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Mother’s flowers

Helen Rose Pauls

Her hands are plucking at the unfamiliar afghan spread across her knees. Hands that have never been still, continually seek to do purposeful work, even in this place. Her bed is smooth and pristine, and she can see beyond it through the window to the flower garden outside.

She yearns to be close to flowers again, so I wheel her chair out among them. Her hands reach for them. How she longs to pull the weeds and feel rich black soil under her fingers once more!

I can visualize the huge garden she kept beyond the kitchen door on the farm – her form of daily worship as she co-created with God. She tended not only the vegetables for summer soups and salads, but also the potatoes and root crops for winter. She tended, with her children, an acre of raspberries and three acres of pole beans for market, while Dad worked in the city. Still she found time for flowers: two plots by the front door, and rows and rows of them around the perimeter of the garden. “To keep the bugs out,” she’d explain, but we sensed they existed for their colour and for their capacity to delight her.

How can this endlessly energetic mother be now so weak, so vulnerable? At first, the stroke seemed minor, but soon it was apparent that many tiny strokes had followed, affecting both mind and body. How can I enter her eyes – the windows of her soul – and know what she is thinking? What is she feeling in this strange place? Sometimes she cries, and once, in a lucid moment, she said, “We moved, and we don’t know anyone here.” I explain that she is in Menno Hospital with lots of caring friends. She knows who I am, but it seems that she sees the child, not the adult with a family of her own. She strokes my arm and nods, saying over and over, “You’re a good girl, a good girl!” I feel as if I have received a blessing.

Somehow she raised five of us and, in spite of the relentless farm work, still found time to teach the senior girls’ Sunday school class; lead the Ladies’ Aid Bible study; stitch quilts for all of us and Mennonite Central Committee; and sew dresses for orphanages in India. If I woke up early, she was at the dining room table studying her lessons. At night, I fell asleep to the sound of her whirring sewing machine. All summer, she told us stories to keep us busy at our work picking and preserving the wondrous fruits of her garden. In the evening, we took the bright blooms and arranged them in vases, one for each room.

“God loves me,” she writes in her cramped backhand at the patio table outside her room. “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.” In all the confusion, this goodness still pervades.

She looks out again at the vivid flowers. I stroke her arm. To her, I am the little girl again. “You are a wonderful mommy,” I say, “a wonderful mommy.” She cries. I sob. It is time to go.

I stop on the way home to buy seeds for my garden. I grasp a red basket with one hand and begin to fill it with bright packages. I find myself choosing zinnias, cosmos, larkspur, marigolds, sunflowers, clarkias and alyssum: hardy, faithful, durable flowers. This is not my garden I am planting. These are my mother’s flowers. We will co-create with God.

Helen Rose Pauls is a teacher and a member of Sardis Community Church in Chilliwack, B.C.

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Last modified January 8, 2000.

© 2000 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
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