Flowers Forty Years Ago

Spring is sprung and . . . the height of decadence . . . I wandered happily in the local Lowe's touching plants, deciphering labels (full sun, part sun,), consulting the "safe for parrots" list for indoor plants . . . comparing all-purpose bloom booster to rose food.

Here's what I remember, kneeling down in the cool northeastern Ohio (Canfield to be exact) grass next to my "Aunt" Wanda. She was really my cousin, hence the quotations, but I was about five and she was about 45 so to me she was my aunt. I can clearly remember one day, kneeling next to her, putting those bulbs in the ground. Then we went for a walk down the street with my favorite toy, a stuffed monkey I'd named Joe. Wanda holding one of Joe's plastic hands and me the other. I'm sure there was lemonade and cookies along the way.

Aunt Wanda passed away several years ago, but I glanced at her photo today -- it hangs in my living room, she's smiling, with my son's arm around her on one holiday or another -- and I thought of her. And I thought of that spring day forty-odd years ago.

Hooray for extended family members, cool Ohio grass (I lived in Florida long enough to appreciate that), spring that is a separate month (Florida again) and the fresh air, the boy next door cutting the grass, the bees buzzing around the flowering shrubs the burst of yellow color I saw yesterday in a gorgeous forsythia bush growing alongside a creek, seeming to laugh at me as I sped by, tax returns on my mind.

Yeah for lemonade, ice tea, all the family birthdays in May and June. Mother's Day, the end of my youngest son's first year of college.

Pansies sit now on my back deck waiting for their honored place. I put up the new flag I won in a raffle; it's cloth and sewn and not that cheap kind I had last year that ended up looking like a relic from World War II.

I'm sorry Terry Shiavo died. I'm sorry the Pope died. I'm sorry for the missing girls in Florida and California, the young Ohio soldier missing in Iraq. I'm sorry, but I can't be sad anymore. Sadness has to end. Spring has to come. Nature knows this. I know it too. It's a bit cruel but human nature, I suppose.

Yes, I have spring fever. I caught it from Aunt Wanda years ago.