Mother’s Corsages and Easter

My Mother loved Easter. I believe in her mind Easter was really the beginning of spring and being a gardener and “green thumb” this meant she was now free to start her growing season.

For those of you that knew my Mother, you can attest to the fact that she could take a seemingly dead twig and poke it into the ground and it would blossom into a beautiful flower.

She loved flowers of all kinds and for her Easter, all the years I was in high school, I bought her a corsage. She would, after wearing it that one day, freeze it. When she passed and I cleaned out her freezer there was four years’ worth of her food bounty and sure enough, there were four corsages each marked with the year I had given it to her.

We took the food and her canned goods – beans, okra, corn, tomatoes, beets, pickles, and relish – and frozen items and gave them to Martha’s Vineyard in Paducah. I recall the lady we dealt with there being so grateful and reassuring me that they would use every single container they possibly could to feed the homeless.

Mother being of the depression era always over canned and over froze more vegetables than our household could possibly use. Now, even in her death, she was still giving away some of herself to others. I felt proud of her and recognized for the first time how beneficent my Mother truly was.

All through the many years, she was with us Mother would plant and tend a large garden. It was her source, I believe, of spirituality and strength and gave her purpose.

She had a 4th-grade education yet in many ways that level of education most assuredly would be equivalent today to at least a 9^th grade one. She could “cipher” and read and those were the two most important qualities of education to her.

She read the weekly newspaper front to back and always shopped for bargains at either Mr. Hancock’s place when he was out on US 68 or in my youth at Harry or J.W. Quinn’s IGA with Mr. Martin at the A&P and even now and then the old Sureway Store downtown.   She always relished visiting with Mr. Pruitt and Mr. Newsom when their stores were in operation in the 1960s.

But back to the corsages, you see my Mother never had “fine things” as she defined them and when my Dad left home during my high school years, well, I just felt she deserved something special. When I came home one Easter with a corsage for my then-girlfriend to wear to Easter service at church and she admired it so, the tradition began.

It took me a while that day, as I was cleaning the freezer out to throw away those frozen flowers. For me, that simple act of discarding them made me recognize that they were of great value to her.

I often wonder what else I could have done to show her I loved her as deeply as I did.

I hope this Easter Sunday she is reveling in the dawn of a new spring and in her heavenly home she has brought out her plants and started gardening again and most assuredly I suspect she is.