” Will you dance with me, Mother of the World?” — Sharon Knight
Sometimes, you find things in your garden that you’d forgotten.
Mother’s Day was a little strange to me this year. The girls gave me some terrific presents, and afterward I took the girls to the farm to visit my mom, which was fun. I enjoyed running through the fields of grass–its subtle hues of green, gold, pinks–waving in the Spring breezes as the dog jumped over the grass that was taller than he is like a dolphin rising and falling through the water. It was funny and fun and pleasant, but there were some surreal moments, too.
On the way home from dinner with my mom and girls, the sun was still high in the sky and we made a detour through the cemetery. That’s not unusual. I often drive by my grandparents’ graves to “pay my respects” when I’m in town. It was strange that I’d forgotten until I’d already turned in at the cemetery that Daddy’s there, too. It was…disconcerting…to remember so suddenly.
We watched “3:10 to Yuma” with my mom, figuring she might like it–as Shannon and I certainly enjoyed the pretty men–but afterwards, I was suddenly hit by one of those energy waves that I don’t get as often now. I never could discern its origin, just that it was one of my “boys” somewhere, anxious. The feeling stayed through the night, and through the day as well. It is less so tonight, but still there and still anxious. No, it’s not Daddy. This is the energy of a young man, yearning yet somehow blocked from contacting me, most likely by himself. And though you might think it would be easy for me to pinpoint, there’s more than one man in that situation.
Mother’s Day is always a bit difficult for me because the memories of the last Mother’s Day of my marriage are still vivid and tears at old wounds. They are memories that might slip unnoticed into the night except that they are too merged with Mother’s Day for me to separate the two. Unfortunately, my plans for a Mother’s Day dinner outing with the girls didn’t go as I’d hoped. I didn’t find out until too late. They’d earlier thought that they would be with me for dinner but instead they had to go to their paternal grandmother’s for dinner, so I was alone with my thoughts for a long while.
I spent some time walking around my garden before sunset, trying to ground and shake off the disconcerting energies of the weekend. I haven’t been in my garden much, between our camping trip and a busy week at work, so it seemed that some things had grown quite a bit. A few surprised me, not because they’d grown so much in the past week or so, but because they’d grown so much in the past week when they’ve been invisible for years.
There’s a line of oaks the squirrels planted for me that are suddenly tall and shading the back patio. A redbud that I planted fifteen years ago did not grow AT ALL for several years, so I dug it up and planted it in an area where it seemed much more likely to flourish. It didn’t . It’s lanquished for ten years. But in the past two weeks, it’s shot up two feet and entwined itself with a young oak that’s come up long since it was planted.
If I look around my gardens, I see other flowers and trees that are suddenly flourishing, with no explanation (not counting “Fairies at Work”) . Yes, I’ve pruned some areas of the yard, so I notice some of the flora more but many of these just SUDDENLY seemed to spring forth after long years of being runts in my garden.
I suppose it’s like that with traits and abilities. Some stay in the background and then, one day, they suddenly burst forward, growing by leaps and bounds, taking centerstage and outpacing everything around. In any case, it was a lovely Mother’s Day gift from my garden.
Leave a Reply