With two kids getting married, two nieces graduating, a new book to write, and Hiram training for a half-marathon, spring’s been busy. So busy, in fact, it was hard to squeeze Mother’s Day into the mix. But it managed to settle comfortably into the small amount of space available.
The kids couldn’t come home because wedding showers and ceremonies have eaten up weekends and gas money. But they called on Sunday, and the sheer pleasure of talking to the amazing young adults they’ve become and to the wonderful mates they’ve chosen made up for their absence.
Finding time to honor my mother was tricky too, since her granddaughter graduated from college the day before Mother’s Day. She went to UNI with my brother’s family for the ceremony and were too tired for any big doing the next day. So Hiram and I drove down and took her out for pie – except she hadn’t eaten lunch yet so she had a patty melt while Hiram and I ate pie. An odd celebration, but it worked.
Hiram’s mother isn’t with us, but the other day I looked out the kitchen window at the tree we planted in her memory several years ago. Memories of her vibrant, eccentric presence flooded through me, and I shook my head. For the first time, the tree looks more treeish than sapling. Has she really been gone that long?
Our littlest crab apple tree finished blooming last week, the one Hiram and Anne planted for Mother’s Day a few years back. It’s not trying too hard to become a tree, being short to start with and not very ambitious. It’s biggest claim to fame came last year when a flock of spring robins got tipsy eating the fermented fruit still hanging from it’s branches. The tree strained under the weight of the birds, but remained upright. Kind of reminded me of Cindy Brady from the Brady Bunch, the youngest child in a big family determinedly trying to keep up with the bigger kids.
The crab apple tree reminds me of all that’s happened since it became part of our yard – Mom breaking up housekeeping after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the healing and life changes our son has experienced, our self-conscious daughter blossoming into a confident woman, our neurotic daschund moving in with my brother’s family, the birth of my bouncing baby book, my husband becoming a motorcycle dude at age fifty – all those things that squeezed their way into our unsuspecting days and made themselves completely at home.
Kind of like Mother’s Day squeezing its way into the busyness of our lives this year. I’m getting used to it, becoming comfortable with it. This May, I wouldn’t want things any other way.
