Category Archives: family

daffodils

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Ya got me on a run here. After writing about my honeysuckle memories, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about daffodils.

When I was in third, fourth and fifth grades, my mom and I lived in Urbana, Illinois. Smack dab in tornado alley central Illinois. My mom was going to the university and working and we were pretty poor. In order to make some extra money and teach me a lesson in earning my own money, my mom got the idea one year to drive back home to southern Illinois, pick daffodils and bring them back to Urbana to sell them. We did this all three years we lived in Urbana.

Daffodil season in southern Illinois is in early Spring. Mid-March is prime time for the perfumed yellow (and sometimes white) flowers. We would bundle up in chilly central Illinois and drive south to where it was warmer and flowers were blooming. It was a marker of Spring.

Stores sell daffodils in either little planter pots with three or four flowers, or as small bunches wrapped in paper to take home and put in a vase. The ones that we picked grew in fields reminiscent of the uninterrupted poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz. We would drive on bumpy old gravelly back roads until we found a field. Then we would jump out and fill our baskets with the sweet-smelling flowers.

My mom taught me to not pick too many from one bunch lest we strip the flowers from that location. Pick selectively, she advised.

We would gather all day, then spend the evening with my grandparents walking through the woods and warming up next to the wood-burning fireplace while watching the sun set over the Shawnee hills.

Home.

When it was time to leave, we would wrap the flowers and pile them in the old red Fiat and drive the four hours back to Urbana. Monday morning we would take our baskets full of daffodils and sell them for .25 to students and professors on campus. People greeted us with smiles of delight. The flowers reminded them that Spring was just around the corner.

Like a lot of fragile, beautiful things, daffodils are also short-lived so we had a small window in which we could do this adventure each year.

Those simple days shared with my mom were wonderful. To this day, the daffodil remains my favorite flower. It is sunny, fragrant, delicate and graceful.

And the sad thing is that right now I can’t conjure up the smell of my most beloved flower.

simpler days

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I miss my family.
I miss home – not the town, but the simple, beautiful, idealized home of my childhood.

Christmas mornings waking up with my cousin and playing with our finger puppets and tossing aside the well-intentioned and ever-present stocking stuffer orange. She and I haggling over who would get to hand out presents and that strange green elf doll.

I have flash-bulb images of one-piece pajamas, snow-covered backyard hills, a simple single strand of white lights that grandpa always put in a tree near the road, mom directing the decorating of the tree, my cousin and I getting yelled at by grandma for sliding from the linoleum kitchen into the living room on that lovely parquay flooring while aiming our feet into the teak tri-tables nestled together against the far wall.

When I was seven we had a quintessential, iconic white Christmas.

The week before was the usual hustle and bustle. Grandpa was tasked to scout out and chop down a good sized tree for the living room, mom organized all the decorations and started to put ceramic angels on the bookshelf and a handmade red with green piping runner across the dining room table, grandma was busy baking, and I was helping wherever I was needed. My cousin-who-is-like-a-sister and her parents were coming into town and the house smelled like festive evergreen and cookies.

That Christmas of 1978 we got bright blue toboggans. The whole family bundled up and piled out into the backyard snow to test the new toys. I have 16mm reel-to-reel film of the event. My mom and me doubling up on one toboggan, sister and her mom on another…and down the big backyard hill we’d fly! Toboggans don’t steer well, so often we’d end up sliding sideways and coming to an ungraceful stop launched off the blue plastic into the snow, laughing and tumbling together.

Every year thereafter, grandpa would pull out the projector and screen. While he was winding the tape through the projector and onto the reels, grandma would make after-dinner tea and coffee. Somehow, the two would be ready at the same time, and we’d take our places for viewing; my cousin and I on pillows on the floor at grandma and grandpa’s feet, mom and my uncle on the black roundy swivel chairs. It was warm and full of comments and laughter.

This is my ninth Christmas without my grandfather, the fourth without my dad, and the second without my grandmother.

This year, for the first time, I felt like I am losing my connection; as if ‘home’ is a fading idea.

I am so grateful for the wonderful memories I have. I was lucky in that I got to have those wonderful, iconic experiences growing up. And I am sad that they are forever gone.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, grandma and grandpa and dad.
I miss you all very much.

worry

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Interstate 70 across Kansas is long and boring. It is even more so when you are driving through at night.

Many years ago I drove that stretch east to west and back again a number of times. This was pre-cell phones and when you were alone in the middle of nowhere, you were really alone. If your car broke down, hopefully some kind not-axe-murderer stranger would come along and give you a lift to the closest telephone or gas station/tow truck.

My grandmother was a worrier. She would proclaim so often. “I’m a worrier!” she would say to remind my mom and I, as if we could ever forget.

On those trips east to west and west to east on I-70, I made sure to call my grandma each night when I stopped at a motel-before I got settled in. Even if I got in late, I had to call in.
Otherwise grandma would worry.

This call-in requirement bothered my mom to no end. It annoyed her, it vexed her, it made her frustrated. But still, she did it too.

I loved the call-in requirement. It made me feel less alone on those long, dark stretches knowing that I had a call to make and a voice to connect with at the end of the night. I liked knowing someone out there was concerned about my welfare. Usually, it was just a simple, “Hi grandma! I’m in Alma at a Motel 6. Just got in.”
“Oh, good,” she’s say sleepily in her little grandma voice.
“I was just starting to worry.”