The greatest gifts in life are those that blossom from love

I was away at a conference at a small town in North Carolina, just at the edge of the Smoky Mountains.

It was an achingly beautiful autumn day. A low mist hung over the trees and the air was crisp and sweet. Oaks and sugar maples were ablaze. It had rained earlier so everything was wet, and the colors were clear and strong.

I didn’t want to hear another word from another speaker. I needed to be outside. So, at the first break, I gathered up my things and escaped.

Free at last, I took one of the narrow paths that led away from the lodge and wound up the hill to where century-old cottages were clustered overlooking the lake.

I walked past rows of tiny houses, painted storybook colors, and admired the front porches dressed with white rockers and potted ferns. The gardens were still full of late blooms.

Most of the houses were summer homes, places to escape the Southern heat and humidity. On that late October day they were shuttered and closed. Locked and covered until the next school holiday.

I passed one house that didn’t look like a child’s playhouse. It hadn’t been painted recently and beside the front door was an open umbrella. There was an old car – as faded as the house – parked in the drive.

I watched an elderly woman move slowly down the front walk, leaning on an aluminum walker for support. She moved to a low bench beside a narrow flower garden and sat down. Bending from the waist, she began to dig in the rich black soil. She pulled something out, dropped it into a paper bag and then dug into the dirt again.

The woman made slow progress. She looked up, noticed me, smiled and called out a greeting.

“What are you digging?” I asked.

She told me they were tender bulbs that could not survive the winter. Each year they had to be dug up and stored. When spring came, they went back in the garden.

I moved closer and walking over to where she sat, I crouched, close to the flower bed, close enough to smell the richness of the soil, and picked up one of the bulbs she had pulled to the surface.

“Do you do this every year?” I asked.

She did.

I looked up at her. The woman was old and as frail as one of the papery, rain-slick leaves that were scattered across the grass. We chatted for a few minutes and I offered to help her.

I pulled out the papers I’d stuffed into my purse before I left the meeting, put them on the ground to keep my knees dry, and went to work beside her.

I pushed the trowel into the earth and dropped the bulbs into the bag she held out to me.

One, two, a dozen went into the bag. As I scraped back the dead leaves and pushed another bulb to the surface, I asked her about the plants we were saving from the coming winter. What made them so special?

And then I understood.

The bulbs, she told me, had been a gift from her son. Years and years ago a little boy had brought his mother potted flowers. And, as mothers do, she’d been unable to simply throw it away after the bloom was gone. So she’d planted it in the front yard.

Decades passed and the gift multiplied, and each fall she saved as many as she could to plant again the next year.

The little boy was a man now. A man with children and grandchildren of his own. He lived a few hours away and each week he drove up to see her.

As we worked she told me about her boy and how sweet he had been, And what a good man he was now.

By the time we’d finished, the bag was full. And I was a mess.

The ground was sodden and the papers hadn’t protected the knees of my khaki pants. They were black with mud. My hands were dirty and there were smudges on my face.

We said goodbye and I walked back into the lodge just in time for dinner.

The next day I left. On the long ride home I gazed out the car window, watching raindrops roll across the glass, and thought about the old woman. I was on my way back to my young children. It was only the second time I’d been away overnight and I missed them terribly.

I tried to imagine the future, when my daughters and my own son would be grown and each of us would carry very different memories of the years when they had been small.

And that’s when I understood what drove the woman to take such tender care of the bulbs she planted and then dug up each year.

By doing that, she didn’t just get pretty flowers every summer. Each year, when tight green buds pushed their way to the sun, when the late afternoon breeze rose up from the calm waters of the lake and washed over the gardens up the hill, the woman could look at a flower and see the face of a little boy.

And then, when winter threatened, when cold winds blew and skies grew low and dark, as long as she could get down to the garden, as long as she could touch the earth, she could still gather up the boy and bring him inside.

She could keep him safe and warm.