04/10/2024
My mom’s garden was full of irises. Big beautiful irises of every color. Bright purples and yellows, deep burgundy, and sometimes white—bringing cheer to the front of the otherwise plain exterior of my childhood home, blooming like clockwork every spring. If you know anything about irises, you know they spread like crazy and are fairly easy to move.
The year she left us, I took a bag of iris bulbs from her garden and carefully transported them to Austin, and planted them in my own — hoping to have some small part of her with me in the home she never got to see.
Now, I have many talents, but keeping plants alive is not one of them. Yet every year, I inspected those irises with growing green stalks, spreading throughout my otherwise depressing flowerbed more and more each year, trusting they’d bloom when they were ready.
This year they bloomed. Well, two of them did. I captured one bloom, and the other fell victim to damn caterpillars before I could catch a picture. And still, when that first flower appeared, among the carpet weeds in my piddly flower bed —I felt your presence so deeply…and I can’t help but feel it’s a beautiful metaphor for the influence your loving, compassionate heart still has in my life almost 5 years later— patiently, every spring for 4 years—trusting that some day, those flowers would bloom.
And while it still makes no damn sense that you’re gone, and there is not a day that goes by when I don’t think of you — I mostly just wish you were here to see the life I’ve built—and the person I have grown into — a result of your love AND the agony of your departure—because I think you would be proud. I like to think of that first bloom as sign of that…Offering a small but not insignificant glimmer of peace.
Happy heavenly birthday, Mama. It would have been your 70th today, and undoubtedly I would have been there to celebrate you...gone too soon, but never forgotten.
