A Family in Flowers

My mother loved flowers. She planted them, weeded around them, nurtured and watered and pruned them, and cut the blossoms to arrange. Every Christmas time, bowls floated camellias, and every spring rows of jonquils (she never referred to these as daffodils) waved in the front yard.
Her mother too had loved flowers, tending serried rows of blooms in the down-sloping back yard, the entire property lush with boxwood (never boxwoods, mind you, as this was Virginia and my grandmother was a formidable woman).

My deceased sister-in-law loved flowers too. She tailored her yards, in increasing sophistication at home (even installing a small greenhouse in her last one); in the county, she respected edibles like blueberries (hers were always lush and fresh and tasty) and tomatoes and snap peas (which I ate with great pleasure right from the vine) and heaped flowers in large barrels and baskets along the porch.

My niece, her daughter, also loves flowers, first helping to grow them and sell them in California, then as farm manager of an herb farm (where acres of coneflowers led down to river framed by mountains), then as an organic garden planner/installer, and now as a florist of such skill that I am astonished every time I see pictures of her work.

I do not grow flowers, but I love them too, for their colors and shapes and scents and attractiveness to bugs of all kinds. I had forgotten how much I love them until, with a new camera, I started snapping them again. And now I cannot imagine how I got sidetracked from them in the first place.

Flowers
by Wendy Videlock

for my mother

They are fleeting.
They are fragile.
They require

little water.
They'll surprise you.
They'll remind you

that they aren't
and they are you.

Consecrated Grounds

I
The Online Etymology Dictionary says this about the word cemetery:

late 14c., from Old Frencn cimetiere "graveyard" (12c.), from Late Latin coemeterium, from Greek koimeterion "sleeping place, dormitory," from koiman "to put to sleep," kemai "I lie down," from PIE root *kei- "to lie, rest," also "bed, couch," hence secondary sense of "beloved, dear" 

II
I remember no funeral before my mother's, when I was 16. A gray day in December, chilly, wet. Inside, in the newly constructed church where the altar would be dedicated to her and where her hand-sewn hangings celebrated Advent, hundreds of people gathered, but I didn't see them, seated as we were in the front pew. It wasn't our regular Sunday pew, two rows back, but it served that day. The cemetery was gray, and I remember only the odd sensation of sitting unsteadily on a folding chair, seeming about to give way, balanced on the covering, the ground underneath soft with rain.

III
When I worked for a historic house museum lived in over a span of 100 hundred years, the last fifty or so by members of my own family (including my father), I learned that cemeteries served in the earlier years as parks,  where families gathered to picnic or folks strolled for pleasure. No one gathers at my mother's grave, or my father's, or those others of my family, at least so far as I know. I have been to my parents' graves less than a dozen times.

IV
Here, though, in Sewanee, I wander often through the cemetery (where I knew only a few of the dead). It is separated from the campus only by a low wall, and it's surrounded by dormitories, the library, art studios, even the firehouse. Directly across the street, the University-owned coffeehouse, operated by students under the direction of an adult raised here, serves as the popular campus gathering place for laughter, and gossip, and study, and deep conversation. A Victorian house, cheerfully painted and gingerbreaded, it complements the stones across Georgia Avenue, where sleepers lie and lichen and moss thrive.

V
The living and the dead sleep in close proximity.

Day 6 of 40: Another Day That Changed My Life

In the pool's shallow end, I sang "Itsy-bitsy Spider" over and over and over again, thumb to pinkie over and over and over again, as Mother did bathing me. I could sing. I had manual dexterity. I could entertain myself.

Day 3 of 40: Another Day That Changed My Life

"I feel like hell," Mother said, not so much to me as to darkness, in the room and inside her radiated self. The one complaint I heard in her suffering gave me permission to feel like hell when she died.

By Any Name

My mother loved jonquils, but whether all the spring flowers of yellow, cream, white, and orange, with big or small trumpets, double or single heads were jonquils or daffodils, I don't know: I know only that she called them jonquils, and that there hundreds, if not thousands, of them, spilling down the leaf-scattered woodsy hill in front of our house and in the rolling trough between our neighbor's house and ours, and that they made spring springy, and that I loved them as much as she, so much in fact that I would sit among them or lie among them and feel myself happy. That's the way I have felt every time over the last weeks when I catch sight of them in my yard or another's, or on the kitchen window sill, the blouson flower heads and pin-striped petals reminding me of childhood and of my mother.

Narcissus stared at himself, finding himself so beautiful in reflected water that he died, still fixed to his own image. I might not mind dying so much if the last thing I saw was a daffodil or jonquil or narcissus, or a field of them, waving and nodding in a spring breeze, the sun behind them, but itself not visible, so that the flower or flowers seem to generate their own light, burning to the last.

Birmingham Fifty Years Ago

In his inaugural address, Alabama Governor George Wallace declared "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"

At the Melba Theatre, I saw To Kill a Mockingbird, in which two young actors I knew appeared.

Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and wrote "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

The Children's Crusade helped to make the struggle for Civil Rights a national issue.

I heard Joan Baez in concert at Miles College and sat in an integrated audience for the first time in my life. We held hands and sang "We Shall Overcome." When we left, traffic was diverted because of a major Civil Rights demonstration that began at New Pilgrim Baptist Church.

Governor Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door and was ordered to move by General Henry Graham, soft-spoken father of a childhood friend. I watched them on live television.

Our housekeeper Lucille attended the March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, which I watched on live television.

Four black girls were murdered in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and two black boys were later shot dead. A childhood neighbor sculpted the memorial dedicated on the anniversary this year.

President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22.

My mother died on December 3.

engagement photo

Heritage Trend

The purging begins with one closet: five garbage bags of clothing filled for Sewanee's Hospitality Shop and three handmade classics -- two created by and one worn by my mother.

A child of the Depression, Mother sewed because she was thrifty. But she was also creative, inventive, and endlessly energetic. She sewed because it provided a much-needed outlet, the same way gardening and puppeteering and volunteering and writing and directing Junior League folly productions fulfilled that urge.

A lover of the outdoors and of outdoors activities, Mother built a rock garden, planned, planted, and maintained it. She fed the birds and learned their names and habits. She killed snakes when she needed to and helped my cat birth her kittens. She enjoyed working with her hands outdoors in all kinds of weather, including wintry cold and snow. 

Soon after she died, at my father's request, I cleaned out her clothes and sewing closets, from which I kept only a few items, all of which I still have fifty years later: her handmade sewing bag; a fruitcake tin filled with buttons and clasps and frogs; needle-pointed chair seat covers; and her red wool lumberman's jacket.

Her "style transcends age." 

The 1950s in Fruit

My entryway is a sort of modified mudroom, complete with a built-in storage bench, atop of which is my small set of fruit pillows (strawberry, pear, pineapple, watermelong, and eggplant -- the misfit). I don't think about them consciously, but I see them every time I enter as do my visitors.

Today, however, I am thinking of them -- because an acquaintance from years back asked me about them through Facebook. She remembered something I had forgotten: the pillows dressed the set for Painting Churches, which I directed more than 20 years ago.



When I look at the pillows, I see my mother. I remember and admire her flair for sewing and her love of whimsy. She made these 1950s home accents from a pattern, probably McCall's or Butterick. (Those were her favorite pattern makers, and I loved thumbing through their pages while she chose fabrics.) She embroidered seeds on the watermelon slice, appliqued the triangles on the pineapple, and stuffed and hand shaped the stems and leaves.

It's a strange and wonderful thing that the same object can stir such different memories and associations, and it's lovely that Caroline's question stirred me. Because Caroline asked about them, I touched these pillows and felt as if I were touching my mother's hands, something I have not done since I was 16, soon before she died.

Busy as a Bee

When I was a little girl, I loved wearing my white sailor's cap with its red monogrammed illustration and adage: The early bird catches the worm. (You can imagine the illustration without my description.) I remember, too, without remembering exactly what article it was, something that said "Life is a bowl of cherries."

A Facebook friend and former colleague has been messaging me about her son's fascination with such metaphorical sayings. We have both been researching meanings and origins of such proverbs as "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water." It's an amusing pursuit -- both the research and sharing her delight in her son's fascination with language.

Today, while admiring my old-fashioned spirea with its limber white-blossomed branches, I witnessed the origin of another saying: "Busy as a bee." This little fellow was working so hard that he never noticed my hand and camera within inches of his little body. I had a heck of a time trying to focus and wish I had been able to capture his pollen-smeared head. Alas, the picture is as fuzzy as he was.

Funny how an insect can remind me of my mother and her fondness for well-worn adages. I love the bee and the viburnum and the memories of my mother and the love of language they evoke.