As the bristles of the broom swept the red and yellow autumn leaves from the flagstone, my mind wandered to the Springtime when I’d be delighted by the first glimpse of the purple crocus rearing its delicate petals above the recently frozen earth.  But that sign of the coming warmth takes me back in time to my first memories of getting dirt under my fingernails.  Going up the walk from the driveway at 14021 Grayson Road, was the small flower bed that my mother taught me to tender.  There beneath the pink azalea,  given to her by my Uncle Bob a few years earlier, were nestled the purple and blue crocuses.  Later in the season to be joined by the tiger lilies and chrysanthemums.  

My mother taught me to bury those crocus bulbs in the Fall and each Sunday as Easter approached, we’d scan the small garden for signs of their approach.  When they finally arrived, I wanted to pick them, preserve their beauty, and somehow capture the exhilaration of a new season, with all its possibilities that those delicate flowers represented. 

For nearly 40 more years, those crocus have bloomed at 14021 in the garden tended so   graciously by my mother, now in her eighth decade.  Soon, she’ll be selling the only home that I’ve ever known for her and a piece of me is sad just as I was sad when the last crocus would lose its color and vibrance. Sometimes it’s easier to focus on what is fading rather than what is to come. 

Decades later I now remind myself that the beauty of the flower isn’t really in its color, texture, or delicateness, but rather in the warmth that it brings to our hearts when we think about it and remember its splendor, whether its mere minutes after it blooms or 35 years after we first saw it. 

I could give a detailed description of my mother’s house on the hill, including the etchings of seven kids’ writings in the “little attic” under the stairs, the small wooden arbor near the spigot in the back, or the grooves in the basement door from our four-legged family members,  Puppy, TJ, or Spike.  I know the physical structure intimately, but soon a new family will create their own memories there, painting over ours, and maybe even removing the crocus. Not knowing their previous significance.  But that is their new journey to create and ours, those of my mother and my six sisters, will forever be in our hearts, warming us, making us laugh and cry