Color

Our theme for this week: Color

My mother loves to garden. Her father loved to garden. When I went back to her house over the weekend the very first thing my mother did was take me on a garden tour.

I was glad to take it. I'm most often home during the winter months, when her gardens are covered by several inches of snow. The front, side, and very back gardens are exclusively for flowers. The garden that my father has recently redone for her is exclusively vegetables that she and Dad freeze for the winter.

My mother's gardens are lovely, striking, unique things. I love them because they are beautiful, certainly, but even more because they are extensions of my mother's personality. Anyone who looks at them can see her love of things beautiful and natural, her appreciation for things both tame and wild. Her practicality and thriftiness are apparent in her love for helping things grow.

An ode (of sorts) to my mother and her gardens.

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My Mother's Garden

My mother's garden is a riot of color. Pink roses and white poppies. Orange tiger lilies growing next to green chili peppers and purple beets. The pink-cream flowers of late pea blossoms wind their way around the grey stone fountain. A yellow goldfinch splashes in the rusty water. My mother, a white bandanna over her wild brown hair, pulls up weeds and talks a blue streak. I worry about her hands, sliced open by weeds and stuck by brambles. Oh, Kelly she says, wiping them on her khaki shorts. We all bleed red.