What a beautiful morning this is! The sun is shining, the water so blue, I’ve been in love, how ‘bout you?
In just 12 days, March 19 – the first day of spring in fact – my wife of 50 years married will have been gone one year. In addition to the too-many-to-recount memories (although I try) of her life and love planted deep in our hearts, our family planted in her memory dozens of tulips (her favorite flower, she was Dutch) and a flowering, weeping willow tree.
The tulip sprouts are already several inches high which is over-the-sunrise exciting, random brilliant colors soon to grace the specially built planter box that extends 64 (sixty-four!) feet.
At the lake-front water’s edge is the tree.
When we first planted the tree there was nothing on its spindly bare branches to indicate that it was what the tag said it was.
No, in fact, this scrawny, skeleton of a few twigs gave no evidence of what it could be, or even that it was alive.
I love these trees and so one year I purchased one for my mother, whose birthday was March 6.
I decided my mother’s tree, like my wife’s tree, needed some help.
In addition to buying the-whatever-it-was, I purchased a magazine containing all manner of pictures of flowers, trees that bloom, anything with color from roses to rhododendrons.
Then I carefully cut out maybe thirty or more of the prettiest of the bunch and taped them here and there to the otherwise rather sad looking branches of the so-called flowering, weeping willow tree.
Remarkably improved, this creation of mine needed only minor adjustment which was easily accomplished by moving the taped-on poinsettias so the taped-on pansies weren’t hidden in all the wild explosion of color.
Proudly I presented IT to my mom.
Clearly, from her initial reaction, she was beyond pleased.
In fact, she said so.
Releasing me from a big hug she said, “That’s beautiful! What is it?”
Whereupon I explained how this thing came about and she smiled and said, “How ‘bout we plant it and watch to see which of these flowers it really is?”
My mother, and my wife like her, were so down-to-earth practical about such things.
Then, and now soon, given this beautiful springlike weather, we’ll see no doubt a breathtaking pastel show of blossoms cascading down from delicate arched branches like an elegant chandelier, proof of what this tree was all along.
Kind of like our lives.
Buried in the darkness of hardship, struggling through winter’s weariness, we become – provide evidence, show our true colors – of what we really are as we emerge into life and love once again, perhaps better, more beautiful, for where we have been.
As a good friend of mine is fond of saying, “Just watch. You’ll see.”
