B is for Blooms

                              

                        April 2, 2014     B  is for  Blooms

 

      We have two blooms today. Our hibiscus is sitting in the front doorway to catch what ever scrap of sunshine comes her way. Alas, no sunshine today.

       My mother didn't keep hibiscus in the house. In Oklahoma she had hardy hibiscus outside. She did have house plants that lived inside in the winter and outside in the summer.

      Momma was very like her plants. She thrived in the sunshine. Cloudy, winter days were not good for her. Daddy built her a dining area that had a wall of windows facing south. There was a big open yard between the house and the barn with woods all around. She had bird feeders and pans of water for the wild animals sharing her living space. They had chickens and rabbits and dairy goats. And sometimes a couple of pigs or steers. One to sell and one to put in the freezer. And Daddy always had a big vegetable garden.

      She would sit at her table smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and watching her world. And she would think. She wasn't much to talk about what she was thinking, but she wrote. Letters, mostly. This was in the days before facebook and blogging.

       Her sister lived two and a half or three hours away, so they didn't often get to visit. Momma didn't like to talk on the phone but she and Aunt Dorothy visited regularly by mail. Long newsy letters about the animals around them, their children, the weather.

      Both were readers so they knew how to tell a story. They evoked the senses. The way the sunlight glinted off the brilliant yellow of the cottonwood tree in the fall when the world around them was going grey and brown.

      The scent of old fashioned roses, of honeysuckle, and lilies of the valley. The deafening clatter of hail on the metal roof. The taste of English peas right out of the pod while she stood in the garden.

      The shock of a bobcat snatching one of her chickens and leaping the fence with it before she could get to it.

      The humor of a squirrel dropping an ear of corn it had stolen out of the garden. The little thief dropped it on the patio and proceeded to quarrel at the humans because they were sitting on that patio and it was afraid to come down and retrieve the corn.

      I don't know what my mother thought about the questions our culture seems obsessed with -- politics or religion or celebrity foibles. If they interested her, I don't remember her ever saying. But I do remember experiencing the world around us through her, and I learned to pay attention to that world myself.