Published: May 08, 2008 10:21 pm         

Mother’s Day, spring teach us many lessons

Oh, how I used to dread Mother’s Day!

No, honest. I know that sounds like heresy, but don’t you remember, as I do, those terrible Mother’s Days, when your dear earnest little children, all of 4 to 9 years old, used to make — ugh — breakfast-in-bed for you?

It was awful. Remember how your husband had to strongarm you into lying there, while Heaven knows what went on in the kitchen? (You could often hear it happening as you lay there, sounds of discord and crashing, especially when there was more than one child involved!)

When the proud little celebrators (one of whom had won the battle for carrying in the tray, possibly with blows) tiptoed in with your special “surprise,” you had to act delighted, and not just for a moment, but for the next hour as they closely watched you eat toast like tiny cemetery monuments and eggs splayed out looking for all the world like dead mummy eyes, still cold in the middle. The coffee could support marbles and sometimes did, depending on who was allowed to share in the preparation.

And that was just after the breakfast managed to make it up the steps and into your bed with you. Or, as sometimes happened, all over your bed with you.

I was never able to figure out why breakfast in bed was such an article of faith for the children. They’d never had breakfast in bed, except when they were sick. As far as I know, they never yearned for it, or I would have heard about it, I’m sure.

Still, I look back on the whole operation with misty eyes, and rejoice when I see it reenacted, as my grandchildren play their part in the ongoing drama of the years. It’s one of those implacable traditions — you couldn’t stop it if you wanted to. And no one wants to. Not counting mothers on Mother’s Day at about 7 a.m.

I must admit, Mothers’ Days have gotten a whole lot better since those days. The kids are still attentive, but they don’t serve breakfast in bed anymore, and I can’t say as I mind.

Another wonderful thing about Mother’s Day is that it lets you know that spring is here to stay. (Probably, although one takes nothing for granted these days.) And spring is so — well, so amazing.

You’d think at my age I’d be used to it by now. Instead, it just seems to get more and more beautiful every year. (Or maybe I’m just more grateful every time for another year, as the odds go down.)

The flowers simply exploded this year! I couldn’t believe the magnolias, spared a freeze for once, and then the daffodils and tulips and the serviceberry in the woods. After that, the Bradford pears, and then the other fruit trees, and the crabapples, and the gorgeous ornamental weeping trees, and the dogwood, which was especially brilliant this time, both pink and white. And along with these came my very own personal favorite of all the blooming trees of our area, the redbud.

There is no flowering tree that I know of that carries such a delicate presence — it does not shout, like dogwood, or sing, like the later black locust blooms, but, merely, whispers in the woods, like the still small voice in the Bible.

I can be cynical at times, but, just like puppies, this is one phenomenon about which one cannot be sarcastic, or even ironic. At such times, we realize fleetingly that we are more blessed than we ever dreamed we would be, in ways beyond our own doing that we cannot even comprehend.

My wisteria, as I write this, is about to burst, the azaleas too. I want to be there for the explosion. With luck, I will stand under the fallout, and, if only for a moment, experience the beauty of the natural world as it is intended to be.

Oh yes, and the birds. Have you noticed that the distinctive Western Maryland twang has even hit some cardinals this year? I heard one recently whose usual “Cheer! Cheer!” had somehow morphed into “Chee-urh! Chee-urh!”

In Gettysburg this year (the same Gettysburg that my buddy Jim Goldsworthy to the east — your west — just wrote two fine columns about), they have torn down all the redbud and dogwood that used to blanket the battlefield. Besides that, they cut down all of the trees that could be accused of having grown up since that bloody battle.

I guess the point is well meant, that battleground should be returned to the way it was at the time of the battle. (Whether before the battle or after the battle, they don’t say, nor do they deal much with the unremovable presence of monuments, roads and buildings that were not there in 1863.)

But it seems to me that by destroying all the dogwood and redbud that used to transform the stony gorges of Devil’s Den and the hillside of Little Round Top into a vast spring rock garden, they ignore a hugely precious lesson that doesn’t get taught enough in this world of war:

That it is possible to come together for a season of new birth, and make beauty grow, where bodies once lay twisted and blood flowed down the crevices of stone to the ground.

Not to make too much of all this, yet, it seems to me necessary to celebrate, yes, those still small voices of healing and peace that these flowers represent, and to allow them to remind us of the beauty and harmony that can exist among us if we just let them.

If only the children could learn to get along together.

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer. Her columns appear in the Times-News on alternate Sundays.