From My Mother's Garden



Peonies in kitchen

Every Tuesday my Mother and I spend the evening together.  It has been this way since I was in college and as long as I have lived locally.  In college she came to see me on Wednesday evenings and took me out to dinner and listened to me talk giddily about whatever struck my fancy at the time or weep in frailty at whatever I was struggling to come to terms with.  She was always there. No matter what. 

After college when I moved back home we no longer had our one night a week because we had every day and every evening together so to speak.  Then I moved to Asheville and then later to Virginia.  The years that I was away we burnt up the phone lines and also the roads going back and forth to visit each other.



Peony close-up

Eventually I came home again and took refuge in my parents home enjoying quiet days on the farm and walking through the woods.  I think this was the year I talked them into to planting one of their biggest gardens yet and later disappeared to be with my friends instead of helping pick and can and freeze all of the bounty it produced.  Before long I was back out on my own but living close by and that is when the Tuesday evenings started.  I bought my first home in the summer of 2001 so it has been 10 years now since we started this tradition.  Sometimes we have taken classes together but we have always been together.  We share secrets, stories, memories, joys, triumphs, defeats, food, poems, books, back scratches, hugs, and the quiet presence of understanding.

In the spring and summer we enjoy talking about, shopping for and sharing plants.  This year she has brought me fern and vinca vine and last night along with the beautiful peonies she brought me blue salvia.  I cannot wait to see how big it gets.  Vila had the first blue salvia I had ever seen when she lived in Virginia and I remember falling in love with it then.



The peonies are transplants from my grandmother's garden.  I remember exactly where they were planted beside the red rose bush between her driveway and the neighbors.  This same rose bush served as my drive through bank when I was a little girl playing make believe and I would drive up to the "teller" on my pink huffy bicycle.  My grandmother would always ask my Mother or me to go cut a peony for her and two rose buds for ourselves for Mother's Day Sunday at church.  She wore the white peony in remembrance of her Mother who had passed and we wore the red roses in remembrance of our Mother's who were still very much alive.

Peonies outside in the sun

I love that these peonies are a gift from both my Mother and my Grandmother.  I was struck with the heady aroma of them as soon as I walked into the kitchen this morning.  And then I thought, the best things in life really are free.

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844