Poppies, Hummingbirds, Roses and Tears

My Mother’s Day bouquet

I find myself crying at strange times these days. The tears come in waves, sometimes in the shower for no apparent reason, sometimes when I’m driving if a particular song shows up on my Spotify playlist.

The news cycle batters me. I think that is what they are hoping for, whoever they are. I try to remember the things that troubled me, even a few weeks ago, but that I seem to have almost forgotten. Is Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia still in prison in El Salvador? Is anything being done to help him?

I didn’t write here last week. It was Mother’s Day weekend. I miss my Mom. I miss my kids. I am so happy for my children, that they are out in the world living their lives. I had loving phone calls with both of them, but there was no way to see them in person, which on an ordinary Sunday would not make me feel even the slightest bit of melancholy. But because it was Mother’s Day? There was a little of that. Just a touch. Unnecessary sadness, if you ask me.

Mother’s Day is a difficult holiday. I like Anne Lamott’s take on it, where she says that “Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path. Ha! Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment.”

My friend has a beautiful garden; her roses are blooming magnificently this year. She picked me a Mother’s Day bouquet. They are on my kitchen table now, hovering over my computer screen. If I lean forward, I can smell their sweetness.

The columbine are blooming in my front yard, also my snapdragons, poppies, the California lilac, our Dutch Flat daisies. I went out Saturday, a day when the temperature soared to the mid-80s and changed the batteries in the timers that take care of watering the different parts of my garden and attached hoses to the faucets and discovered what hoses had cracked over the winter and made a list of things to buy so that I can start watering again. Then the weather turned and it rained, a good soaking, so I had a few days before I need to worry about watering. The temperature also dropped and there was snow in the mountains and a big rig crash that closed West Bound I-80, a major thoroughfare, for hours.

What is all of this I am sharing with you? There are moments when I cry and then I go out into my yard and see a Bullock’s oriole at my hummingbird feeder. I’ve been refilling that feeder every morning now for the past week or so. I’m seeing more hummingbirds than ever before. They even seem to be drinking at the same time, three of them. That’s new. Usually, there’s only two, and one is a bully who chases the other one away.

My online writing group meets every weekday at 7:30 am, which is when I first wrote this. I hadn’t joined in a while. It was good to be back, to remember that I can write not only on a late Saturday evening, but also on a Tuesday morning, a cloudy day, where everything in the garden is damp with rain, and the hummingbirds are at the feeder. I said goodbye to my writing friends on Zoom and headed to the shower where maybe I cried a little.  I probably cried a little. It’s how I am making it through these days: poppies, hummingbirds, roses and tears.