I say I'm tired from traveling and excuse myself for a nap. Well, maybe I'll take a little rest too, my father says, as if he doesn't every day. I bring my mother a new book, and she nods off. Too soon I hear the clanging of silverware. It's dinnertime. They dine early. I sleep late.

My father serves me young yellow beans. Can't buy these in the store, he says with pleasure. My mother passes me her applesauce. I remembered, she says. Someone asked me if I used food coloring, she laughs. Some people don't know apple skins color pink, she says to me whose secret I share.

After dinner, we put the dishes to soak and take a long walk. My father remembers to take his keys but forgets to lock the door. We tease him when we return; my mother and I act out a Sherlock Holmes' mystery and sleuth around for burglars. My father remains serious and puzzles about the door.

Soon my mother is playing one-handed piano. Her story goes that when she went for her arthritic pain shot, she fell outside the doctor's office where she returned to learn she had fractured her hand. She plays on. My father hums the old tunes she plays: "Somewhere My Love," "Oh Danny Boy," "Tit Willow." And she sews, too, "with that one hand," he tells on her. She looks at me, expecting a scold, and ducks her head like a naughty child. But I shake my head instead of my finger and smile. They say they will take a vacation while I'm there.

At night I share the spare room full of dolls my mother has created out of her head. In a corner I see the new one she began one-handed, a gift for my daughter.