July 6, 2022
Yesterday I spent some quiet
time reflecting on the significance of the day—this one day of every year that had
rolled around once more. July 5th, when I was a child, was my mother’s
birthday. It never bothered her when I went out into her flower beds and picked
her a small bouquet and presented it to her. She aways thanked me for the gift.
Mother died at the too-young age of 57 in 1976. And then, the year after she
passed, my second child, my son Anthony, was born on that same day.
If they were both alive today,
they would be 103 and 45, respectively.
It’s impossible for me to
think of Anthony as being 45. Because he died far too soon, he is forever
frozen, in my mind’s eye, as a twenty-nine-year-old man. No, that’s not exactly
true. In my recollection, he remains a teenager, because I understand that his
journey to maturity and wisdom got stuck in a teenaged mentality.
I loved him with all my heart,
and I still weep for him occasionally. But I was not and am not blind to his
flaws. And I do believe it was a flaw within him. For some reason there was a
connection in his mental processes that simply didn’t work.
It is a human trait that tries
to make sense of something that on its face appears senseless. We are always
asking why things happen the way they do, but we often never know the
answer.
I really don’t dwell overmuch
on the losses I’ve experienced in my life. I know I’m not the only one who has lost
loved ones. And while I still have been unable to know the answer to “why”, or
to make sense of the situation, I have understood that I can give some meaning
to these losses. They have made me more empathic. Knowing what it is to love
and lose means I can relate to others who grieve. And I do believe that having
experienced tragedy means I can show more humanity in my work. That’s
something, at least.
Our daughter went out
yesterday and purchased a few more plants to go in the front flower beds. She
chose a few petunias, and some more coleus. I had, just a couple of months ago,
believed that in the middle of June we would go out, my husband and I, to pick
a few flowers to put in our front porch “window boxes”. We have several of
those, and I was thinking about what I would like to have on display this year.
Now, my husband is a frugal
soul. In the interests of total transparency, I need to tell you that “frugal”
is his word. Mine, which he doesn’t deny but also does not prefer, is cheap.
Yes, my husband has actually built up a bit of a reputation among family and
friends for this, shall we say, interesting quality.
We here in Canada have a five-cent
coin. We call it a nickel—so called because back in 1922, all silver was
removed from the coin and it became pure nickel. The head of the coin is, of
course, our Queen. The tail of the coin is a beaver. And I can recall one of David’s
former coworkers saying he “squeezes his nickels so tightly the beaver screams”.
David’s response to that dig? “Damn
right!” Friends, my husband is as proud of being frugal as he is of being a
redneck. And most of the time, that’s okay. I have no real complaints of this
quality and in fact, it makes it easier when we have to tighten our belts.
Which we are doing now along with everyone else, but that is a topic for another
essay.
And knowing all this, of
course, I shouldn’t have been surprised a few weeks ago, on Father’s Day. Our
oldest son and his wife dropped in, and it was a very nice visit. We had a few “boxes”
of green beans left on the back yard table, beans David had grown from seed, and
he convinced our son to take a couple to put into his own yard.
And as they were leaving, I
went out onto the porch to wave good-bye, I noticed that our window boxes were
hanging on the porch, and with greenery in them! And then I really looked at
them.
Yes, those boxes held greenery.
As in, green beans. Growing on my porch. And yes, I get it, and I really can’t
complain, so I didn’t. Exactly. What I did, was I clarified that what I was
seeing was real. “Green beans? On the front porch? In hanging boxes?”
“Yup. Now we don’t have to
spend good money buying more flowers.”
Well, he’s got me there. But
we’ll see how this all pans out. The bean plants are only a few inches high at
this point, and of course, don’t yet have anything heavy growing on them to harvest.
We’ll see how those boxes hold
up as a base, and how those bean plants fare in them, when they do.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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