The Legacy...

Recently, I have been missing my mother. She died too young, at 65, many years ago. I find myself becoming more like her, and I have to wonder what she thinks of me.

I have been thinking about how quickly life passes by. How it seems like just yesterday, maybe, when I was a child, running across this very same lawn, enjoying the stillness of a summer's eve.

We ate our supper on the patio almost every night. And my mother would pick a gardenia and put it in her hair. I can still see her beautiful, brown hair adorned with the white gardenia. Soon, the gardenias will bloom again, and their sweet smell will remind me, once more, of her.

She was in her early thirties when we moved into this house. It was a brand new house, just built, and it was ours. The house looked lost and alone, sitting in the middle of the huge, barren yard. There was a house to the west, and one behind us, and the rest of the block was empty lots. Across the street, there were grape vineyards.

The first order of business, besides moving into the house and painting and arranging things, was to put up a fence. I just vaguely remember going to the grape stake yard, and talking to the owners. It seemed like my parents were there for hours. In the end, they had purchased enough grape stakes to build our fence.

My mother had struck up a conversation with the owner's wife. It seems they both liked the same type of plants. And so, in addition to the requisite grape stakes, we came home with cuttings from the plants in their yard.

I don't remember how many plants, or what varieties. I just remember the twigs. They were long, and had buds on them, but no leaves. My mother put them in a coffee can full of wet sand. Every day, she would water the sand in the coffee can, and the buds turned green.

Four of the twigs survived, and were planted in the yard. There are three in the backyard, and one in the front yard, next to the carport. Currently, the one in the front yard has been overgrown by an opportunistic miniature rose. Soon, when both have finished blooming, I will separate them.

And now, as the lilacs bloom, it is a treat for the senses. The blooms are a beautiful lavender color: three of them are more of a purple lavender, and the fourth one tends toward a blue lavender. Craggy trunks, thick and wooden, support new shoots of growth. And the tips of most of the branches are a profusion of scented, lavender blooms.

In another week, the blooms will be past their prime, and I will come home from work each day and cut off those that have turned brown. For the rest of the summer and into the fall, the pale green leaves will provide shade for the dogs and the flowers blooming beneath them.

So, even though she left me nearly thirty years ago, my mother's legacy lives on, providing a glorious display of lavender blooms each spring. And a promise: she is gone, but she is not. Her lilacs and roses and gardenias are here to remind me how much she loved to work in her garden.

And so do I....