Birthday Flowers

It's hard to explain how I viewed beauty as a child. Oddly. Differently. I suppose I stared out the window around six months old or so, just like any child does. But my memories, of course, don't start that early. My memories tend to center around endless stops at scenic overlooks, waiting while my father took snapshots of valleys or flower gardens. If you look through our old photo albums you'll find pictures of my sister and me pointing at flowers, pointing at rock formations, pointing at historical markers, pointing at faraway mountains—all staged. “Point at the tiger lilies.” “Which ones are the tiger lilies?” “The one that looks like tigers.” “Oh, okay.” Snap. Another one for the album.

Those long roadtrips up and down the eastern seaboard have become an blur of endless stretches, my sister and I snoozing and staring out the car window, followed by tedious stops to look at pretty things. You got out of the smelly car, drowsy from heat, shuffled along with my dad. You stopped and looked, you wished it to be over with, looked at more stuff, then got back in the car for another long stretch of staring and snoozing.

As I grew older my appreciation for natural beauty utterly failed to grow. I'd seen it all, staring blearily over guardrails, the backs of my knees tickled by sweat from plastic car seat covers. I found nature sometimes fascinating, but I did not find it beautiful. It was beautiful because everyone said it was.

I lived on the campus of a home for kids with different kinds of problems. My dad was the chaplain there, and we lived near where the teachers were housed, about a half mile from the school house. So it was not uncommon for me to find myself walking to school with a teacher. I remember one evening—I would have been about fourteen-- my sister and I were walking to supper. The cafeteria was also at the school end of campus, and we were walking with my English teacher, whom I admired. There was an unusual cloud formation overhead and my sister and the teacher were commenting on it. Half the sky was covered by clouds. The other half was clear and blue, with a distinct line marking the boundary between the two halves of the sky. I remember thinking, “It's the edge of a cloud front!” and feeling a delicious thrill at the thought of seeing the edge of a cloud front. The teacher said what she thought the clouds looked like. My sister said what she thought the clouds looked like. I said, “It looks like the edge of a cloud front.”

The teacher said, with a chuckle, “Oh, Connie, shut up!” The kind of laugh you would share with a smart alecky peer, but I wasn't a peer and I wasn't being smart alecky (not this time, anyway). Her comment stung, but I laughed to cover. My sister said later, “Your mouth laughed but your eyes definitely didn't laugh.”

I saw some beauty, but not in the traditional places you look for it. My mother would set me to washing the dishes and there I'd be, an hour later, holding a handful of foam up to a window, watching soap bubbles slide down my hand. I don't know if you know this, but if the sun shines through a soap bubble it creates a prism. And a handful of bubbles was like a fairyland of globes, each one shining with its own little rainbow. I admit it. I was an odd child.

Later on, when I started dating, the flowers started rolling in. I didn't get it, but I pretended I did. I mimicked the way other girls exclaimed over flowers. I learned you could put a corsage in the refrigerator and make it last a week, so I dutifully put corsages in the fridge and threw them away when they turned brown. Woo hoo.

* * *

Ironically I went to Toccoa Falls College, one of the most beautiful college campuses anywhere. I was told I ought to go enjoy the falls all I could, so I took my homework up there a time or two. My homework got damp. After that I studied in my room or the library.

I enjoyed hiking with friends. There were cookouts above the falls and campfires with guitars, so I certainly recognized that nature had its benefits. And while I did not always appreciate nature's beauty, I was utterly fascinated with its wildness.

Near the end of my college career I moved off campus, away from the college scene. I slowed down on classes so I could work more hours. At the slowed-down pace my friends began to graduate and move away. I developed new friends; friends with lives apart from school and its social life.

Then came the Birthday; the birthday nobody remembered. I went through classes as usual that day, then stopped by the snack bar to visit with a friend—my best friend at the time. We talked for a while, and I don't know how it came out, but I remember she suddenly exclaimed, “It's your birthday, isn't it? Oh, Connie, I forgot completely!” I graciously accepted the apology, but then the day continued just like any other. Not that I expected anything. Well......

--most of that day went unmarked.

I got back to the house where I was living alone at the time and settled into some serious self-pity. “Well, buck up, kiddo,” I said to myself. “There are just going to be times in your life when you're going to be alone.”

Then this scripture popped into my head. Funny how that happens. The verse was, “I will never leave you or forsake you.”

“I know, Lord,” I said, sniffling. “And it's not that I don't appreciate your being here all the time, forever. It's just that—well, sometimes you just need that human touch—just to be told you're special.” I summed it up-- “You can't send me flowers.”

Petulant youth. He knew as well as I did how much (or how little) I appreciated flowers.

I was hungry, so I pulled myself together and fixed a little something for supper. I pouted over the dishes. I looked out the window into the back yard and saw a miracle.

A bed of daffodils had apparently been planted by someone along the middle of the yard, and the gardener had mowed around them, and they were budding now. Today—the unmarked day—the daffodils had all gone from bud to bloom. Not staggered out over a week, but all in one day. I quickly dried my hands and rushed out to handpick my own bouquet. I hadn't known there were so many varieties of daffodils! All in bloom right on my birthday! And you know what? They were beautiful. Each one a little marvel, and proof that God loved me and marked my birthday.

I set my bouquet from God on a counter in the kitchen. That evening every time I walked by them, the fresh aroma was a sweet reminder of the miracle, like a little smile between God and me. I've never again had a birthday that no one remembered. But no birthday stands out as being more precious.

I love flowers these days! I can't get enough of them. I look for them everywhere I go. And I'll travel a long way to look at scenery, and I love to take pictures (although I don't make my kids point at things). It's all a marvel, and I view beauty in nature as a gift from God.

So last night my family visited a retired co-worker of Roger's. She gardens avidly now, and loves to share her hobby with company. She showed me around her garden, and I wished I had brought a camera. Later we sat and talked outdoors for a while, then she made us go stand around these little plants—evening primrose, she said they were, and they bloomed at dusk. There was one pretty little yellow blossom, which I admired, but she said, just wait. We stood there and talked for a while, then—I kid you not--a bud bloomed right there as I watched. Then another. Each bud, in turn, bloomed. It's one of the most moving experiences I've had.

On the drive home it occurred to me that this experience was a gift. I mean, an actual, planned, thought-out gift. Yesterday I found myself thinking of that long-ago birthday bouquet, then the primrose show followed that very evening. I said to God, “YOU planned that, didn't You?” Does God smile at us? If He does, He did right then.