Another Mother’s Day Blooms
Along the front walkway that led up to the house, Mom planted tulips. The colorful tulips came up every year and by the middle of spring, we had full blooms in purples, whites, bright pinks, and reds, gently swaying in the breeze.
As someone who wasn’t particularly outdoorsy, it always surprised me that my mother enjoyed getting her hands in the dirt. In May, on Mother’s Day, we’d go over to Dubrow’s Nursery, and Mom would choose a selection of flowers to plant in the other beds near the front steps, and around the low bushes. This was an excursion we did together each year. She loved picking out beautiful mixtures to brighten the yard. We’d unload the plants from the car, place them along the flower beds, and then start our gardening project, equipped with gardening gloves, trowels, and bags of plant food.
There was a garden hose coiled on a reel by the faucet attached to the house, and it was my task, to climb behind the azalea and forsythia bushes and bring out the hose to water the flowers. It’s important to point out that I do not have a green thumb, and do not like dirt (or bugs that crawl in dirt), but I diligently watered the flowers and plants twice daily, in the early morning and after dusk, so they wouldn’t die.
One year, I noticed a dog bone halfway buried near one tulip that was just starting to shoot up. The only dog in our neighborhood lived next door. It was a little, nosy bulldog, and I always saw him sniffing the soil and checking out the flowers and garden areas. I knocked on my neighbor’s door and asked him to come and take a look at the bone. “Nope, not mine,” he said. “Not my dog.” I didn’t really believe him, but didn’t have any proof, other than the circumstantial evidence. I dug it up myself. The tulips didn’t seem to mind and pushed through the ground at will.
Most of the time, we’d get one or two days of full blooming tulips. Overnight, a family of deer who lived in the woods behind our house would discover the flowers and eat them. By the next morning, all that remained were the stems. This was a losing battle between humans armed with deer repellant spray that reeked of rotten eggs and burned like hot peppers, and the tenacious creatures and their nocturnal forays. We tried planting daffodils among the tulips, because they were supposed to be “deer-resistant,” but the deer salad-picked among the flowers, tiptoeing through the beds, and ate the tulips anyway.
After several seasons playing Deer Wars and losing, we dug up the tulip bulbs and planted other deer-resistant flowers. We avoided pretty violas, pansies, and petunias, since deer love them; and instead we’d plant marigolds, verbena, snapdragons, zinnias, or peonies. (Mom seemed to know flowers and avidly consulted with the garden experts.) We learned that you can’t really dig up all the offshoots of the tulip bulbs, though. As soon as the ground got warm, sure enough, a few stray shoots would poke through the soil, and we’d have one or two lonely tulips.
We sold the house in 2016, to a builder who knocked it down, leaving only the brick chimney – a small piece of the footprint of the house that was our home for more than 50 years. He built a massive house on the property, with all new landscaping. I just know those phantom tulip bulbs were still incubating and multiplying underground, and will poke their way up through the soil one day, and the deer will undoubtedly come for lunch. Karma!
Mom died two years later, before the spring had sprung that year.
I spent that first lonely Mother’s Day with family friends, who insisted I join them for a barbeque. It had only been three weeks, and I didn’t want to go anywhere. But I sat at their table, and half-listened to the conversation, verbally nodding when someone spoke to me, and moving the food around on my plate. The full extent of my grief had not yet bloomed, still buried deep in my heart like the bulbs in the ground.
The next year, when I had moved to California and was living in an apartment with a small balcony, I went to a nearby nursery on Mother’s Day, thinking it would be a way to honor my mother. I missed her as I strolled among the flowers on display. I didn’t have flowerbeds, or anyplace to plant, so I chose a potted flowering plant with red petals. I have no idea of its name. I set it on a small plastic table on the balcony so I could see it from inside the tiny living room, where one stream of sunlight shone through the slats in the sliding door in the morning. The cats napped nonchalantly in the warm sunbeam, and ignored my attempt at bringing nature to our place. The plant reminded me of Mom and her love for flowers and plants, but also of my plant-tending shortcomings. I watered it regularly, and the plant lasted for a while, but I knew it wouldn’t survive long, because all living things die.
Having a sad, dying plant didn’t make me happy. The wilting petals looked pitiful and dreary, and made me think of the tulips that used to bloom in the spring at our house that’s no longer there.
