I am sure this year will be different, but as long as I can remember, Mother's Day has meant going to the nursery and planting flowers. Occasionally my family went to a zoo, arboretum, or a botanical garden, but there were always flowers. Mom picked out the prettiest and most prolific annual plants like begonias, petunias, geraniums, and enlisted the help of mostly me to help her.
We would spend the day in the yard, get sunburned, or freeze and be soaked, but we would plant flowers. Even last year, mired by chemotherapy and covid-19 quarantines, we planted flowers. I never expected it would be the last time we would garden together.
When my sister died, Mother's Day was especially hard for Mom, but she persevered and tried to engage with the day, the flowers, and me. But her heart usually wasn't in it. I could tell that Angela's absence was a weight on the day even though Ang didn't like worms - in fact, she hated worms and would scream and run away if she encountered one. She would help us pick out plants, bring them out, but for the most part - Angela wasn't part of the gardening.
My dad usually didn't really participate either, he would try and take over and my mom and dad would fight. My dad would turn the day into an assembly line ... taking the fun right away from the planting for my mother. The fun for her was the quiet conversations, the introductions to each plant, finding the right spots for everything, and trying to keep the livestock (dogs, cats) and night visitors from unplanting the recently immigrated crops.
The fun for her were the stories of the sunflowers from my childhood in Westacres, the aguga in Kansas, and of course, the gardens of her childhood because my mother's family were are gardeners.
Now that she's gone, and not having any children, I don't have anyone to share those memories with - so I am telling you about my mother, and the sunflowers from my childhood, and the aguga from Kansas, and how much I miss my mom.
Last weekend was amazing weather, so my father and I jumped the gun and spent $200 on plants and seeds at Lowes and I went to work with Mark, my best-friend, trying to return the life and love the backyard after a dreadful winter, the winter that my mother went to the hospital on my dead sister's birthday and never left, dying 5 days later.
It was a tough weekend. I thought all the bad, lonely feelings would go away if I stayed away from stores, people, and television. Needless to say, that didn't work. Facebook was the worst.
Leave it to social media to make you feel guilty in your grief for not being grateful for all the time you had with your mom rather than simply missing her on a day you used to spend with her and being mad, mad, mad that your dad won't even let you be sadder than him on Mother's Day.
On a good note, the plants appear to be alive - even after a near frost low last night. So, with any luck, there will be peas and beans.
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