Happy Mother's Day. I like to think of this as a universal holiday and celebration: if you're not a mother/ parent yourself, hopefully you have a mom to celebrate, or fur babies whom you love and nurture.
My mother was my best friend. She was always encouraging, interested, [interesting], thrilled by any accomplishment, no matter how small. Only a little critical,lol; I do know I wasn't as pretty or as outgoing as she might have hoped, but she accepted me as best she could. And as I grew up we became friends as well as parent-child. One time when I was very ill, she phoned me and wailed, 'What if I lose you? You're my best friend!" and I said, ''No worries, I'm fine'',
but inside I was dismayed to suddenly realize that the reverse would be probably true, that she would instead leave me. And so she did.
Every time I'd board the little plane in Hyannis, on my way home to New York, I'd wave from the runway and wonder if I'd ever see her and my dad again. Bittersweet.
Mo and I took advantage of a first warm windless day to walk around admiring all the blooming trees..
and to peek through fences at newly turned gardens:
Isn't Mo's new baby blue vestie handsome! Pugs traditionally wear baby blue. It was my MD gift to Mo and me.
Garden peeping:
We saw a white dogwood, just unfurling. [sorry, no pix] and that took me back to childhood. Every MD my dad planted a flowering tree as a gift to my mom. The very first was a pink dogwood for my brother, the next a white dogwood for me. These trees grow large in Ohio, too large to be moved when our family moved on to Illinois and then Massachusetts. But everywhere we settled, on Mother's Day, my dad put in a gift tree---azaleas and rhododendrons, blue hydrangeas, the occasional climbing rose. The Ohio rose was spectacular, "Schiaparelli Pink" color and so fragrant! My mom and I read Little Women together beneath its blooms, the summer before I began third grade.
Another favorite tree was an heirloom white peach tree. Its offshoots traveled to every home and the trees bore luscious fruit. My parents would harvest the peaches and make endless bottles of jam, since we did not eat fruit in a fruity form.
One year when my brother and I were in college, a time when my parents traveled extensively, constantly, avoiding their empty nest, I now see---my dad brought home a blue spruce seedling from Colorado. Oh so tiny, as big as your hand, nestled in a soup can. He found it growing through the mulch in a parking lot's flower bed at a Taco Bell. It grew to immense heights over the years, in the corner of their yard on Cape Cod.
Not a Mother's Day tree, but a fun memory, my dad always planted an evergreen in the backyard, near the deck windows, a specimen pine or spruce which he would decorate each winter with Christmas lights and food for his beloved birds. I especially loved the pine in Illinois, always snow covered for Christmas, just magical.
I miss them both. My mom was the original Elisabeth, though it is a family name: So remembering--Happy Mother's Day, Liz!
And to you all.
I write this blog in memory of the letters we wrote
and love we shared.
**************
PS Aren't the fern furls cute? Have you ever eaten them? here
love,
lizzy
gone to the beach....
.jpg)
