It was summer when I met her, though I’d seen her, sure, before, but unbeknownst to her, in middle May when I was home from Way Back East to the prairieland where I’d grown up.  All that gloomy seacoast winter I’d been homesick and sky hungry, missing the dry air and the windy wide-open.  One day Brother Dave was headed to the Mulvane Co-Op for a load of hay and did I care to ride along?  Sure, I did.   Anything to get out in the country and feel the place again. We picked up Brother Steve and piled into Dave’s old rust-bit farm truck, a rattletrap if ever was one, footwells ankle-deep in crumpled PayDay wrappers and splotchy burger bags, Fanta cans, and--I can’t lie—empty Bud tallboys, all that mess silted over with at least a hundred miles of road dirt.  Dave cranked down the window to air out the stink of his Swisher Sweet. Truth was, I liked the smell.  It was as much a part of home as the honey-and-balsam scent of blooming Russian Olive.  We took the back roads to enjoy the scenery, or so Dave said. 

Just outside the blink-and-miss it town of Belle Plaine, Kansas, Dave jammed on the brakes.  We jolted forward, then back, as did our clanking dumpster cargo.  “That’s her!” he whispered. 

“Who?” I wanted to know. All I’d seen parked along the old Arboretum road was a sedan with its trunk open, three women in denim jackets unloading flats of bedding plants. Looked to me like seedling sweet peas. Nothing out of the ordinary 

Dave downshifted so that we were crawling by and I scrooched down in the middle of the bench seat and tried to hide behind my headscarf, embarrassed by our rudeness.  “Speed up!” I told him, but no.   

Lugging along in first gear, motor coughing, the two Shameless Brothers rubbernecked. Cat had Dave’s tongue but Steve finally answered me, “It’s that Dixie Chick!” 

By then we’d moved past the women, and I wouldn’t have known what to look for anyway, but the boys filled me in: the pretty blonde one in the middle was Robin Macy, one of the founding members of the Dixie Chicks.  She had bought the old arboretum, an abandoned Victorian botanical garden near our hometown that had gone to ruin, and she was restoring it to the showplace it had once been. Dave later confessed that he’d picked our route on purpose, on the off chance he might catch a glimpse.  Poor brother had back then and still maintains a hopeless, hangdog crush.

In those days what I didn’t know about the woman who would become my friend could fill a fat doorstopper of a book.  From her earliest girlhood in the sixties, in her granny’s meager kitchen in the Oklahoma hills, Robin Macy had the notion there was some kind of magic in blood harmony, the sound that rose from kinfolk and women lifting their voices together.  Her grannie Mattie Lois and her great aunts Ruby, Evelyn, and Remyth would sing old-time songs and ballads in four-part harmony while cleaning up after a family supper or a church gathering.  Lingering nearby, always within earshot, Robin could feel her heart swell as their tight harmonies worked their way from her ears all the way down to her soul, Robin wanted more than anything else to grow up and sing like that.  

Back in the late eighties I might have found her in a cluttered faculty housing living room in Dallas, heads together with sisters Martie and Emily and West Texas friend Laura, hatching an idea they never imagined would fly.  Robin mother-henned the group, organizing appearances, busking on street corners in Dallas’ fashionable WestEnd, a whirlwind time that saw the group go from stashing their earnings in Robin’s piano bench to opening in Las Vegas for the likes of Garth Brooks and George Strait. As their reputation grew, Robin worried that they were leaving behind their roots in bluegrass and traditional music in favor of a glittery big-horn-big-hat sound that currently held sway—the opposite of what they were doing, and so in 1991 she left the group.  She still played and sang and wrote songs.  She formed two all-girl bands—Domestic Science Club and a tight harmony group called the Cherokee Maidens, modeled on Bob Wills’ singers, the McKinney Sisters. To make a living she taught math and took performing gigs where she could find them.  She wasn’t stalled so much as she was waiting, but for what she wasn’t sure.  A sign, a call, a path. 

It was a wrong turn on a country road that would turn out to be the right one, setting her on the path that would become her life’s calling, which turned out to be becoming the accidental proprietor, pony-of-all-work, and penniless steward of a tree sanctuary in the middle of nowhere.  She’d come across the place as she was driving home from the Walnut Valley Bluegrass Festival.  Somehow she’d gotten haywire with her road map and lost in the near-treeless grazing land of the Southern Plains. But just outside a rinky-dink town, in the shadow of a grain elevator, she came upon a curious sight: massive filigreed iron gates locked against a thicket of brambles, neglected trees, and overgrowth.  For Sale, read the sign planted in the ditch.  She stopped and poked around, wondering what was behind the locked gates, but even before she heard the story—that the Bartlett Arboretum was started by a country doctor as a gift to the town, its acres of Holland bulbs a memorial to his young daughter lost in the great pandemic of 1918—she knew she had to buy it.  Twenty-eight years and countless mortgage payments later, she had at last got it onto the National Historic Register, and the place was a working attraction known all over the state and beyond.

Over the years any number of characters have wandered through the Arb, some to volunteer help with the back-breaking work, some to enjoy the beauty of nature and marvel that in the middle of a drought-ridden landscape such an oasis flourishes, some just to jaw about the time their granny took them to see the acres of tulips in bloom and oh, my, didn’t it just take your breath away?  One of these characters was Kentucky White, Nashville sideman on banjo, guitar, and mandolin, and owner of a design firm that donated work to the Arboretum.  As it turned out, he had more in mind than helping and enjoying and jawing, all of which he did, but he had deeper designs on Robin, and he determined to court her. Before long they fell in love, the deep kind where you aren’t sure where one of you leaves off and the other begins. Kenny shared her call to stewardship and preservation and land conservation. They made music, he wrote the melodies; she penned the poetry. Every now and then, he’d press his suit: would she do him the honor?  But no matter how sweetly he asked her to marry him, she balked, and her answer was always, “No.”   

She had her reasons.  There was an age difference that worried her.  They both had histories. Would marriage claim too much of her time?  Would it last?  She knew herself to be independent almost to a fault, strong-headed and used to managing on her own. But she loved him.  She loved him deeply, madly.  What to do? 

About this time when she was all tangled in her thoughts and reasons, she happened to read a short story by a writer who grew up the next county over, yours truly. The story was about a woman who loved a man for forty years but on principles of her own refused to marry him.  Try as she might, the woman couldn’t get past her reasons until toward the end of the man’s life, she found a way.  The story moved Robin.  She read it again.  The story seemed to take all feeling, history, time and chance and love and fear, all things at once, and blend them so that there could be only one way forward.  One night Robin read the story aloud to Kenny.  By the time she reached the end, she was crying and so was he.  They laughed about their crying and then they cried some more, and then out of the blue (but not, oh, not) and when she was least expecting to, she told him, “Yes.”    

Reader, she married him.  When the deed was done and it looked like the marriage was going to take—they were happy beyond sense and reason and they fussed at each other only every now and then, she wrote me up to thank me. 

Wasn’t anything I did, I told her, but I was pleased.  (Just between us if you ever doubt a made-up person can change the fate of a living one, I’m here to argue different.) 

Nowadays she travels occasionally to Nashville, where Kenny serves as Executive Director of IBMA but most days you’ll find her on the Zoysia lawn preparing for a concert, or in the hoop house seedling tomatoes, broccoli, to feed the community in the Arb to Table program she pioneered, or on her hands and knees, transplanting a swath of hellebores. She’s the tiny dynamo with grubby hands and mud-caked sneakers, a dirt-smudged cheek, her long now-white hair pinned up in glorious disarray as she welcomes visitors through the gates of the garden, inviting them to rest a spell on one of the many benches, to listen to the music of the wind in cottonwoods, the hum of bees, doing what she loves. 

The songs in her new release speak to the lessons the years have taught her. Patience, hope, preservation of old forms, old times, old beauty. Respect for the land and the charge to care for it for generations yet to come. The power of roots.  The power of home.  What love can do.

 – Janet Peery, as told by Little Lou from the story “Mountains, Road, the Tops of Trees” in ALLIGATOR DANCE, Dallas, SMU Press: 1993