Gratitude Practice 2016 Nov 1: Garfield Avenue Garden
Last weekend, we finished transplanting flowers and bulbs from my family home into new flower beds in our backyard. My grandmother, Harriet Emily Smith Parker, planted Peonies and Iris and Poppies in flower beds surrounding their home well over sixty plus years ago. These remarkable flowers bloomed spring after spring after spring and I not only measured the changing seasons with their arrival but it is by these ever faithful blossoms that I've come to measure myself.
One of my earliest memories is walking hand in hand with my grandmother in her backyard experiencing her flowers whose big bright blossoms were close to my eye level and listening to her encourage me to bury my face into their bright nourishing petals and simply... breathe in their love. Every Memorial Day of my youth, I would watch my grandparents cut flowers from their gardens and create arrangements for the graves of our deceased ancestors....tin cans were covered in contact paper and flowers carefully selected to match the personalities or interests or preferences of my great great grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles and cousins once removed. These tin can masterpiece's were then lovingly placed at graveside of loved ones as they shared memories and stories of the people who shaped them. A bouquet of these beautiful blooms were gifted to me by my grandparents at significant moments of my childhood and adolescence...at 8 years I held fuschia peonies while wearing a significant white dress...at 12 years a bunch of Iris were my birthday gift...as a junior in Highschool, the Spring after my father died, I found peace and security in the safety of this backyard garden when new life triumphantly bloomed after the bleakest winter I had ever experienced... it was these colorful flowers that brought both color and hope back into my world. As a headstrong college girl, I snipped a few buds each spring, put them in a glass vase and placed them proudly in my rented apartments. The act of creating a floral centerpiece with these petals for my own table instantaneously made me feel both adult and accomplished... two feelings I desperately needed to feel. Vase of cut flowers from my grandmother's garden have adorned my home and my office every spring for as long as I can remember.
After my grandparents passed, my mother moved into their home and added new colors and textures and scents to grandma's Garfield Avenue Garden. In time, tall colorful hollyhocks grew along the driveway and bunches of delicate delphinia nestled in the northern corners. When I lived in Texas, my mother called me every spring to let me know... our flowers have bloomed and even though I lived half way across the country knowing they had bloomed was both important and significant to both of us. Year after year these flowers have taught, sustained, brightened, reminded, and inspired me over and over and over again....but I don't think I've ever needed this garden...or been more grateful for this garden than I was this Spring.
For me, this year's crop was by far the most meaningful and by association the most beautiful. Each week, as I arrived at my mom's home to sort through and organize her things, these sustaining flowers greeted my grieving heart with the comforting warmth and love that I desperately needed. Burying a parent, and in my case my mom who was my last living parent, is just a surreal bucket list experience. Complicated. Depressing. Reflective. Unimaginable and yet...expected. This spring, I wept in this garden week after week as I contemplated not just the colorful blossoms but the women whose hands and hearts cared for both me and these flowers year after year after year. I read recently that some loves, like types of flower, are annuals while other loves are perennial...bloom big for a season and then go dormant for a time.... but there...always there preparing for the next phase of life...and that gardens, like loves, need care and careful pruning to flourish. I also recently stumbled across the definition of flourish.... which is to bloom despite circumstance; to grow with renewed faith and hope of thriving; to have courage in personal potential; to have vision is a divine plan of promised blessings; to live up to one's privilege; to nurture faith alone a covenant path; to multiply and prosper; to blossom with abundant joy. I can't help but feel immense gratitude that the love that has bound the women in my family has been the perennial kind of love and that it has flourished year after year after year. You know... the long lasting persistent rain or shine is never perfect but what is perfect anyway year after year is a headstrong and heart strong kind of love. That is how we grow flowers and that is how we loved each other. Some years, we bloomed big and bright and other years our blossoms were fewer and far between but.... flourishing at individual levels and always always growing.
Our family home, on good old Garfield Avenue, will be sold soon and the rich soil that has sustained our family will have the chance to nourish someone new. As my siblings and I have wrestled through so many adult decisions this year it became clear that grandma's flowers were coming with me....and so they did. Last weekend, we finished transplanting and splitting and dividing our beloved flowers which now securely rest in my backyard. We planted well over twenty Peonies that grew from four or five original plants grandma Emily planted a lifetime ago and we stopped counting somewhere around four hundred Iris. Like relationships, flowers often require careful pruning and purging...you keep what is nourishing and you discard that which no longer brings life....all to ensure that new buds can grow... and if all goes well....and with heaps and heaps of love, faith and hope...these delicate transplants will not just grow....but flourish and sometime next spring these cherished flowers.... will...BLOOM...and I will take my curious daughter by the hand to our new garden and introduce her to OUR flowers and invite her to bury her face in the blossoms of our heritage and simply breathe in the perennial love of generations.
