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Mother always loved spring time best.

She loved the warming of the earth, bare arms and bare feet, and new life. She liked to stretch her arms above her head and shake off the winter and get dirt under her fingernails.

Mother loved growth. She kept a house full of plants even though her thumb wasn’t green, and she learned as she went. Some made it, and some didn’t. She didn’t mourn the lost (usually) and tried her best to enjoy the journey.

I remember the sight of her back, her backside, sprinting through summer downpours to rescue her half-drowned anthurium from under the azaleas. She squealed like a schoolgirl while her bare feet slapped at paving stones and puddles, twigs catching in her disheveled hair as she scooped up the anthurium like a frightened child and sprinted back to the house. She’d roll up her pants legs and wring out her hair and laugh, laugh, laugh. She always laughed when it rained.

Winters were hardest for mother, because she couldn’t find the beauty in them like most folk. She didn’t like to be cold and slept a lot, especially when we were little. When she couldn’t take it anymore we’d come home to find the fancy, wedding-present vases and an odd collection of coke and beer bottles filled with pine boughs, holly branches… anything she’d find green in the yard. They marched across the kitchen counter with a bouquet of supermarket daisies carefully spread between them. I’ve seen her arrange a stand of tall grass, when times were desperate and poor enough. Anything to get a bit of green in the house.