When my mother was rested and happy, her eyes were the color of bluebells. During late March in England, bluebells carpeted the forest and unfarmed hillsides. Each blossom was a bell, a delicate invested cup the color of a late summer sky, rolling over acres of mature cornfields. A sky on a day after the rains have stopped, unadorned and simple in beauty. Their petals are the color of periwinkle, like cold water lapping over a pool of shallow rocks beside a shore of snow. The blue of smooth silk dresses and spring tablecloths. In full bloom, these blue cups tilt toward the sky hiding the earth with a shimmer of sapphire sheen.
When I was eleven, I stood at the edge of the bluebell meadows, feasting on their color. Running back to the house, I grabbed the bucket used for scrubbing to carry the bluebells that I wanted to take home.
My mother’s home was lacking in softness; beauty took a back seat to the basic necessities involved in caring for her ten children.
Then, in my mother’s life, the day included no time for picking and arranging flowers. She woke up children, fried bacon and eggs, supervised the wearing of school uniforms, matching socks, coats, and hats. In the mornings, she gathered piles of laundry, washed it, ironed shirts, smoothed tablecloths, swept floors, and made beds. Dinner was such a tremendous feat to accomplish that its beginnings were initiated right after breakfast. My mother’s daily crowning achievement was sending her children to school with clean hands and clothes and feeding them a hearty dinner each night.
The bluebells started at the edge of the trees. As I entered the woods, my legs became tangled in the cluster of their stalks. Crouching into the sea of blue, I found the base of each flower, gently bent its stalk, and twisted it loose. Milky nectar oozed over my fingers and down my forearms like pancake syrup, sticky and viscous. I held the flowers close to my face to inspect the little bells as they shook in the breeze like bells around the necks of cows walking through a pasture. Then, carefully to prevent crushing them, I placed each long stem into the bucket so the blossoms poked out of the top.
On the way to a full bucket, I examined the hairy moss on the barks of trees and the other gifts that the woods offered. In-between picking the bluebells, I cradled fallen chestnuts from under the greening trees, cracking their hulls and rubbing the shiny boot-brown nut underneath with my sticky hands. In the hollows between the trees, I found walls built with old dead tree branches, scattered rocks, and other debris from the forest floor.
Eventually, the bucket was full, and I skipped home with it swinging from my arm like the milk maids that I read about in fairy tales who carried pails full of milk from the barn to the house every morning.
I took out my mother’s two empty vases and filled them with flowers for the dining room table and the bookcase in the living room. After these were arranged, I stooped down to the cupboard where my mother kept empty jars, jars used for everything from leftover dinner vegetables to fish bowls for the brown fish we caught in the pond on the other side of the woods. I picked fat jars with large openings. When I tucked the bluebells inside them, they were transformed into wide-mouthed jars of crystal. The stalks showed straight and strong through the sides of the jars, and the bursts of bell blossoms sprayed over the ridges, bursting with profusions of blue so intense that, as I admired them, I felt like my feet rose off the floor and my heart fluttered like the wings of a hummingbird.
Once the bucket was emptied, every room in the house was accented by a bouquet of bluebells . . . on a dresser here, table there, or a windowsill.
My mother passed me as I stood back to appreciate their beauty. Her eyes creased into jewels, and, at that moment, her irises were the same hue as the petals of the bluebells, even though she wasn’t rested and had a whole list of things to do that day.
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