Mindy Friddle

“I drew my bath and scattered dried rose petals in the water. I stepped into the tub, pinned up my hair, dipped into the bowl of mayonnaise that had been mixed with fennel and rosemary and soaked secretly in the refrigerator for two days.”
― Mindy Friddle, The Garden Angel

“We walked to a row of three stones: our grandmother and grandfather and, between them, our mother. There were crocuses and daffodils and snowdrops blooming on my mother's grave. Gran had always carefully tended it. After Sunday dinners, when we were little, Gran would put on her wide-brimmed gardening hat and gloves and take along her basket of garden tools and bring us down here. She would plant lavender petunias and purple bearded irises. She would deadhead the spent daylilies and pull up weeds on my mother's grave and on my great-grandmother Beulah's grave back in the corner. She barely touched my grandfather's grave, scratched in some monkey grass and ivy and told us even that was too good for him.”
― Mindy Friddle, The Garden Angel