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.

Another Opening, Another Show

Ballet with the Greats dancing followed by a dinner/movie date (Miss Dots fried chicken [but the collard greens win the day] and the movie Hachi [a throat-catching film about loyalty and love]) with the nephew and two Greats (one human, one canine).

For some it might seem tutu much of a good thing, but not for me.

Home is where the heart always is, and that home is filled with it.

The Blues Before Leaving

Before

Christmas Eve 

visit to my niece's new studio

rain and water

first gifts: 

what's most beautiful

is as it is.

After the Drive

like the stacked stone
just-right flowers
wood bowl of shells
slow-burning green wood
my niece's house
radiates more warmth
than even Christmas

Day 37: Another Day That Changed My Life

At their rehearsal dinner, my nephew said, "I love J because she makes me a better person."  

J knows how to fix anything, find the bargain, sew a costume, mother her girls, and make a small family large with love.

Day 33: Another Day That Changed My Life

As a child, she swung hard, cross-barred and smiling, side-banded pigtails flying, a streak of joy, and at night, her cat curled and nursing her tail, she slept hard.

A lover of life, ECH beautifies it for others.

Improvising

1.
My friend Lynne spins, dyes, and creates knitting patterns that delight many. This summer, she experimented with leaves, making beautiful skeins on display and for sale today at the fall craft fair on campus.

When the fifteen-foot limb pierced my car's windshield a couple of months ago, I called to see if she and her husband had  a chainsaw. "Sure," she said. "Why?" When I told her, she said James would come later and take care of the limb, but she wanted to have a look first. She pulled off as many leaves as she could carry and made something beautiful from them.

2.
At home after dropping by the fair, I decided to break one of my own safety rules. On Thursday, I confirmed what I had suspected: my elderly cat is in the beginning stages of kidney disease. Why not let her do what she has longed to do? I thought. Now she has nothing to lose. I set up the zero-gravity chair on the deck, so she and I could spend the second half of the afternoon under a perfect fall sky. 

When deer raced through the trees to our left, she jumped, eyes dilated, and when a leaf flew through the rail supports opposite us, she leapt off the chair and batted it as a kitten would (as she did once, in fact). She sniffed spider silk and mold on the table legs, she investigated the concrete gnome, she attempted to descend the steps but always reconsidered at my stern warning, and she slept in my lap while I read and stroked her fur.

3.
An elderly friend told me last night I should go to North Carolina, where I had planned to drive today to visit my niece and her family for the first time in over a year. "I couldn't do that to a cat sitter," I said. "What if there were a crisis? I should be here." She said, "You could put her down then. You should go!" 

That comment shattered me like the limb did the windshield. Yes, I miss my niece, her husband, their children. Yes, I think of them every day. Yes, I wish I were there.

But I know they know I'm just making the best of a bad situation.

Beautiful Things

I

My niece, a floral designer, makes beautiful things beautiful anew through selection, arrangement, and display. A skill, an art, a calling, of a kind, to make herself and others happy. I admire her dedication to making an environment beautiful, no matter how prosaic and small or grand and large. She brings the natural to attention, making others attend to what she loves.

II

Hanging on my study wall, over and behind my left shoulder, a Jim Sudduth painting glows. Although many would call it crude or untutored, -- the product of an untrained painter or dabbler -- mud and housepaint, brush and finger marks and pencil create an addictive vibration of life and liveliness, wedding earth, hand and eye. Whoever dismisses the painting as "naive" does not appreciate artful creation.

III

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity" brings together paintings and objects of fashionable daily life -- men's hats, women's corsets and bustles, designer dresses. In her New York Times review, Roberta Smith writes, "A result is an intense, almost hallucinatory swirl in which art and artifact continually change places, and a basic wisdom is demonstrated: any well-selected thing can illuminate any other."

IV

I love the basic wisdom of well-selected things and the people wise enough to love them.

The Cure for What Ailed Me

Labor Day in North Carolina with my niece and her family provided the balm I long needed.  My niece E said sometime Sunday evening, "You're such an easy guest."  That's because all I wanted was time with four of my favorite people and time is what I got.

C and A scouted out spiders and big leaves and caterpillars for my camera.  O made me the best cocktails I've ever drunk and took us all to Shining Rock Wilderness where, despite the rain, we fished and swam and laughed at the Red-spotted Purple that landed again and again on Kiva, the family dog.  E showed me her van and place of business.  And we played games and watched The Gruffalo's Child and The Lorax and ate popcorn, and while E read Harry Potter to C, I read Miss Spider's Tea Party to A.

Better than vacation, Labor Day was homecoming.

An Old Car in a New Home

My Birmingham great-nieces have grown up in one car -- their mother's Suburu, which is now my Suburu.  When I drove away in the car last week, they were a bit teary, surprisingly sad to see it go.

What they don't know is why I love the car: it smells like them and their mother.  I'm not sure how long the scent will linger, but for now I am reminded that not all the angels live in Sewanee.