My mother died more than 20 years ago and not a day goes by that I don’t remember her in some small way.  Memories about my mom often catch me off guard. . . one day shortly after my mom died, I was in a coffee shop and saw a so called “left handed” coffee cup.  My mother was a proud left hander and would have gotten quite a kick out of that cup, but I was overcome with grief and longing and could not get out of the coffee shop fast enough.  Songs on the radio sometimes provoke memories of my mother and the profound grief always follow.

People say, “time will make it better,” and in some respects they are correct.  Time blunts the sharp edges of raw grief, but time does not remove the grief.  I still feel it every day.  There are still times when I want to pull my hair and stomp my feet and demand to see my mother NOW! But those moments eventually pass.

Used to be I could not go near a card shop any time near Mothers’ Day, so I just avoided places where I might see the clusters of people searching for the perfect Mothers’ Day card.  Mothers’ Day would come and go and I would try to ignore it and the dull throbbing pain of not_having_a_mother to call or go see or send a card to.

My mother loved flowers but wasn’t much of a green thumb.  As a child, I remember my mother planting nasturtiums in a flower bed that nothing else would grow in. My mother called them “nasty stur-shums” and we would pick the leaves and eat them in our salads.  My mother also loved red geraniums and so in the summer time there were always pots of red geraniums placed around the yard.

Long ago my sister told me that she’d buy flowers every year around Mothers’ Day and place them in a vase on her kitchen table in remembrance of mom.  It wasn’t until later that year, while standing in line at the local nursery holding a pot of red geraniums in my hand that I realized why I planted geraniums in the pots on my front porch every year.