Sunday, Mother's Day... Our Stories in Flowers

Sunday ... can be bound up in memories of flowers. It’s a long time ago now, but when my grandmother died at 96, we arranged for a spray of bachelor buttons on her casket — her favorite flower. My own mother was partial to gardenias, fragile to the touch and hard to come by these days. But in her own garden, the plant she most lovingly tends to this day are her chrysanthemums. My mother-in-law loved calla lilies, seems to have had them at her wedding. I’m an iris guy myself, so it was with an air of excitement, I saw the buds shooting up like mad this past week in the garden. Alongside foundation wall, the hot western sun set one lone iris to blooming early. I was tickled to see they were the old-fashioned two-tone garden variety found in purples, golds and deep rusty magentas on farmsteads through the East and Midwest. Occasionally, I see a stand of them sprawling down an empty hillside and the sight triggers shivers of awareness, even awe.  A farmhouse once stood in that place, instinct tells me, without having to check for the crumbling fieldstone outline of where a woman and wife and mother once tried to interject something of beauty into her care-worn pioneer life. The garden as living history blooms on untended in the landscape, if we learn to watch for it, a tribute to mothers everywhere.