4

From my mother’s garden

With streaks of verdant green and 
dots of blooming flora, few places 
hold the same sanctity and beauty 
as a garden. Gifted a natural green 
thumb, my mother introduced me 
to the art of gardening — she spent 
years of her young life managing a 
local greenhouse in a small Michigan 
town, and her natural inclination 
to grow and create never quite 
dissipated. Her floods of floral 
beauty are something for the world to 
admire. Even in the rockiest soils and 
under the harshest sunshine, she can 
sustain gardens of intricate beauty 
and careful curation. Asiatic lilies, 
her favorite, populate our front yard, 
as green vines of ivy snake alongside 
our house walls and windowsills. Her 
long days of planting ranging from 
functional fruits and commercial 
objects of beauty offer a moment of 
peace away from a tumultuous life. 
Her gardening — in every form — is 
nothing short of an act of love. 
On early spring days of rototilling 
and dirty knees, my mother and I 
can finally share the same language: 
outdoor 
planning, 
plotting 
and 
scheming. I have never been as 
naturally meticulous and intentional 
as my mother — my brain is a 
perpetual scatter of forgotten plans 
and tasks — but the specificity needed 
for gardening alleviates this. We 
silently understand the exact depths 
and distances between new holes dug 
for fresh seedlings, and exactly which 
plants should be placed where. This is 
a delicate art; it needs an extensive 
mutual understanding of how each 
plant explains its wants and needs. 
We can place our sweet lavender 
bush near cheerful marigolds, but 
know very well to keep onions away 
from the nutrient-suffocating peas 
and pole beans. Each year we spend 
weeks together in this way — working 
to create the perfect garden together, 
one that is unparalleled in its beauty 
and functionality. 
To create our art, my mother and I 
shop early in the season for a variety 
of colors, shapes and smells. We share 
the same habit of waking up around 
sunrise, and this shared rhythm holds 
out throughout this importantly 
ritualized day. We eat breakfast, she 

boils green tea as I sip on a morning 
coffee, devising our garden-shopping 
strategies. Together, we settle on 
which store to visit, which plants 
to keep an eye out for and which 
annuals will grow back on their 
own this season. During particularly 
thought-out seasons, my mother will 
sketch out her ideal garden on the 
nearest napkin and mark where and 
what will be planted, a soil canvas 
she’s intricately designed. 
As spring dissolves into summer, 
the garden begins to settle into a living 

entity. No longer restricted to our pre-
planned seedling coordinates, the 
adolescent plants grow and spread 
into a living, breathing biome of their 
own volition. 
In its newfound glory, our garden 
turns into a ripe wash of flowers 
and vegetables as summer arrives. 
Through only light touches of tender 
weeding and watering, our garden is 
nearly a self-sufficient masterpiece. 
The proven formula of flower 
placements and strategic vegetable 
varieties yields an admirable array of 
floral colors and homemade salads in 
waiting. After sweating through its 
growing pains and need for constant 
attending-to, my mother and I 
have a garden to simply enjoy — to 
a garden we created together. Soil 
no longer needs to be washed away 
from our hands, dirt picked out from 
underneath our fingernails; instead, 
our fingers exist to pluck vegetable-
shaped jewels from our garden.
In these long evenings spent sitting 
near our garden, I am reminded 
of just how much of my mother’s 
daughter I am. We share the same 

smile, and soon enough our laugh 
lines will be mirror images of our 
well-aged joy. Our foreheads share a 
wrinkle of eyebrow-raising delight 
as we relish in the sardonic gossip 
we’re both eager to share within the 
sanctity of our late-summer garden. 
During these days, the sun seems to 
shine upon us with extra brightness 
and vitality. We share meals, slow 
mornings and soft evenings admiring 
our living work of art. As some 
flowers begin to close and vegetables 
no longer propagate, the season 

of creation begins to halt, and our 
shared language will begin to stutter. 
At this point, it’s clear the evening 
of the growing season is coming to 
an end and we’re observing the final 
inhalations of our garden’s breath. 
As the hot summer sun slowly 
sets into fall, our garden becomes a 
dying relic of sunshine. Time spent 
in the garden is close to being ribbon-
wrapped and put away.
The vegetables have completely 
lost their numbers, and few flowers 
make it through chilly fall nights. 
Now is the perfect time to pluck 
up the surviving bits of beauty and 
immortalize them — together, my 
mother and I pull apart lavender 
bunches from their wilting bushes, 
snip off the buds of black-eyed susans 
and echinacea, and immortalize the 
soft petals by pressing them between 
napkins underneath a hefty book 
stack. These small bits of petals and 
buds are all that remain from our 
garden as temperatures drop and the 
world gets colder.

S T A T E M E N T

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
 4—Wednesday, June 1, 2022 

Sitting back and chatting with 
friends, 
enjoying 
the 
perfect 
weather and pleasantly buzzed 
off of a watermelon frosé, I 
looked around and wondered 
why I’d never noticed this place. 
I worked right across the street, 
in the Kerrytown Shops, and 
must’ve walked by it a hundred 
times. It was secluded and quiet, 
the drinks were good and the bar 
served a mean brick oven pizza. 
It felt like I’d discovered one of 
the city’s best-kept secrets, and, 
like Narnia, I became irrationally 
worried that it would only ever 
reveal itself to me again when I 
wasn’t looking for it.
This, of course, wasn’t the case, 
and the Bar at 327 Braun Court 
easily became my favorite bar 
in the city. But it took a couple 
more visits for me to get over my 
tunnel vision, which was focused 
on Aperol spritzes and margherita 
pizza. 
Seven 
buildings, 
all 
commercial 
despite 
their 
residential facades, surround the 
courtyard. On one side: the Bar, 
Spiral Tattoo and Trillium Real 

Estate; the four on the opposite 
side are empty. As welcoming as 
Braun Court is, it’s impossible to 
ignore the space’s vague feeling of 
lopsidedness.
During another visit one night 
in August 2020, I looked up at 

one of the shuttered buildings 
and noticed the signage that still 
remained. The house was white 
with green trim, and a sign with 
a bright yellow and pink logo 
announced the space as what it 
used to be: Aut Bar (named after 
the phonetic spelling of the word 
“out”).
I’d heard about Aut Bar. In my 
second semester at the University 
of Michigan, I made a friend 
whom I, as a transfer who was 
desperately looking for other 
Queer people in Ann Arbor, 
latched onto as something of a 
gay mentor. She gave me two 
recommendations for where to 
find gay culture: the co-ops and 
Aut Bar — the latter being the 
city’s only gay bar. I should’ve 
taken her advice sooner. Only 
a 
month 
after 
she 
gave 
it, 
everything — including Aut Bar — 
was shutting down as COVID-19 
started to spread throughout the 
country.
I hadn’t thought much about 
the bar since I was made aware 
of it, but I remembered seeing 
on social media that it would 
be closing permanently in June 
2020. As I looked up at its empty 
shell in August, I found myself 

feeling sorry that I hadn’t seized 
the few weeks between that 
initial introduction and the outset 
of the pandemic to experience the 
bar myself.

AVA BURZYCKI
Statement Columnist

Read more at michigandaily.com
Read more at michigandaily.com

Design by Abby Schreck

 KATRINA STEBBINS
Statement Correspondent 

Design by Abby Schreck

A history of Ann Arbor’s Queer 
spaces, from The Flame to Aut Bar

