~ These beautiful flowers are for you Mama ~
picked from your Mock Orange bush you so lovingly
planted many years ago in our backyard...

You see, there's a story behind most of my
mama's flower bushes
~ Her flowers were like she was ~ never plain nor ordinary ~

Mama had an old scraggly rose bush by her porch stoop that my husband planted for her over 20 years ago.  It should have been an extradorinary plant ... and it would have been too ... except it didn't get much sunlight because of the Rose of Sharon tree and the house blocking the sun's rays.

But every summer that old bush would produce a most beautiful rose every now and then ... it would be large and yellow with a pink center and had the most glorious scent one could ever imagine!

Mama never missed a bingo game if she could help it ... she loved it just about as much as she did Yahtzee.  Hardly a week passed where she didn't play Yahtzee with her sisters and friends.  Then one day, she suffered a massive stroke that just about took everything away from her except her life.  She and I worked almost a year trying to get back to life as it once was.  We didn't quite make it but did get to the place where she could once again play bingo.  During the last year of her life, she moved to a beautiful nursing pavilion where they played bingo at least twice a week. 

Now it was almost winter, and after returning home on a Tuesday Bingo Day in November of 1993, there were two beautiful roses blooming on this very cold day.  Try as I might, I couldn't break them off their bush for the heavy thorns.  Wanting to take them to her the next day, I went into the house for a knife.  The phone rang and that was the last thoughts I had of the beautiful yellow roses.

The next morning, Mama was admitted to the hospital for a fractured leg.  She was scheduled for surgery on Friday morning but her frail body could not wait any longer.  She left us on that early, cold Friday morning ... taking a journey to where she had always looked forward and sang so many songs about ~

I'd forgotten all about the roses until they were brought to my attention.  My youngest son was always Mama's angel.  He plucked those two sweet smelling roses ... made rose water perfume from one of them, the one I had attempted to break from the stem a few days before, bottled it up in one of Mama's miniature bottles and gave it to her as his gift.  The other rose he placed with her in her everlasting sleep.

But that's not the end of this story ~ my husband and I decided to move that rose bush to the front of the house, along with one his mom had given us that was planted on the other side of the house and also not receiving enough sun.  Well, both rose bushes died that summer.  But the next spring, an Easter Lily came up in the very exact spot where Mama's rose bush had been.  And you ask, "How did that happen?" ... your guess is as good as mine ... because we've never planted Easter Lilies anywhere in our yard before ... and we'd been living here for 14 years.

...  "Others"  My mother's song

... Mother's Day