Call Your Mother

This is the title of Tom Friedman’s Op Ed article in the NYT today. He gives us these directions because for the first time in his life, he can’t call his mother; she died this past year. So if you have a mother, be grateful that you can call her.

I did the math and was amazed to learn that I haven’t been able to call my mother for nineteen years.

Mom was not a fan of Mother’s Day. She believed it was a construct of the Hallmark greeting card company and was to be ignored. 
“Everyday should be mother’s day,” she used to say.

And it is. She is woven into the fabric of my life and I think of her often.

This morning as I sipped my tea and gazed out at the hillside in back of our house, I admired the large mountain laurel that grow there. Mom brought those to us as tiny seedings twenty five years ago, along with tiny dogwood trees and rhodos. She had discovered them in the Phillips Academy Bird Sanctuary that was directly behind their house in Andover.

History: When our parents bought the Andover house, the Phillips Academy Board of Trustees voted to create a gate in the Sanctuary fence that would allow them to enter right from their back yard. This was a special honor bestowed on Dad in appreciation for his long years of service to the school. Surely the Trustees imagined Mom and Dad strolling down the gravel roads, taking in the beauty as they aged gracefully over the years.

I am sure they did not imagine that this easy access would encourage pillage and plunder of plant material! How was it that laurel, vinca, and dogwoods jumped the fence and took firm root in Mom’s garden? Even more puzzling, some of them ended up in Lincoln!

Mom was always good at pruning and I have no doubt that the thinning was good for the plants in the Sanctuary. It was not as well tended as it should have been she often said. Mom provided a valuable service.

Our mother was an accomplished gardener. I was intimidated by the thought of creating a garden here in this woodlot in Lincoln where every time I put a shovel in in the ground, I hit a rock. No Garden State, this Massachusetts! Our Summit garden was amazing, helped by the fact that it was set in a surprisingly fertile, temperate part of the country.

When I’d ask Mom for gardening advice, she’d calmly say, “ just create a woodland garden” and kept bringing me shade tolerant plants which were tiny escapees from her neighboring Eden.
I hate to admit that many of the plants that she brought me died. I was busy with two young children, a teaching job and a house under construction, and tending more small living things was beyond me.

But her laurels have lived and thrived in our acid soil beneath the canopy of tall hemlocks. Blessedly the deer, our new hungry neighbors, don’t like the taste of them. So, thanks Mom, for helping us establish a woodland garden. It is all because of you.