I’m tending my mother’s garden.
She’s been told she has only a few months to live…So she’s planting a garden.
How beautiful is that? How hopeful and selfless and wonderful? It sums up her spirit…How she walks in the world. My mother sows kindness everywhere she goes. She makes friends with everyone she meets and sees the good in all things.
And year after year she has the most beautiful gardens. Flowers that remind her of her mother, flowers that make her smile. Flowers that reappear in spring from the deepest gray of winter, or make their confident appearance in the heart of summer.
She has wildflowers…and revels in their wild and reckless abandon.
She grows vegetables and shakes her fist at the groundhogs and deer that try to nibble away at her work, all the while welcoming the chance to experience the natural world around her.
Her back door hangs heavy with herbs grown, now drying…waiting for the night they get chosen for a hearty feast.
So I’m tending my mother’s garden with all the hope that goes along with it. Cutting back the old, making way for the new, pulling weeds, planting seeds.
What a blessing, what an honor to be tending my mother’s garden.
