All in one's perspective...

"My mother gave me a completely priceless life."
Little Edith Bouvier Beale

Lilacs and Lullabies

“Earth gave us all the satisfaction we asked.”
Virginia Woolf, Reminiscences


It has been an odd kind of spring that has promised to warm, but then gone back to ice, and wind and unseemingly long dark nights that give way to frost on young leaves.

Lilacs have come bringing with them so many memories of other springs when a grandmother sat in a backyard swing with her arm around me - back and forth, squeek-squeek, back and forth, sigh-and-smile - softly singing "You Are My Sunshine" and talking of future evenings that would be lit by fireflies.

I can bring those evenings back (with a suddeness that sometimes brings tears) as long as the breeze has a hint of lilac left on it...And when the last hint is gone, all such memories are soflty folded away for another year.
SPM

Keller Williams Red Day

The sky was roughly the color of the flakes of slate that once made up the roof of the Hill House but lay now on the ground at its foundation. Well. Lay in the mud at its foundation, is more accurate because it was pouring cats and dogs. Or ponies and sheep...or radiatiators and wrenches, or...

And in this weather were tromping a little over a dozen Keller Williams agents, friends, family and a random little person. They had all come out to help get the new neighborhood garden started by planting perinnials along what would one day be a fenceline and gate arch but was today just a field of mud under pouring rain.

The effort was one more wonderful contribution of neighbors in the broader sense of the word coming together to help boost the gathering vitality in a pocket of one of Saginaw's wrongly-dreaded East Side neighborhoods. And, Surprise: The rain was the worst thing to befall any of them, and even the rain couldn't dampen grins in the mud...
SPM

All mothers give up something to be what they are...

 “When I try to see her I see more distinctly how our lives are pieces in a pattern and to judge one truly you must consider how this side is squeezed and that indented and a third expanded and none are really isolated, and so I conceive that there were many reasons then to make your mother show herself a little other than she was. We lived in a state of anxious growth; school, reports, professions to be chosen, marriage for the elders, books coming out, bills, health – the future was always too near and too much of a question for any sedate expression. All these activities, too, charged the air with personal emotions and urged even children, and certainly “the eldest,” to develop one side prematurely. To help, to do something was desirable, not to obtrude diffident wishes, irrelevant and possibly expensive.
So your mother, whose sight seemed in some ways so clear, took it upon herself to be what people call “practical”…”
Virginia Woolf, Reminiscences