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The Gardenia
Every year on my birthday, from the time I turned 12, one white gardenia
was delivered anonymously to me at my house. There was never a card or note,
and calls to the florist were in vain, because the purchase was always made
in cash. After a while, I stopped trying to discover the identity of the
sender. I just delighted in the beauty and heady perfume of that one magical,
perfect white flower nestled in folds of soft pink tissue paper. But I never
stopped imagining who the sender might be. Some of my happiest moments were
spent in day dreams about someone wonderful and exciting, but too shy or
eccentric to make known his or her identity. In my teen years, it was fun to
speculate that the sender might be a boy I had a crush on, or even someone I
didn't know who had noticed me.
My mother often contributed to my speculations. She'd ask me if there was
someone for whom I had done a special kindness, who might be showing
appreciation anonymously. She reminded me of the times when I'd been riding
my bike and our neighbor drove up with her car full of groceries and children.
I always helped her unload the car and made sure the children didn't run into
the road. Or maybe the mystery sender was the old man across the street. I
often retrieved his mail during the winter, so he wouldn't have to venture
down his icy steps.
My mother did her best to foster my imagination about the gardenia. She
wanted her children to be creative. She also wanted us to feel cherished and
loved, not just by her, but by the world at large.
When I was 17, a boy broke my heart. The night he called for the last time,
I cried myself to sleep. When I awoke in the morning, there was a message
scribbled on my mirror in red lipstick: "Heartily know, when half-gods go,
the gods arrive." I thought about that quotation from Emerson for a long time,
and I left it where my mother had written it until my heart healed. When I
finally went for the glass cleaner, my mother knew that everything was all
right again.
But there were some hurts my mother couldn't heal. A month before my high
school graduation, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. My feelings
ranged from simple grief to abandonment, fear, distrust and overwhelming
anger that my dad was missing some of the most important events in my life.
I became completely uninterested in my upcoming graduation, the senior-class
play and the prom - events that I had worked on and looked forward to. I even
considered staying home to attend college instead of going away as I had
planned because it felt safer. My mother, in the midst of her own grief,
wouldn't hear of me missing out on any of these things. The day before my
father died, she and I had gone shopping for a prom dress and had found a
spectacular one -- yards and yards of dotted Swiss in red, white and blue.
Wearing it made me feel like Scarlett O'Hara. But it was the wrong size, and
when my father died the next day, I forgot all about the dress.
My mother didn't. The day before the prom, I found the dress waiting for me--
in the right size. It was draped majestically over the living room sofa,
presented to me artistically and lovingly. I may not have cared about having
a new dress, but my mother did.
She cared how we children felt about ourselves. She imbued us with a sense of
the magic in the world, and she gave us the ability to see beauty even in the
face of adversity.
In truth, my mother wanted her children to see themselves much like the
gardenia-- lovely, strong, perfect, with an aura of magic and perhaps a bit
of mystery.
My mother died when I was 22, only 10 days after I was married.
That was the year the gardenias stopped coming.
~author unknown
"The heart of a Mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you always find forgiveness." -- Honore de Balzac
The botanical name of the chocolate plant is Theobramba cacao, which means "Food of the Gods."
