I'm going to be sixty-five on Tuesday. And the lilacs are blooming.

I always thought I was born in the perfect season for celebrating birthdays. The lilacs in the back yard would be blooming, the big forsythia bush on the corner would be all decked out in yellow blossoms, and the borders of our huge lawn would be full of tulips and daffodils, gladiola and iris.

 

 Often, my birthday dinner table would be graced with a bowl overflowing with their combined colors and scents

I was born in Monterey California, on Good Friday. My mother spent Easter in the hospital, and would tell me how my father brought my big brother Joe to visit me. Because children were not allowed in the maternity ward, Dad held Joe up to the window of my mother's room so that he could see his new baby sister; father and son both wearing the yellow sweaters my mother had purchased for them for Easter.

My mother was an amazing gardener. She turned our corner lot into a showstopper, with geraniums and roses and irises and tulips and lilacs and cosmos and dahlias. People would stop and take pictures of the glory. She gardened well into her 80's, and it wasn't until her last months that she reluctantly gave up  Her last summer, even when grass fires forced her to wear a mask when she was outside, she would be out as soon as it was light, watering and weeding. She would come in the house with muddy fingers, using her shirt as a bowl to hold tomatoes or zucchini from the garden.

Maybe it was because my mother grew up during the Depression, where money was scarce. Or maybe it was because she grew up in a large family where hand-me-downs were common and birthdays and holidays weren't a big deal. Whatever the reason, my mother went to great lengths to make every birthday, every Easter, every Christmas, special. She spent hours at her sewing machine, making dresses and shirts and pajamas and robes and doll clothes. She wore the same dresses for twenty years, but we always had new clothes. And it wasn't just a case of clothing a growing family. She could have done that at Sears. No, she sewed, I think, as a creative outlet, in much the same way she gardened.

 

 I was incredibly lucky to have the mother I had. I tried as best I could to emulate her when I became a mother. And it fills my heart with joy to seem that my daughter is following in her G'ma's footsteps, developing a love of gardening and crafting and caring for her family.

 

I had fifty-nine birthdays with my Mom. She might not have physically been with me for every birthday but her spirit was. Her spirit still is.