Sleeping Beauty Arrives with a Spring in Her Step

The Boston Globe

I know I drive my grandkids a little crazy, gushing over every tree, pointing out every flower, oohing and ahhing over the yellow of forsythia and the world turned newly green.

“Look at those tulips!” I say, letting up on the gas so that the 12-year-old in the front seat has time to turn her head and gaze at a small garden studded with red and orange and yellow. “Look how beautiful they are, Charlotte. And look, next door, at that dogwood.”

My granddaughter turns her head but not toward what I’m pointing at. Instead she turns to me. “Why do you get so excited about flowers, Mimi?” she asks. Joy over tulips is unfathomable to her. It’s spring. Flowers bloom in spring. Trees blossom in spring. And spring happens every year.

So why, she wonders, am I continually surprised?

I tell her that spring is a succession of big and tiny miracles. I tell her that I wish I had more eyes, two not enoughto take it all in, the shades of green, the lacy leaves, the shoots of God-knows-what sprouting up everywhere. I tell her that every fall when I plant bulbs, I think how amazing it is that these dry, ugly things that look dead are really full of life, and that nature is the real Sleeping Beauty, kissed awake every spring by sun and rain. I tell her that even in the rain, in spring, I have to stop walking, driving, doing whatever it is I’m doing and take a breath and stare.

Grandkids are portals sometimes. There’s Charlotte in the front seat of an SUV looking at me as if I am a math problem she doesn’t know how to solve; but what I am seeing is me at 12 in the front seat of a 1957 Chevy, looking at my mother in the exact same way.

My mother gushed, too, when trees bloomed and lilacs turned the air sweet. There were so many lilacs in Randolph when I was growing up, hedges of them. And pussy willows, too, everywhere for the taking. They never felt like miracles to me. But they did to my mother.

She made me plant bachelor buttons once. I complained. We had started the plants from seed at Brownies. Mrs. Barnes, our Brownie leader, helped us. She gave out little Dixie cups full of dirt she’d dug up from her backyard. And she gave us each a few seeds. I used a spoon to dig a hole in the dirt in my cup, then dropped my seeds into the hole, then used the spoon again to cover the seeds with dirt. My hands never touched the soil.

Mrs. Barnes kept the Dixie cups on her windowsill until our seeds sprouted. Then we got to take them home. That’s when my troubles began.

My mother fussed over those seeds as if they were going to grow into Jack’s beanstalk, not little blue flowers that were too short for our vase. She made a bed for them, that’s what she called the space she created in a sunny spot near our back steps. And, she bought me a small watering can.

It was my job to transfer the tiny plants from the Dixie cup into the ground but I begged my mother to do it for me, and I bet she would have but my planting the flowers was part of the Brownie project. I had to do this myself.

There were worms in the dirt. And flat bugs with wings. And spiders. “Please, Mom, please. You do it! You plant them.” But she didn’t.

My mother watered those bachelor buttons because I didn’t care if they lived or died. At the A&P, she bought her own package of bachelor button seeds and sprinkled them in the bed next to my transplants. Come summer we had a bunch of droopy, blue flowers, which she cut and put in a jelly glass and set before her statue of the Infant of Prague.

And I didn’t go near a garden for the next 20 years.

How do I explain to Charlotte that it’s eternity I gawk at in spring, life going on and on, pushing its way up through earth that was frozen just a month ago, squeezing its way through cracks in concrete. Life, tender and strong, new and old, plain and flashy, daffodils and dandelions, every bit of it, beautiful.

Beverly Beckham’s column appears every two weeks. She can be reached at bev@beverlybeckham.com.