When I was a child, and I’m sure long after I stopped being a child, my mother would be so satisfied and filled with joy to be able to go to the local greenhouse around this time of year and buy flowers for her yard. She would save up her money, putting a little bit away every pay day so she could come to this moment, and go to the greenhouse on a shiny, early summer, Saturday morning and fill her car with flowers. She would want me to go along, and I would not be as excited as her. I would be a little bored and would want to dominate this shopping trip with my own choices, and she would let me pick out one or two flowers, but basically this was all her. Now that I am a mother I totally get that. This was HER moment.

The greenhouse always smelled fresh and like wet soil. I was often only as tall as the counters so as I walked with her my direct line of vision was what seemed like an infinite line of amazing colors from the earth. Every year she bought something a little different, but the constants were always petunias, geraniums, and snapdragons for me, in yellow. When we would get home she would open her car trunk like a child opening a gift, just for her. We would lay out the flats in the yard and she would get to work making a little hole in the ground for each beautiful little one to be welcomed to its new home.

Her yard was nurtured like one of her young. There were wild rose bushes that bloomed yellow for my sister’s birthday in June, and pink for my other sister in July. I would wake in the morning to that scent coming into my bedroom. She only watered in the evening, and so the gloaming for me in my parents’ yard always sounded like the soft, gentle hiss of one of her garden hoses that had been punctured many times along its length to spray a constant mist low to the ground. I would forget and walk into the wet yard and drench my feet and my mother would chuckle at me.

She loved the spring and the summer. She loved the sun and the heat and she loved to swim. She relished the whole lot of this and could not wait to get home from her office job to work in the yard.

She and I are different. I do not love the sun and work to actively avoid it. The heat makes me bitchy. I swim if I have to, and, my yard looks like crap.

I feel sad about that. I wish my yard was a glorious array of horticultural delight, but I am often off having adventures instead of kneeling on the patio pulling weeds. I spend my money on instruments instead of flats of flowers. My mother would have been ok with that. I have the life I have because I was encouraged to take advantage of every opportunity I was given. I was told that she was proud of me. She beamed when she saw me on stage, and never batted an eye at me for having a yard that looks like serious crap.

Last summer I came home to my parents’ house and was stricken at how the weeds were taking over. My mother never would have allowed that to go on and so I went to work trying to weed her flower beds. I set her up a little chair in the sun for her and she seemed peacefully oblivious. My dad was trying to plant hanging baskets to impress her and he kept trying to show her and get her approval but she didn’t care. That was sad. Finally she reached over and put her hands into the leaves. “Oh!” she said “I had forgotten how much I love this!”

She has forgotten how much she loves this. And that. And the other thing. And sometimes, me.

I don’t work in my yard, but I know how. I listened and I watched her and I know. I remember.  Some day I will open the trunk of my car, pull out petunias and geraniums, and dig new little homes in the ground for the little flowers my mother would have nurtured and revered. I will remember that she loved this.