One of he pictures in my study is a photograph of two red Gerbera daisies. One is in full bloom and the other is just beginning to open. The photograph looks like it must have been a sunshiny day. The flower’s foliage is lush and green. Occasionally someone will pick up the picture and ask, “Why do you have a picture of these two flowers on your desk?” And I answer with a story.
The memory goes back more than twenty five years. Coming home from a two-week trip I began to catch up on the news with my wife. She had traveled south while I studied up north. On her way home she had stopped by my Mother’s house in Georgia and learned she was in the hospital. In her eighties, Mother’s trips to the hospital were coming closer together.
“Oh, by the way,” my wife said, “your Mother sent you some flowers. Gerber daisies, she called them. Her favorite. Just before she got sick she said that she found two plants at a good price. She instructed me to go by her house when I left the hospital, get the daisies, be very careful with them and bring them home to you.” We were moving soon and she told my wife, “Don’t plant them now. Take the daisies with you to Memphis and plant them in your new yard.”
When I talked to my mother on the telephone she wanted to know about the daisies. “Give them plenty of water. Keep them out of full sun until you plant them and take them with you to Memphis. Now don’t put them in that moving van—you put them in your car.” That was our last conversation. She died less than a week later.
Weeks later we moved to Tennessee. One of the last things I did as we closed up our house was to put the daisies in my car. On a Sunday morning I planted the green daisy plants in the Tennessee soil in our new side yard. It was a painful planting. Grief came surging back. As I mulched the flowers I remember praying, “Dear God, let them live. Let them live.” It was late August.
My birthday fell on a Saturday in October that year. As I went to get the newspaper I was dumb founded by what I saw. One of the daisies had the prettiest red bloom and another bud was barely opening. I don’t know much about this flower except October is very late for a Gerbera daisy to bloom. I charged into the house and told my wife, “You won’t believe what’s outside. One of my mother’s daisies is blooming on my birthday!”
It was her final gift of so many others she had given me through the years. Even after her death, the long arm of her love touches me still. That photograph reminds me of that birthday morning.
Frost came early that year. The flowers wilted. I hoped the daisies would live through the winter—but Gerbera daisies don’t usually survive the winter cold. The next spring the flowers never came up. But this I know: that daisy bloomed on my birthday. The flowers did their work in a hard time. And even after all these years, on this Mother’s Day I look at that picture and smile. Grace, stubborn grace, comes in the strangest of ways. I told my friend this was why I keep this picture of that red daisy on my desk.
(My son drew this picture of his grandmother years ago. As I look at it--I remember Mama.)
--Roger Lovette / rogrlovette.blogspot.com
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