Tag Archives: spring

Catching Them When They’re Perfect

Last week was that one week out of the year when the Yoshino cherry trees bloom. It’s like one day they’re just bare and wintery trees and the next day they wake up as pale pink clouds skimming the earth.

The blooms don’t last long. A stiff wind will take them down, or a heavy spring rain. Even if the weather cooperates, the blooms don’t hang around–they are soon pushed aside by the green leaves that will keep the tree fed for the rest of the year. As Big Gay explained it, “The blossoms are there to set the seed pods.” There’s work to be done, the work of keeping that tree going year after year.

There’s a flurry of Yoshinos at the bank in my neighborhood. I drove under them one morning after cashing a check and felt compelled to stop the car. I swerved over to the curb then opened the sunroof. I turned my face straight up and felt their pink softness smile upon me. It was so beautiful that I took out my phone to capture the perfection…but the camera refused to work (because I have about 5000 pictures on there that really should be organized somewhere).

I promised myself that I would come back and get that picture.

But the next few days were gray and gross. Then I got bogged down and started to crack up. Every day last week, I came home with another piece of bad news about how my kid was behaving and I curled up in a ball on the bed. One morning, I did manage to pull into the bank with a camera that was cooperating, but the sky was a flat gray nothing that sapped the color from the cherry blossoms:

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Wednesday, Carlos gets sent home from daycare. Thursday, we have Vivi’s teacher conference and she’s being….a brilliant challenge. Thursday, Carlos comes home with a sternly worded note. Friday, he gets sent home from school AGAIN. Luckily, G got the call because I didn’t have my phone with me at lunchtime. But I was dragging pretty low by the time I finally got to leave work at 5:30 and get Vivi.

“Mama! I was on blue today!” That’s the best color on the stick–and it erases one of those reds that she had the day before. We stepped out of her school and headed towards the car…which happened to be parked right across from a small Yoshino cherry tree. And what do you know–the sky was blue, my camera was working, the blossoms were tossing around in the breeze.

I finally had a chance to catch perfection.

I asked Vivi to pose in front of the tree, but all she wanted to do was show off a penguin finger puppet. Again, my rambunctiously creative daughter was messing up my idea of perfection. And there was a limb bumping right where I needed her head to be…

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That’s when it hit me. Just like the cherry blossoms, my time with my kids is passing quickly. These years are the tender pink blossoms that will be pushed aside by the green growing leaves soon enough. There will be days when the sky is gray or the stick is on red or the boy gets kicked out of school. I can’t sit around waiting to catch them being perfect. They’re beautiful messes, just like the rest of us, and that is a miracle in itself.

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Cherry Blossoms

I remember one Easter when my nephews were small–they grabbed handfuls of cherry blossoms that had fallen from the trees in Nana and Papa’s yard.  Jackson and Grant flung the pale pink petals in the air so they floated down to dust baby Jake’s head.  We all laughed as the boys sang, “It’s snowing!  It’s snowing!” while Jake squealed with joy.  That’s been a dozen years ago and I still remember the sound of their laughter and the astonishment I felt at loving these small, new people so keenly.

Isn’t it holy to live in a moment and know that you will remember it for the rest of your life?  Cherry blossoms remind me to look up.  We are alive, beneath the cherry blossoms.

 

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Seven Signs of Spring

1.  A dog named Bunny who likes to hop.  Hop on top.

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2.  Broody hens who listen to Billy Joel in the coop.

nana chickens

3.  Lenten roses.  Helleborus orientalis that all grew from two plants.

nana hellebore

4.  Is that flowering quince?  Oh, and Bunny.  Nana says it was cute at first but now it’s getting a little annoying.

nana hop

5.  Scampering.

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6.  Papa may have gone a little overboard on the tomato seedlings.

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7.  Rows of tulips all lined up for the Easter parade.

nana tulips

Goals, Outcomes, and Daffodils

daffodils in snow

As I left my office yesterday afternoon to walk to the car, my heart was equal parts heavy and joyful.  Heavy for a friend whose life is in a tangle right now.  She’s sad and confused and overwhelmed.  I remember those sunless days in my own past and ache for her.  I know she’ll figure it out and find herself on the other side of this, but right now she has no place to rest.  The path ahead seems so long and dark and she’s having a hard time believing that she will find her way.

The other part of my heart was joyful, because yesterday I reached a goal I had set for myself a few months back.  February 4th marks the one year anniversary of Baddest Mother Ever.  I wanted to reach 100,000 page views on the site in that first year.  That happened yesterday!  Thank you so much for reading and sharing and building this community.  I feel great joy that I have stuck with this and it is growing.

These are the thoughts that were on my mind when I looked down into the snow and saw green shoots of daffodils peeking up into the frigid air.  Those shoots took me right back to a time in my life when I had no idea what my future would look like.  My birthday is in late October, right around the time you plant spring bulbs so that they can sleep through the winter and surprise you in the spring.  I got a big bag of daffodil bulbs from my mom for a birthday present about a month after Fartbuster came home with lipstick on his collar that first time.  I hadn’t told anyone about our situation because I was ashamed of my husband’s behavior.  One bright Sunday afternoon, I took my bag of bulbs and a trowel out to the backyard and started planting them around the pine trees and along the fence.  On my own and with time to think, my thoughts gravitated back to our marriage, my trust in him, and whether we would ever get back on track and feel normal again.  With each bulb that I tucked into the earth, I wondered, “Will I still be living here to see these come up in the spring?  Will I be married?  Will we make it?”

I tried to bury my fear and sadness with the bulbs.  I committed to a goal–I would be in that house in the spring to watch these flowers bloom.

Well, I reached my goal–I was in that house in the spring when the daffodils bloomed, but Fartbuster wasn’t there.  My marriage was gone.  That’s the difference between a goal and an outcome.  A goal is a milestone along the path.  An outcome is the result of all those goals…with a measure of dumb luck thrown in.  So yes, I reached my goal of seeing the daffodils bloom, but the outcome wasn’t what I had imagined.  Simply achieving the goal didn’t predict the outcome.

We don’t always get to control the outcome.  We control the goals.  I planted the daffodils at just the right depth and I added bone meal.  I tucked them into the warming red dirt and I covered them with a layer of pine straw.  But that’s as far as I could influence the outcome.  Floods or freezes or insects could have taken it from there and the outcome would have been out of my hands.  Same thing with my marriage to Fartbuster.  My goals, like going to counseling and working on my own self, were reached.  Instead of saving my marriage, I saved my self.

So if you’re walking briskly through the cold wind, with your chin tucked to your chest, look around for that little shoot of green.  That daffodil has something to tell you.

Here Comes the Sun

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Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.   –Maori Proverb

Today is the day that it all takes a turn for the better.  Yesterday was the March equinox, the day that light and dark are equal, but from here until the solstice, every day gets longer and brighter.  Ahhhhhhhh.  Lightness.

We had rain a few days ago and I swear I looked out the window today and the greening switch had been flipped in the backyard.  I can hear it buzzing.  Our front yard is ringing with the daffodils we tucked away in October.  As we were pulling into the garage, Vivi delighted at the sight of the neighbor’s apple tree in full bloom as if she had never seen it before.  Two days ago it was bare and now it is a cloud of hooray.  Soon, the Yoshino cherry trees will bloom.  Their light pink froth makes the soft movement of the air visible again.  I remember that every space around me and inside me is filled with boisterous molecules.  I feel like I can breathe again…even if it ends up in sneezing.

I’ve been humming “Here Comes the Sun” for weeks now.  I love that “the quiet Beatle” wrote that lovely, simple song.  Last week while we were waiting on an over-priced chicken finger lunch, Vivi pointed out the picture of the Beatles from the Abbey Road cover from the mural in a TGIFridays.  She asked what those men were doing and that led to a discussion of who they were and what they were each famous for.  Then she asked if they were still alive and I had to break the news about John and George.  George lived a long and peaceful life but his body stopped working.  What about the one in front?  Well that’s John.  He died when a bad man shot him with a gun.  Why did the man do that?  I don’t know.

I hated to leave it on that note because we had been having such a good talk.  I said, “Hey, do you wish treeremember that tree in Washington DC that we tied wishes to?”  She did.  “John’s wife came up with that idea.”  I scrolled through the pictures on my phone and showed Vivi the wish she had drawn onto a white paper tag then tied to the bare branch of that tree at the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden.  She had drawn a cat.  That was her wish–a cat.

On my wish, I wrote my favorite quote about gratitude:  “For all that has been, thanks.  For all that will be, yes.”   I think “yes” is my favorite word, and that word brings us back to what John loved about Yoko–her yes.

In a 1971 Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner, John told the story this way:

LENNON: I’m sure I’ve told you this many times. How did I meet Yoko? John Dunbar, who was married to Marianne Faithful, had an art gallery in London called Indica and I’d been going around to galleries a bit on my off days in between records. I got the word that this amazing woman was putting on a show next week and there was going to be something about people in bags, in black bags, and it was going to be a bit of a happening and all that. So I went down to a preview of the show. I got there the night before it opened. I went in – she didn’t know who I was or anything – I was wandering around, there was a couple of artsy type students that had been helping lying around there in the gallery, and I was looking at it and I was astounded. There was a piece which really decided me for-or-against the artist, a ladder which led to a painting which was hung on the ceiling. It looked like a blank canvas with a chain with a spy glass hanging on the end of it. This was near the door when you went in. I climbed the ladder, you look through the spyglass and in tiny little letters it says “yes”.

So it was positive. I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say “no” or “fuck you” or something, it said “yes.”

I peeked at some of the other wishes around ours and the one that will stay with me for many years was from a little boy.  It said, “If David asks Mom to marry him, please let her say yes.”

Vivi and I visited the wish tree in the dead of winter, when the pavement around it was slippery with ice and the wind tossed the white wishes until their strings were tangled and knotted.  Tying a paper wish to a tree is a kind of offering, returning the paper to its source.  Despite the darkness of winter, each simple white wish sprouted from the bare limbs like a bloom.

Wishes are hope.  Wishes allow us to believe in yes.

I think NOW is the time of year for resolutions.  This is the time of newness and growing and coming back to life.  The Zoroastrians are celebrating Nowruz with fire and green grass.  The Christians mark Easter.  The pagans thank Ostara, the Germanic goddess of the dawn for bringing light into the darkness.

Turn your face to the sun today.  Hum a few bars of George’s song.  Say yes.