Published: May 09, 2008 08:01 pm            

HAMILTON: Mother’s Day carnations

If all dictionaries were pictures-only with no definitions at all, then her picture would be in all of them next to the word Grandma.

That Mother’s Day morning, all alone in the near emptiness of the church’s sanctuary — just after the spring sun had wiped away the last of the giant drops of the morning rain and had pushed away the day’s darkest clouds — she sat there staring past the pulpit cross and out through the colorful windows.

While her eyes were fixed far past even the distant sun, the colorful light poured upon her shoulders and danced in an aura around her, and then willowed up towards the cathedral ceiling like the morning mist on a pastoral pond, leaving her paired with the perfect peace of a lily pad resting upon the surface of wind tickled waters.

As I passed down the pews near her, I noticed her sitting with a Bible on her lap and her hand upon that Bible. In it was one of the single, unadorned carnations that we had given to all of the mothers that morning.

While her hand held the carnation, in her eyes was the gentle glory of the quiet storms that had long ago etched the pictures of the thousands of joys and sorrows that hung in the mirrored hall of her soul. As her transfixed mind meandered through the seasons of those reflected images, a million memories slowly marched within her aging and aching heart as droplets formed on her eyelashes like the warm dew on the spring grasses. I stopped and asked her if there was something wrong and she assured me that there was not, and then she quickly looked away. A moment later I asked again, and she reassured me of her wellness.

“Do you need a ride home?”

She looked up at me again, and, “No, my grandson is on the way to pick me up” she said, pushing her answer through a forced smile and fading back into her thoughts.

But I felt the hand of her heart knocking upon the door of my own and I asked her again, “Are you sure that you are all right?”

She slowly nodded, and then the tears that had welled up within her soul began to trickle down her cheek. Wiping those moist droplets of sweet sorrow with the back of her hand, she then said the only words that her soft voice would allow; “Yes, I’m sure.”

I pondered a moment more before slowly and lovingly asking, “Then, why are you crying?”

As she then looked towards me, the fountain in her eyes cascaded into a full-fledged stream of tears, and her trembling answer shook my very soul.

“I am 67 years old,” she said, “and this is the first time in my life that anyone has ever given me a flower."

She reached out and patted my hand and whispered a very warm, “Thank you.”

It is hard to imagine how much that grandmother had to have given to so many others in all of her 67 years, yet no one had ever given her something as simple as a carnation.

Years later, I still think back to that first rainy Mothers Day of our new church whenever I drive past the corner where I picked up, at cost, the entire remaining inventory of a rain-soaked vendor -- standing with a newspaper over his head and bouquets of cellophane-wrapped carnations in his hand -- just so he could get out of the weather. Truly, in the end, while I picked up all of the flowers from the vendor, it took but a single flower to pick up both a grandmother and me.

The hand of God reached down that afternoon and took the spirit of the simple flower that she held in her hand and placed it forever into the plain, earthen vase of my soul. It still grows there, watered by her tears and the sunshine of her words.

Now, with a heart full of blossoming hopes, I wish that every son buys someone’s mother, and one other, a Mothers Day flower so that their picture will be in the definitionless dictionary under “son” and that we all have a Happy Mother’s Day.

Ken Hamilton is a Niagara Falls resident. His columns run Fridays in the Gazette. He welcomes feedback at Ken Hamilton930@aol.com.

        

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