Follow the Flowers

If you are driving through Montana in the springtime and see poppies growing by the side of the road – vivid, yellow-orange globes of color looking out of place, like they belong on a California hillside instead of Montana, you can thank my Mom.

She tossed California Golden Poppy seeds out the window, as our family trek across country yet another time, like dustbowl migrants, all our stuff in our car. But we were not wandering, searching for a better life. We were under orders.

A faceless military bureaucrat decided our next duty station. We knew it would never be Kansas because my dad was in the U.S. Navy. They don’t have aircraft carriers and naval bases in Kansas. Even as a little kid, I knew that.

So we traversed this great country, going from one coast to another, leaving friends, starting over, moving to a new naval base, a new school, a new life, and we did it about every nine months.

Mom was an equal opportunity seed thrower. It didn’t matter if my Dad took the northern route through Washington, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota or the middle way, winding through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas or take the southern route through Arizona, New Mexico and the huge state of Texas that never seemed to end.

Between towns, in the middle of nowhere, Mom would reach into her purse, pull out a packet of seeds, rip off one corner and shake out some tiny black seeds in her cupped hand. Then she’d roll the window down all the way, scan the right of way and fling the seeds with a full sweep of her arm.

Dad never said anything, just kept driving. I’m sure he resented this sudden invasion of hot air into the cool car. She would keep flinging, a few at a time, until the packet was empty.

The deed done, Mom rolled up the window, put the packet back in her purse, and sit very quietly, staring straight ahead, arms folded. She seemed to be meditating.

Five hundred years from now, archeological sifting through the ancient ruins of roadsides will be hard pressed to explain California Golden Poppies growing in Mississippi and Montana. They’ll come up with elaborate wind patterns and scattering theories, but you and I know the truth. It was my Mom.

As a kid in the back seat, surrounded by all the things provided to keep us happy and quiet -books, crayons, paper, puzzles, small boxes of breakfast cereal, I thought Mom was really cool, throwing seeds out the window. I decided she must be related to Johnnie Appleseed, who planted apple trees all over America, and that made me proud, like I’d acquired a really neat relative I could brag about.

Years later Jacqueline Kennedy visiting California. Her husband Jack Kennedy was then President. It was springtime. Brown hills were wearing their finery, a Jacob’s coat of many colors – including California Golden poppies and purple lupine.

She admired the color on the hills and later asked for poppy and lupine seeds to be sent to the White House. I knew right then and there that my Mom and Mrs. Kennedy would have gotten along famously. Surly they’d have tea, talk about flowers and making wherever they lived beautiful.

But I wonder if Mom also had another agenda. Perhaps the poppies, in addition to being beautiful, were like breadcrumbs, marking the trail, showing her the way back to California, showing her the way home.

You see, Mom was a California girl, full of sunshine and surf, loving the Pacific Ocean, the tides, and the rhythms of the days. How tough it must have been for her to marry a military man and move around like a nomad, never owning a home, rootless, renting, setting up households in faraway places where people had regional accents and different expectations and there wasn’t a lupine or poppy to be found.

To compensate, Mom planted flowers, sometimes randomly, by flinging seeds out of a car window. She created springtime wherever she went.

I look outside today at spring unfolding in my back yard, Easter about to happen, trees growing tall that I planted and I realize I’m not the little girl in the backseat anymore.

It is my turn to be in the front seat. I have roots some 3000 miles from California but, to my surprise, I sometimes have this irresistible urge to throw poppy seeds in my backyard and out the car window while driving down the road.

I am, even after all these years, my Mother’s daughter.

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For further reading:
http://www.calphoto.com/wflower.htm has a California wildflower hotsheet where people post sightings of wildflowers.
http://www.californiapictures.com/californiawildflowers1c.html has lovely photos of California Golden Poppy, the state flower
“Home” by Illustrator Jeannie Baker, a wordless book for ages 4to 8 about a young girl living on a bare city street and how the community takes back the street by planting flowers and trees.

May I Serve You Soup?

Millie likes to multi task. While slicing long loaves of French bread, she cradles her cell phone on one shoulder, reassuring a parent.

“We have to keep looking for any signs of fever, but the test was fine and she should be all right,” Millie says as she slices. The person on the other end of the line hasn’t a clue that this is Doctor Millie’s day off. She is not in the office but in a soup kitchen along with other volunteers.

“I like coming here,” Millie says. “I don’t have to think, or make decisions. They just tell me what to do.” She smiles. A professional’s dream, someone else in charge for a day and a way to give back to the community. Win win.

Brothers Keeper Soup Kitchen is an outreach of Blessed Trinity Catholic Church in Ocala, Florida. Warm bodies, of any denomination, are welcome to help the last, lost and least seven days a week, some four to five hours a day.

Your columnist just joined the Tuesday crew. Millie is part of the Tuesday crew. So is Charlie. He got here the old fashioned way – through prayer.

“I was sitting in the living room, meditating, trying to figure out what I should be doing as service,” Charlie recalls. A Brother’s Keeper truck drove by the front of his house. He took it as a sign and started volunteering at the soup kitchen.

“It is part of my spiritual training,” Charlie says. Today his training has him putting mayo/mustard mixture on bread. It is the start of building sandwiches. And you thought it was just soup at the soup kitchen?

A little while later, Brenda says to Charlie “Hey, fancy sandwiches today, I see you are putting lettuce on them.” Brenda is a volunteer, the head cook, the big kahuna, which means she gets to decide the soups de jour, using ingredients sliced and diced by other volunteers.

“My mission in life is to find a way to recycle everything,” Brenda says and she is really good at it. A tray of potatoes forms the base of potato/broccoli soup. Pasta is always a favorite. She usually adds any meat that’s around to the pasta soup.

Sister Concepta is the soup kitchen nazi. Ah, wait, that was on a television show, now off the air. Larry Thomas was the Seinfield Soup Nazi – his best role. This, on the other hand, is real life.

In real life, Sister Concepta with the order Immaculate Heart of Mary has a PhD in spiritual development and came here from Uganda to the order’s mission convent in Ocala. Yes, we are their mission work. She expected to teach, what with a PhD and all, but instead was told to run the soup kitchen. It is an exercise in spiritual development.

“We take a vow of obedience,” Sister says,laughing at the irony of all that education and now – a soup kitchen where there are never enough volunteers,she is constantly begging for donations of food and an increasing number of guests keep arriving for lunch. Did they teach this course in grad school? Nope.

Sister takes her job very seriously. After all, we are enjoined to feed the hungry. Turns out, the hungry are hungry seven days a week. And their numbers are increasing.

Not just the walking homeless are coming through the door, packs slung over their shoulder. Right alongside them these days are the working poor, people who arrive in pickup trucks, some with signs for local businesses like roofing and lawn services. Day laborers who have wheels but don’t make enough to buy food. And then there are mothers with children. Those will break your heart.

Food. There has to be enough food for everyone. Rita, another volunteer, spends mornings running around town, picking up produce at grocery stories – they leave boxes on the loading dock. Sometimes businesses just stop by the kitchen – a chicken place sometimes leaves trays of fried chicken. It all has to be deboned, a nitpicking job great for spiritual training in patience and persistence.

Volunteers arrive every day around 9 a.m. In three short hours, everything edible gets chopped and in the soup pot, simmering, all sandwiches are made (usually around 140), French bread, slathered with butter and garlic, goes in the oven, salads are made and put in individual cups, some dishes get washed, water pitchers are placed on the table, desserts go on trays, trash is emptied, shopping carts by the back door are loaded with fresh produce to give away, loaves of bread are placed on back shelves for anyone to take. Whew!
At 11:30a.m. we form a circle, hold hands, hear a Bible verse and say the Lord’s Prayer, followed by few minutes to sit down and have a bowl of soup and then, ba-bing! It is noon. The “Open” sign is put in the window. The rush begins. People have been lined up outside for more than a half hour.

“Hello, would you like some salad?”

“The soups today are navy bean with ham, pasta with spaghetti sauce”

“What would you like for dessert, we have nice pumpkin pie here.”

The line thins out about 12:30 p.m. Some leave quickly. Others go back for seconds or sit and rest, knowing the soup kitchen is open for them until 1 p.m. Many people say “thank you” as they leave.

“It means a lot, hearing ‘thank you’,” Millie says. “We don’t hear that often in our everyday lives.”

Amen.

Need to hear “thank you” in your life? Call the nearest soup kitchen and volunteer. Hearing “thank you” especially from a child with an uncertain future makes it worth all the slicing, dicing and slathering. See you there.

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For Further Reading:

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Author Barbera Ehrenreich takes a job amoung the working poor and reports on life in the lowest wage brackets of America.

The 1999 Report on Homelessness in America by Housing and Urban Developement (HUD) provides a broad statistical look at the causes and nature of homelessness in America.

The organization Second Harvest helps to provide food for the hungry in America.

Many religeous and charitable organizations provide services to the poor, homeless and hungry. Check your local phone book under “Shelters” or “Charitable Services”.

Dancing with Butterflies

When Suzi, my Boxer-Golden Retriever mix, was a puppy, I nicknamed her Solar Cell because she loved to play for a while, then stretch out full length and soak up the sun’s rays in the back yard.

One day a yellow butterfly came fluttering by. Suzi jumped up from her sun bath. She was startled, curious. The butterfly swooped towards her. Suzi leaped up, trying to catch it, but the butterfly rose up just out of reach, and then swooped down again. The two of them started a dance – swooping and leaping. What fun to watch!

Sitting on the porch, laughing, I wondered, not for the first time- where is the video when you need it?

I wondered too, what was it like, long ago, for the first person to ever see a butterfly? Faced with something totally unknown, something with wings and beautiful colors, well, did they immediately run after it, trying to capture the winged beauty with their hands? Did they want to possess it?

Or were they overcome with awe at this alien thing, this miniature burst of color fluttering on the wind. Did they just stop in their tracks, stand stock still, then, impulsively, smile, laugh and start clapping all at the same time, overwhelmed at the sheer wonder of a butterfly? We’ll never know. It was so long ago.

Butterflies are live performance art – canvases ripped off of the Creator’s easels and set free to dance in the breeze. They follow an erratic flight pattern only they can read as they search for just the right lunch and the perfect host plant for their eggs.

WARNING: If pesticides are your thing, and you can’t stand the sight of a caterpillar, forget having butterflies in your yard. They are like the canary in the coal mine, so sensitive to the environment. Spray Dr. Death (any brand of pesticide) and it kills butterflies, just like fumes in a mine will kill canaries.

But, you say, butterflies are good while caterpillars are bad? Oops, maybe you were snoozing in the sixth grade when the science teacher told you about metamorphosis, meaning change of form.

Butterflies are multi taskers. The four stages of a butterfly’s life, each with its own look, are an egg, larva or caterpillar, pupa or chrysalis and then winged adult in all its finery.

Caterpillars eat a lot. The Monarch butterfly, in its caterpillar stage, can strip a milkweed to the bare stem. No problem, milkweed is poisonous to anything else. That’s one way to guarantee your food source!

Adult butterflies fly around looking for lunch. One day, on a bright red Penta growing in the back yard, I counted nine different species of butterflies. Wow. How special is that?

A friend gave me a butterfly house – a pretty thing painted with flowers and narrow slit openings for the butterflies. It stunned me. Why had I never thought to wonder where butterflies go at night? Turns out they cling to the undersides of leaves or tuck into tree crevices.

Marc Minno, author of “Florida Butterfly Gardening” (University of Florida Press, 1999) with his wife Maria Minno, says he’s never seen a butterfly use a butterfly house but they are pretty and you never know. It can’t hurt to try one or two.

At the age of 11, Suzi snoozes more these days and plays less, but I still remember her as a puppy, discovering something new and wonderful – the day she danced with a butterfly.

Junior Learns Facts of Life

There are a lot of ways to get into the birdfeeder in my backyard, but I’ve got to tell you that sliding down the roof is not one of them. That didn’t stop Junior from trying. Perched on the top of the peaked roof, the young blue jay considered his options, or maybe didn’t think at all, then impulsively decided to slide on down the steeply pitched roof. He picked up speed as he slid along, and was clearly clueless as to how to stop his freefall. By the time he reached the end of the roof, he was falling pretty fast, and kept on falling, right past the open feeding trough under the roof.

His mother was in there. She looked up as he fell past her, shook her head, and went back to eating hulled sunflower seeds. Junior landed on the ground with a thud, righted himself and began flapping his wings, like a baby bird, opened his beak in the baby bird feed me position (really wide) and let out a wail that tears at every mother’s heart. The universal wail that has just one word:

“MOM!”

Okay, so it was the blue jay version, but the tone was familiar. I got the message

Once in the grocery store, a young boy got separated from his Mom and wailed “MOM”. He managed to make a whole paragraph out of that one word, with a rising pitch of desperation at the end. At least six women, me included, turned our heads immediately. Heck, my kids are grown and out of the nest and I snapped to attention. Something about the tone in his voice – fear, concern, worry, need. I know that tone. Every mother does. We have to respond. Our DNA demands it.

Happy ending. He found his Mom. We first responders to the child’s version of a 911 call looked over our shopping carts at one another, made eye contact, and laughed, embarrassed. Once a Mom, always a Mom.

Back at the bird feeder, Mom looked over the edge. Junior begged for food, attention, Mom. Remember, this is no baby bird. He had fledged, with flight wings to prove it.

Flight feathers mean you are out of the nest, graduated. It means the training wheels are off and free meals are history. Time to forage on your own. For a bird, flight feathers are the equivalent to being a teenager. Your parents still keep an eye on you, but you are free to roam the neighborhood and curfew hours are a lot later.

Finally, Mom couldn’t stand listening to Junior, so she stared shoveling seeds over the edge of the feeder. They fell to the ground. Some even landed on Junior. He was amazed. Food. Raining down from above. What a concept.

A few days later, Mom flew away. Junior was going to have to figure out the facts of life on his own.

The days turn. A year passes. Spring is in the air once again. I see adult blue jays at the bird feeder, scarfing down seeds along with the other birds. Is one of them Junior? I hope so. It means he discovered the best way to get into the bird feeder – just spread your wings and glide right in.

Welcome To Saturday Mornings with Lucy