May 13,2019
Easter Sunday was a bad day for me this year. Perhaps you’ve heard the Kris Kristofferson song Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, or Johnny Cash’s rendition of the same song. Well for me it was not just Sunday morning coming down, but Easter Sunday morning coming down.
Every year during April my mother and I would go over to the local Home Depot and pick ou1 a selection of spring flowers, which I would transplant into our own containers and place around the backyard: pansies, petunias, pinks, salvia, snapdragons, daisies, geraniums, begonias, an azalea- whatever caught our fancy. We would also choose some seed packets for fa ll flowers- Mother always liked zinnias.
In April 2017 I went by myself to select our flowers, as Mother did not feel up to making the trip to Home Depot. These would be the last spring flowers she would enjoy. Last year, perhaps through force of habit, I was able to go to the garden section and pick out a display of flowers, despite the fact that my mother was no longer around to admire them. This year, however, I could not even bear to look at the spring flowers. I bought a bag of lawn fertilizer
and that was that. I also did not pick up any packets of vegetable seeds, realizing that I will not be planting a garden this year. I used to look forward to harvesting a crop of lettuce and tomatoes. But there is only one person left to enjoy the fruits of the harvest, and I no longer have an appetite for lettuce or tomatoes or the string beans that my mother used to freeze for later consumption. So good-bye garden.
For a final blow upon a bruise, Easter Sunday came late this year, so the daffodils I brought in and placed in vases throughout the house were almost all wilted by the the time Easter Sunday came around. What would my mother have thought of all these wilted flowers? While she was living, I would toss any flowers that were past their prime onto the compost pile and replace them with fresh ones. Because of its late arrival this year, there was not a single
daffodil left in our backyard on Easter Sunday. And for some reason our tulips failed to bloom.
Yes, it was Sunday morning coming down.
Back in the sixties when we lived in the house that my parents built on Huyler Road we had a large fenced-in garden. No doubt inspired by Mother’s early life on her father’s farm in Denmark, we grew tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, radishes, watermelons, pumpkins, string beans, and corn. We stopped planting corn after a couple of years due to a recurring infestation of European corn borers. Mother, however, would use our pumpkins to make pies;
she would blanch and then freeze our bumper crop of string beans to be eaten in the winter. I devoted a section of the garden to sunflowers, and harvested the seeds to feed the birds. Now, In Pennsylvania, I have not planted sunflowers for the past few years. It’s much less work buying birdseed in the grocery store. And last year will likely mark the last garden I ever planted. Anyway, it was a flop. A hoard of squirrels and a groundhog consumed most of the crop. So it goes.
Mother’s Day turned out to be another Sunday morning coming down. It rained on and off from daybreak to night. But perhaps the leaden skies suited my mood far better than if had been a bright sunny day.
By now our azaleas and rhododendrons were blooming (I still say “our” because we selected them together at the garden center and conferred on where to plant them). The day before this rainy Mother’s Day, I took cuttings from the azaleas and rhododendrons in our yard and filled every vase in the house with flowers, including lily of the valley, red-and-white dianthus, and some wildflowers. All of these flowers came from plants that my mother had seen and enjoyed when she was alive. So these familiar flowers were a link to happier days.
