Tag Archives: daffodil

What Really Makes Me Tick (Happy)

Wouldn’t it be a better world if everyone knew what they needed to be happy? I’m retired, and I loved my teaching job; however, now that I don’t have to commute to work five days a week or grade college essays on the weekends, I just want to do things that make me happy. Here they are.

Admiring Flowers

Stopping to smell a rose may seem like an unimportant action, but, when I do it, it brings me joy. I have rose bushes in my front yard and back yard, and every morning, I wander outside to inspect every bush to see the new blooms. I sniff and stare and smile to my heart’s content.

I remember the flowers of my childhood, too. In January, crocuses poked out of the soil in the flower beds in the front yard. In February, the daffodils came. Tulips arrived in March, and Irises after them.  By the time Lent was over, Easter Lilies grew like sophisticated ladies in white hats in our back yard. And in May, the meadows were carpeted with Bluebells.

For four years of my childhood, I lived in England with my family, and I was impressed by the colorful blooms of summer that thrived in the temperate climate. Rambling roses climbed up cottage walls. Cosmos waved their rainbow heads in the breezes like pretty bonnets. Hydrangeas brightened shady nooks of gardens with their puffy burst of blue and pink. I was entranced by their beauty.

At Christmas, my mother bought at least one Poinsettia to decorate the house. She bought red poinsettias, white poinsettias, and ones with white flowers with red stripes. Sometimes, she had an amaryllis bulb growing in a pot. Every day, I’d inspect it to see whether it was blooming or not. I was in more of a hurry than it was.

Making a Stew or Pot of Soup

Whenever my dad cooked, he made “water” soup. He added pieces of beef and vegetables to a pot of water to create soup. Ugh. We kids would cringe when we saw him taking out a pot. His were the worst soups I’ve ever tasted.

Maybe that’s why I love making delicious soups.

I own an old Dutch oven that is the perfect size for making one-pot meals. Some mornings even before I change out of my pajamas, I scour the refrigerator and pantry for the ingredients for a minestrone—onions, celery, carrots, zucchini, chick peas, barley, chicken broth, chopped tomatoes, oregano, salt, and pepper. Sometimes I add cooked shredded chicken. Often, I don’t.

Or I find the fixings for chicken noodle soup for a recipe from a William’s Sonoma Soups book that I bought a long time ago. While I’m chopping the carrots and celery for this soup and simmering the chicken breasts in the broth, I think back when I made this for my two children who loved it. I see their little faces above their steaming bowls, their hands holding spoons, their mouths filled with savory egg noodles.

On one European trip, I bought cookbooks in the Czech Republic and Austria, so when I want to make goulash, I search for recipes from those books. My favorite goulash is a beef, onion, and smoked paprika concoction that is topped with cornmeal dumplings. I first ate cornmeal dumplings at the restaurant at the Belvedere Palace Museum in Vienna. I’m still practicing to make mine taste as good as those were.

Reading Inside When It’s Cold Outside

To me, the essence of decadence is waking up in the morning, seeing that it’s cold and rainy outside, then reaching for a novel and reading it in bed. To take all the time in the world to read a story, then stopping and thinking about it is heaven on earth.

Reading when its cold outside reminds me of when I read as a child. I had time to sit on the floor in a corner of the house with a treasured book of fairy tales and get lost in another world. When my mother took me to the open-air market, I found the bookstore, walked to the back shelves, pulled out a tome, and read it while sitting on the floor. I was always afraid that the shop owner would find me and kick me out, but he never did.

Decorating My Home

When I was a child, we never had an expensive home, but that didn’t keep us from making it beautiful. In the spring and summer, I picked flowers in the meadows, poked them into vases and brightened every table and dresser in the house. In the fall, I cut branches of colored leaves for the mantel in the living room. For winter, my mother and I found pine cones and spray-painted them silver and gold for Christmas. We added holly and pine branch garlands in-between them.

Today, when a new season comes, I still have the irresistible urge to celebrate it with seasonal décor. Right now, I have a collection of pumpkins on my front porch accompanied by a little witch. I also have put pumpkins on the table on the back patio so we can feel the season when we go outside in the afternoons. Every time I pass these decorations, I feel like celebrating.

Writing

I wrote my first poem when I was nine years old, and I’ve been writing ever since. Sometimes, I use writing to help me sort out a problem. Currently, I’m the chair of a scholarship committee for a charitable organization. When I’m planning the meeting agendas, I write them to organize my thoughts. When I’m thinking about how to improve my author’s platform, I write my thoughts down. I write down daily affirmations and New Year’s Eve resolutions. I write every day.

Even when I’m traveling, I have a journal that I use to take notes or write a spontaneous poem. I remember one vacation that I took by myself to Boston. After I toured Paul Revere’s tomb and all of Boston’s historic sites, I drove north up the Atlantic coast. I stopped in Salem and visited another graveyard where a huge oak tree that had gotten so big over the centuries that tombstones were poking out of its bark halfway up. There was so much to write about. Finally, I stopped the car at the edge of the road near a beach. As I sat in the sand and gazed over the surging navy-blue sea, I wrote a poem about the peace that I felt.  

When I visited Sorrento, Italy, I stayed in the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria. Our room had a large terrace that overlooked the Sorrento Harbor. Across the Bay of Naples with its slate-blue ripples, we could see Mount Vesuvius. Every day, I sat at the patio table on this terrace with my journal to write about the gorgeous scenery or about my excursions into the town of Sorrento or its nearby attractions. I wrote how my husband had to scrunch down going into the Blue Grotto Cave in Capri. I described the ceramic factories that we toured in Almalfi. With words, I wondered what it was like to be a citizen of Pompeii in 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius spewed its lava all over the populated city.

Now that I think about it, I’ve been doing these happy things my whole life. Naturally. Now, though, I have more time to do them. What joy.

Rosie’s Blooms

My mother’s name was Rose Marie—most appropriate for when she attended church, sitting at the end of the third row, her mouth pursed into a straight line and her eyes staring obediently at the altar.  Yet, one of her male friends called her “Rosie,” which, most of the time, suited her better.  She was feisty, knew how to get you to do what she wanted, and a woman with the most interesting hobbies.  One of her favorite hobbies was her appreciation of flowers. 

It’s not surprising, then, that I’ve loved flowers since I was a little girl.  When I was four years old, playing house with my younger brother, my mother grew calla lilies in a corner of the back yard.  I admired heir smooth, white bell-shaped flowers and bright, yellow pistils, and my mother called them “resurrection” flowers because they bloomed around Easter time when Jesus rises from the dead. 

My mother cut the lilies and took them indoors to decorate our dining room table.  I loved their intoxicating scent–a comforting aroma of clover mixed with a lemony fragrance.  Their creamy-textured petals exuded luxury, and they lasted longer than most other cut flowers.

When we lived in Air Force base housing for four years in England, my mother planted bulbs in the rectangular planting beds under the windows in the front yard.  After the snow melted in late January, daffodils poked their green shoots out of the brown soil.  Day by day, I watched them grow bigger and taller.  The flower knobs soon formed, and, slowly, pastel yellow flowers peeked out from the green stalks until one day they brightened our simple front yard with happy yellow fringed trumpets. 

After the daffodils lost their blaze, the tulips came up behind them like copycats—rising like slender dolls out of the earth until, in a few weeks, their red cups of petals swayed in the light breezes of March.  My mother told me to never pick a tulip because they represented perfect love, and she wanted them to bloom for as long as possible to bring good luck to our home. The variety of tulips that she grew were just right—not too showy, not too dramatic, not overly romantic.  When they were blooming, our front yard felt comfortable and stable.

Across the street from this house on Shepherd’s Way was a forest where bluebells bloomed in mass profusion every April and May.  English bluebells are associated with fairies, those miniature creatures that cause mischief for humans.  I had a wistful imagination, and I spent hours walking amongst these bluebells with their sticky stems, watching for fairies and feeling grateful for the experience of being lost in a sea of blossoms. 

My mother let me take a bucket out to the forest and fill it full of bluebells.  I brought them home and arranged them in as many vases I could find, and when the vases were full, I used Mason jars for the rest of the flowers.  I placed vases and jars full of the humble bluebells on bookcases, tables, dressers, and night stands, and my mother’s blue eyes lit up when she saw them.

My high school years were dominated by carnations.  Homecomings, proms, dances, and balls called for corsages, and corsages always came as carnations.  After the dances, I saved each corsage by sticking its stem into a tiny vase of water.   Later, I dried it out on a saucer on my dresser, and, often, lifted it to my nose to inhale its floral and peppery scent. My mother didn’t like them because their scent reminded her of funerals and sadness.

When I was seventeen, my mother and I visited The Berkeley Rose Garden, a colorful display built into the hills of Berkeley comprised of hundreds of varieties of roses and thousands of individual rose bushes.  The rose beds were terraced on the hills into the shape of an amphitheater and separated by flagstone paths. 

My mother taught me the differences between polyantha roses, floribunda roses, and tea roses, and she explained how new roses were developed by cross-breeding every year.  I liked the polyantha buses for their smaller heights and tightly packed blooms.  I liked the floribunda bushes for their profusion of blossoms on branching stems, especially the varieties that produced variegated blooms like “purple tiger”—roses with streaks of purple, lavender, and white in each flower.  These showy bushes had other dramatic names, too, like Celestial Night, Scentimental, Sweet Madame Blue, and Forever Amber. 

Most of all, I adored the tea roses—their thick stems punctuated by large thorns and leaves that grew in patterns of five, with the stems ending in large graceful blooms of circling petals.   The names for these sophisticated blooms were grandiose—Double Delight, Mister Lincoln, Chantilly Cream, Love Song, and Oympiad.

Arbors held the climbing roses like the orange Top of the World, the pink Pearly Gates, and the lavender Long Song varieties.  Shrub roses and tree roses filled in every nook and cranny so that the whole garden produced a cacophony of colors for our eyes.

Together, we read the names of as many varieties as we could, pausing at the ones that were the most fragrant or dazzling.  I nestled my nose into the blooms as deep as I dared, trying to memorize the smells forever.  Never before had I been in the midst of such splendor, unrivaled beauty, and mesmerizing fragrances.

According to Mother, each color of rose had its own meaning and the number of roses given has a significance as well.  Yellow roses are for friendship and red roses show love.  Six roses means a growing affection and a dozen roses demonstrates complete love. 

The Berkeley Rose Garden also possessed an incomparable backdrop for our mother-daughter conversation.  As we walked together between the rows, we wondered at the vast view of the San Francisco Bay where the Golden Gate Bridge spread across the Bay’s exit like the arms of a graceful goddess.  The water changed from denim to indigo to periwinkle to cerulean to navy to slate depending on how the surrounding hills cast their shadows, the currents massaged its surface, and the sun penetrated into the prisms of the ocean’s molecules. 

Back at home, around the perimeter of my mother’s Sacramento patio grew dozens of camellia bushes under the shade of a giant mulberry tree.  From November to April, these glossy green overgrown bushes produced hundreds of curly, pink blossoms.  Mother told her children that camellias mean “young sons and daughters,” which seemed so fitting for my mother’s house since she had ten children who were easily outnumbered by the profusions of camellias in her garden.

When my mother moved into an assisted living apartment, she made sure that she had a vase in her cupboard for flowers.  This vase was about 8 inches high and made out of white milk glass; any type of flower would look beautiful in it.   

She had developed macular degeneration in both eyes, so she couldn’t read or, sometimes, even find the food on her dinner plate; she could, however, always sense when you held a bouquet of flowers in your hands to give her.  A smile that matched the petals of a pink rose would light up her face as she took them from you. 

She asked you to put them in her vase or find a place for them on her desk or window sill.  Every few days, she called and told you how they looked or smelled, or how many blooms were still perky or drooping, until one day, she called and told you that she was cleaning out the vase.  I gave her lilies at Easter, red roses during the summer, chrysanthemums during the fall, and a poinsettia at Christmastime.  Her favorite were always the roses because, after all, she was named after them.

I ordered the flowers for my mother’s casket when she died.  The funeral representative recommended a spray of red roses and red carnations, but I knew better.  Never would I allow carnations to come near my dear mom.  I ordered the largest spray of red roses I could because I knew that nothing less would make her happier.

The officiate at the gravesite told us that red roses were such an appropriate choice.  “Red roses symbolize eternal love,” he said.  We placed our spray of eternal love over her gravesite after the service, and their blooms thrived for weeks in the chilly California air of December and January. 

Two months later, my husband bought me a dozen deep red roses for Valentine’s Day.  I carefully extracted them, one by one, from the brown wrapping paper, snipped each stem with a pair of sharp pruning scissors by about one inch, and arranged them in a tall, clear crystal vase filled with fresh water and rose food.  Then, I ceremoniously placed the vase of love on the coffee table in the living room—a place visible from most places in our house during the day. 

One day, as he sat in an arm chair in front of these red roses, he told me how wonderful he felt looking at their beauty.  “I’ve never thought about how beautiful flowers looked before,” he said, with joy filling his eyes.  “I want to sit here forever.”

I realized then, that my mother’s appreciation of flowers was so strong that its influence had passed from her to me, and through me, to my husband.  My love for flowers also positively influences my son, my daughter, my friends, and even people I don’t know with the optimistic power of beauty. 

My mother—my Rosie knew that the delicate blooms of flowers—so ethereal in their form and beauty—are most extraordinary at communicating the powerful, yet intangible nature of love.