Today my mom’s flowers, flowers I acquired and brought with me from Ohio, are blooming. That wonderful, wild and crazy poppy is blooming for the first time this season. It is blooming in the main flowerbed behind the house, but its main show will be next to the fence, where only recently the flowers have come back, after a hiatus. The soil is recovering from the poison of an angry neighbor and the flowers have come back, on their own, little by little. I was surprised to see that that is where they chose to make their big showing.
The white yarrow, that looks more like a totally different plant, Angel’s Breath is its name, and angelic it is. It is growing around a phlox plant from which I seem incapable of separating it. The pink yarrow also made a showing today. I have very little, it is planted in a spot where little will grow because it is clay and it is generally wet.
I cannot help feeling a little sad today as I see the work of my mom showing up in the yard. Its appearance is omen-like for more than one reason. Nonetheless, as much as our lives are short, there are ways in which we are always around, living in the genes of those who follow us.
Besides the flowers, my mom had small pieces of jewelry that she loved, one of them was a rose, an inexpensive little trinket that we purchased in Germany to recall the famous German Queen from Hungary, St. Elizabeth. Two of our granddaughters were recipients of the rose on a chain. We had given one to MK’s mom and the other to mine. To one of our grandchildren, that rose was from Queen Elizabeth. It was one of those things we could not change in her mind. It was from my mom, her great grandmother, Elizabeth, but to her it was Queen Elizabeth. The Hungarian Queen Elizabeth was truly a saint, feeding the poor and being a rebel to do so
On this very special day, we remember.
