Everytime we'd go to visit my grandparents, my grandmother would whisk my mother off to her garden and there they'd be pointing, talking, walking about for what seemed like hours and hours. As a child I wondered how you could talk about flowers for that long, I mean weren't they just...flowers?
Then I became a teenager and summer mornings I'd look out the window to see my Mom slowly walking alongside her garden, studying this, pulling up that, moving a flower here and there. I couldn't understand it. Those same flowers were there yesterday and the day before, what more was there to look at?
Now here I am, a young adult with a garden of my own. Every morning the same, I tell the girls to behave for a second while I sneak out back and look at my garden. I pull a few weeds, prop up a vine that has fallen over, marvel over how beautiful some plants look and wonder what to do about the plants that are struggling along. Just a few minutes, all my own, to enjoy the beauty that my hard work has slowly brought forth from the earth.
When my mother comes to visit, out we go to the backyard and we talk about things like why the nasturtium leaves are yellow and the dahlia leaves are brown. We talk about plans for next year and plants we'd like to have. Somehow, although they are "just flowers" there is always plenty to talk about.
And so, I now know what I'll be like in fifty years or so. I'm happy with that.
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