Still Reason to Marvel

Last summer, my parents still lived on Elm Street, where their house won the prize for the prettiest porch. Not by my dad’s doing. It was my mom’s flowers that cascaded from hanging baskets and from pots on the porch railings and that reached up from the beds below.

On a midsummer evening much like today, I walked into that house. My dad had written his history for the day, and he was relaxing in his recliner, reading.

“Longfellow,” he said, waving his book at me.

It was an old book, clothbound, its cover embossed and its title gilded, probably from his college years.

“This is about your mom and her flowers,” he said, and read me some lines: “… gorgeous flowerets in the sunlight shining, blossoms flaunting in the eye of day, tremulous leaves with soft silver lining. ..”

He hands me the book. On the yellowed pages,  Longfellow calls flowers the stars of the earth. And he writes that some flowers with their blue eyes cry.

If it had been my dad’s druthers, he’d have planted foundation shrubs around the house and been done with it. He’d never have won the prettiest porch prize. Neither would people stop by his porch to enjoy the flowers and stay to talk. But his eyes hold admiration for Longfellow’s words.

He points to the poem and says it again: “This is your mom.”

***

Today I walk into my dad’s room at the retirement center. He’s revising a sixty-page document on the schism that formed the Old Order Amish church. Most days, he wants to read to me, to talk about what he’s writing, and to get my suggestions.

But on this day, he leans back in his chair.

“What is it about your mom?” he asks. “It’s been happening all her life. And now it’s happening again in this new place.”

I know exactly what he’ll say next. And he does.

People are coming to talk to her—in the dining room, in the hallways, after exercise classes, and in the common living area.

“Why do they talk to her? And not to me?”

He’s not complaining. He’d rather write history. But he’s fascinated.

And his eyes hold admiration.

After seventy-two years of marriage, he’s still got reason to marvel.