Monday, May 31, 2010

PEONIES and MY MOTHER’S GARDEN








When I was about three years old my older brother and I, would “help” our mother with chores around the farm. That is, we would imitate as best as we could whatever she was doing. We would hold the pail for the calf to drink his milk, give the cows their grain, feed the cats and catch the little kittens to play with them and tame them. We would go to the chicken coop to gather eggs in wire baskets, every morning and evening and then wash them to be sold to the egg man who would pick them up in cardboard egg crates or boxes. Our daily life was filled with nurturing the world around us, caring for each of God’s creatures and providing for our family. We also had strawberries, ground cherries, raspberries, and apple orchards of various kinds of apples, plum trees, vegetables and flower gardens. We would imitate our mother as she planted seeds, potatoes, onions and flower bulbs, and gathered in the produce, picking berries, apples and cuttings from her gardens. Obviously we were too young to understand all of this, yet the memory of it, as part of our daily life is vivid.
My mother had many little flower gardens that were the result of a stump being removed or where the hogs had gotten out and rooted up a grassy area. This fresh black dirt offered a perfect fertile ground for transplanting perennials like Peonies or Irises. As a result of this we had many huge and beautiful Peony bushes. In an effort to be helpful, my brother and I decided we would be innovative. Each year the Peonies would bloom heavily and have hundreds of buds that looked like little green eggs. We had watched our mother pick the eggs and place them in her wire basket. So we found her wire basket and began filling it with the Peony buds, until we had collected all of them. We proudly presented our harvest to our mother who, remarkably, thanked us for our hard work, admired the buds she had been anticipating all winter. Instead of scolding us, she saw the gift we were giving her. We had offered her our little treasures. We were sure we were giving something very grand to the person who we loved the most.
It seems that when the Peonies arrive, so does summer with all its festivities and family gatherings, the end of the school year, graduations, weddings and Memorial Day. There were many years when there would be only a few early Lilacs for our cemeteries, or perhaps a few Lilies or Spirea. It was only when the Peonies arrived that we had beautiful bouquets of pink and white with our lavender Irises to offer in memorial. This spring I celebrate 60 years with Peonies. They were a big part of my childhood, each birthday party and part of my high-school graduation celebration. They were my choice of flower at our wedding, June 2, 1973. They were the choice of flower at our daughter’s wedding June 11, 2005. They are the center of my floral painting in my home and decorate our table each year. They remind me of happy days, memories of loved ones, and they give me hope for happy days. When we moved to the farm in 1995 we moved all those random gardens planted by my mother to one place where all her special flowers have continued to grow and remind us each spring of her grace and love for us.