The encroaching winter is causing my innards to churn this year, which is unsettling. I suppose saying that about churning innards is redundant. Maybe, because the last two winters were so painful and difficult, I’ve now developed a conditioned emotional response to the dark on both sides of the day. Maybe my lack of ability to have a say or any control over the endless delays of my future home has just worn away the enamel and is now hitting the nerve roots. Moving into a small town when everyone’s boarded up in their homes is not the best way to find new friends and places to be.
For sure the lack of contact with my sons, busy with their lives and, in one case, now living a “low contact with mom” existence means this season, which used to be my favorite, just means missing them more. I understand he’s going through a hard time. I don’t understand his decisions, but they’re not mine to understand. All I can do is nothing, and that is the thing I’m the very worst at. I also have to remember that the person I’m missing so deeply is not there right now, at least not for me.
Forty-five years ago I was living in New York City. I was twenty years old, but it had been about five years since I’d lived at home with my parents full-time. My father describes the relationship between my mother and me as Godzilla vs King Kong, but I prefer to think of it as Godzilla vs Mothra, me being the heroic protector of her own culture and accompanied by twin, singing fairies. Regardless, it’s hard to find a house in the city big enough to fit two creatures of that size, so this creature had to get out of there early and often.
That didn’t mean I didn’t get homesick. I did. Just not for my home, exactly. I’d often wish for some place safe and calm as I crashed through the waves, as people around me commented on how nothing bothered me, or how independent I was, or what a “hoot” I was. But honestly, what were the options? Still, I spent a lot of time homesick for a place that didn’t exist for me.
My mother meant well, she was just plagued by more insidious demons. Godzilla was just setting a pick, as they say in basketball, or creating a screen so that the real monsters could get to work destroying the island from within. But she tried. Unfortunately that usually meant buying me some enormous, hideous piece of jewelry I’d never wear and declaring in an overly-joyful tone, “I saw this and thought of you!”
Funny, but not. My sister and I would exchange glances as she adorned me with chunky wooden giraffe necklaces, or giant lucite hoop earrings, or a pin so big and heavy it pulled my sweater down and flopped over, hiding the brooch. Oh yes. Totally me.
On my twentieth birthday the buzzer in my building rang. I went downstairs and a delivery guy handed me a beautiful bouquet of yellow tea roses. I was living with my boyfriend at the time and assumed they were from him, but in the elevator going back up to the eighth floor I opened the card.
Happy birthday honey, love, mom
I couldn’t believe it. The roses were lovely. Perfect.
I tucked the card in the small jewelry box I had, in which I kept a few precious things, and put the roses in water. After a few days they were starting to wilt, and I decided to dry them, so I cut the stems shorter, hung them upside down, tied them to a string and dried them over the radiator in the living room.
I was working at a store called Pasta & Cheese—I won’t tell you what they sold—and I’d absconded with a jar that had held discs of Italian sheep’s milk cheese packed in olive oil. When the roses were dry, I put them in the jar.
I’ve dried flowers from events in my life ever since. That Italian cheese jar holds flowers from my birthdays, flowers that the boys picked me or bought me when they were young and when they were grown. There are flowers from my wedding bouquet, from anniversaries, and flowers from a bouquet a friend brought me the day my divorce came through. There are flowers from friends’ weddings, and from mother’s day bunches the kids came running in with. There are flowers from congratulations bouquets sent for record releases, job promotions, and house closings. There are get well soon flowers, and holiday cuttings from centerpieces my parents sent. There are flowers from every friend’s funeral, and from my mother’s funeral.
The yellow tea roses long ago turned to dust at the bottom.
At some point several years ago the jar would fit no more flowers. The timing coincided with the boys living elsewhere, and with other big changes, and I felt like the adventure of life was over. The jar was full, and how lucky I was to have filled it. But I was also deeply sad.
“Mom, just get another jar,” said one of the boys.
Oh.
And then they got me a bouquet of flowers.
I’ve looked for another of those Italian cheese jars on the internet for years and I’ve never been able to find one, so I made do with a giant Ball jar.
The Ball jar is also full now, but the flowers have slowed down considerably, so the settling and packing has time to catch up with the rate of flowers to put in. That is what life is like, after all.
The jars sit with me in the living room as I read, or type, and while I might miss people who are no longer here, or are gone for now, the jars remind me that they were real. I need help with that sometimes.
“What would you take if you had one minute to get out in a fire?”
I hear people ask that from time to time, and I always think my list would be the dog, my wallet, and the Italian cheese jar filled with flowers, and a lifetime of memories I call home.
Love this -the word coming to my mind is: poignant. It seems we can't actually realize it until so much is behind us, it was never apparently ours to keep. Beautifully written.
BEAUTIFUL!!!!! Oh how I’ve been looking forward to this piece explaining the dried flowers in a jar!! It was better than I had imagined. Thank you for sharing your life… the messy parts, the sentimental parts, the painful parts, all of it. A life summed up with pretty flowers and a multitude of color ❤️❤️!