Mom loved flowers as a child and her passion grew as she
matured into adulthood. Grandma always had a few rose bushes next to the
vegetable patch. It was a luxury few farmers could afford – they had to use
every sliver of dirt to plant food.
When Mom and Dad lost their house to the social engineering
commies who forced them out of their small abode and off the land, there was no
place to plant flowers in the tiny grey concrete apartment. She had a couple of
pots with geraniums as space permitted. The tiny balcony could have housed a
few pots in summer time but we used it to string up a clothes line, hidden from
view.
During our courtship in the late seventies, my fiancé at the
time used to send me Inter-Flora orders of flowers once a month. The downtown
shop delivered with a frown a large bucket of roses or carnations, usually 100
stems. The frown always meant, “How dare I receive such ostentatious capitalist
gifts since many people could not afford or find food?” Because Bill paid in dollars and the Romanian
currency was so weak, $40 bought a lot of flowers. I shared my happiness every
time with all my neighbors in the 15 apartments on our stairwell. It was a visual
luxury, ray of sunshine and color in an otherwise drab existence.
When Mom came to the U.S. and moved in with us in the
faculty house we rented for three years at a southern university where I taught
part time and was a graduate student, she planted a beautiful garden every
summer filled with egg plants, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, okra, squash, cantaloupe,
and a few rose bushes.
The physical plant superintendent who cared for the
university grounds loved her garden! Many people would drive up to admire the
bounty. Mom was always outside with her white wide-brimmed hat on and the
sleeves rolled up, pulling weeds, fertilizing, picking ripen veggies every day,
sharing the extra with our neighbors, waving at the cars passing by who blew
their horns in admiration. The garden was her pet, her child. A couple of
times, summer school classes in horticulture brought their students to visit Mom’s
huge garden. The students were in awe that one woman could produce so much
food. It was Mom’s labor of love.
To me Mom’s garden was an expression of freedom, the freedom
that was denied to her in the utopia that crushed the human spirit. The
egalitarian paradise we fled from had denied her the right and joy to own land
and grow vegetables on it to feed her family.
My husband David brings carnations home from the grocery
store sometimes. There is always a twinkle in his blue eyes when I eagerly open
the cellophane wrap and put the flowers in the maroon crystal vase Mom brought
from Romania almost twenty years ago. His attentiveness brings us joy and
brightens the room instantly. I am sure Dad approves from Heaven. David is so
much like my Dad; he would have loved him, had he had the chance to meet him.
I think I inherited mom’s love of flowers and her green
thumb. Since HOA does not allow us to have a garden, I plant as many rose
bushes, lilac, and other flowers that I can possibly fit in my yard without
being fined by the HOA. The deer, the rabbits, the birds, the bees, the humming
birds, many insects and the very destructive Japanese beetle love my flowers
too.
© Ileana Johnson
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