Last Sunday I was driving down Boyds Creek & I saw these two old ladies out in the yard. One was pointing to a particular plant in her flowerbed, and the other was peering at it & nodding sagely. They wore polyester pant suits, it looked like to me, with their hair sets & big-enough-to-notice-but-not-big-enough-to-be-tacky necklaces. I slowed, and resisted the urge to stop & watch them, or better yet, join them. They reminded me SO MUCH of my great-grandmother, my Mamaw. I was fortunate enough to have her next door until I was in high school. She loved her flowers. There were several flowerbeds surrounding her home, taking up most of the yard. She had a huge sage patch, and she grew dill, and tended the biggest aloe plant I have ever seen (For those of you that have seen mine, think x3). She also had this magnificent Christmas cactus that blossomed so hot pink it didn’t look real. Anyway, any time she had company, that was part of the ritual: touring the gardens. No matter how many times you’d previously visited, or how recently, you still had to observe the growth of her “cannies” (gigantic leafy red plants with enormous stalks I always thought were hideous), her prizewinning elephant ears that I could hide behind until I was ten, her millions of tulips, the weeping peach tree she was so proud of…the list goes on & on. The inspection could last an hour or more. She had cherry trees, a crabapple tree, shamrocks, a rosebush that served as the border for the vegetable garden (the front field where I rode my horses in later years), and some weird pampas grass stuff we never did really figure out what it was. Anyway, the irises are blooming in profusion now & remind me so much of her. I always wanted so badly, in my childish way, to pick them all & put them in a vase to enjoy inside. She always gently reminded me they best thrived outdoors and we could enjoy them longer out there. She would make me a banana milkshake & let me watch whatever I wanted on her TV. She was a feisty old lady, never failing to speak her mind. She traveled to Hawaii once, bringing back a pallet of pineapples & muu-muus for us all. Plus hundreds of strands of silk-wrapped beads. She adored Hawaii with all their exotic flowers. Her favorite song was “The Battle of New Orleans”. She always had a passel of cats, all outside, and all underfoot. She had a white Persian inside for awhile that would sit on her lap after she bathed it to be dried with a blow dryer. That was the only cat that would not tolerate me for any amount of time.  

Spring makes me think of Mamaw, and smile.