As I’m seeing the first flowers of spring start to make their yearly appearance, I’m ruminating on the flowers I’ve enjoyed in my life. From prom corsages to wedding flowers in my hair, festive worship services, curtain
call honors, anniversaries, birthdays... Flowers add magic to any occasion.
In the house where I grew up, we had a small strawberry patch in our backyard. This was a gift bestowed upon us by our neighbors. After they planted the strawberries on their side of the fence, they never got a single one. Instead, the plants popped up on our side. Collecting the berries and putting them on ice cream was an annual summer treat. Except for one year. That was the year when I saw beautiful white blossoms in the strawberry patch and picked every last one of them to present to my mother. She always had admired the bouquet of yellow dandelions I gave her and placed them in a little vase where they lasted about 30 minutes. I assumed the strawberry patch flowers would receive the same reaction, but they didn’t.
I should have learned from that experience that there are times when flowers are best not picked. But I was a slow learner when it came to some things.
My friend Fritzy and I admired the flowers in a neighbor’s yard, and we just knew they would make a perfect gift for our mothers. We each picked a lovely little bouquet and brought them home. And both of our moms asked, “Where did these come from?” We told them that we had picked them from the yard on the corner. We thought our words were spoken as information, but for our mothers, they were a confession.
Apparently, it’s a really big deal to take the flowers from someone else’s yard. I was shocked when our mothers called it “stealing.” I had always figured that flowers belonged to nature, and they didn’t really belong to any person, even if they’re in that person's yard. So, wow. This was stealing. But the flowers were already picked. What could we do?
“You’re going to take those flowers back and apologize to the family.” Suddenly, we were shamed as the thieves we were.
Realizing that the yard with the flowers had a huge blue spruce that obstructed the view to the front porch, Fritzy and I hid behind the tree for a few minutes, left our flowers on the ground and then returned to tell our mothers that we had apologized.
They didn’t buy it. Now, in addition to being thieves, we had become involved in a cover-up. Needless to say, they marched us down to the front door and watched us do the mortifying thing we needed to do.
That wasn’t the last time I was responsible for taking a neighbor’s flowers. A few years later, my pet rabbit escaped his hutch at night and went straight for a (different) neighbor’s petunias they had just planted. He ate the blossoms off every single one. I don’t remember the name of those neighbors or the rabbit involved, but I do remember that they were pink petunias and cost $36, which was a lot of money back in the early 60s.
At my home in Charlotte, and then again in Timonium (Baltimore), I spent a lot more than $36 and many hours of my time, over the course of years, building up a perennial garden in my yard, including an entire fence line of roses. In both cases, these got just about perfect right before I moved.
Now someone else is enjoying my labor of love. I like to think that I’ve given these people I will never know a gift. But maybe it should also be considered penance for the floral sins of my youth.
