Flower lady

When I was in high school, and elderly lady lived down the road from us. LaRoice Mayland; we called her the flower lady.  She had been a widow for longer than I'd known her, and her yard contained vast beds of flowers. She hired me to come and help her tend these flowers occasionally during the summer, but she must have watered them every day herself, in an era before programmable timed sprinklers.  I would weed among the flowers for a long while, and then we would sit on her stone porch stoop and drink flat Pepsi Cola and eat Cheetos that her husband had probably picked up from the grocery, and we would talk.  I don't even remember about what, only thinking that she must hire me as much to eat stale chips with her and talk as for the weeding, and that I didn't mind either.  I admired her dedication to those flowers, to making her world beautiful, even as her life shrank to a solitary one, and her body succumbed to age.

I think about her when I working in the beds, among the tender shoots. I am the flower lady now. I have planted flowers every single place that I have lived since I left home except those that came with absolutely no ground in which to put a plant: my dorm room and a high rise apartment that I lived in with my first husband in Washington, and even then, I volunteered at the botanical conservatory across the street. I think about her, and I wonder what joys and sorrows my flowers will preside over. Will they be the sole companion of my old age? Will they out live me: a legacy of beauty when I am gone?

The spring bulbs were the very first thing to go in. The shipment was late. It didn't arrive until November, but if I didn't get them in, I would have to wait a full year and a half to see blooms. Morgan and I went out on a brisk day. I gave her the crocuses, because they only have to be half as deep.  I did the tulips. Our hands blistered from the digging. It was chilly; my Morgan wanted to stop, and so I told her about spring, what would come.  I told her about all the years hence that our flowers would bloom, and we would know: we did this, she and I, together. I told her the story of Soggybottom is one of a family, working side by side to build the kind of life we believe in, and that's what our flowers are to me.

No one, wants flowers anymore. One of the 7 consistent criteria for a dream home is low maintenance landscaping. A little bark around some drought resistant shrubs, some river rock, and call it done. Not LaRoice, and not me. No low maintenance life here. I want to teach my kids that a life worth having gives you blisters, and then callouses. It creates beauty and makes you strong. Then, I want to sit on the porch and drink lemonade with them, and look out at the bright blooms, so when they look back, and they come home, they will look at those flowers and remember and think of their mama, the flower lady.