Tiger Lilies are among my mother's favorite flower. There are two patches of these fiery, orange blooms that sit at the front of the solemn rocks that stand guard at the end of our driveway. In the warm summer months when they opened their petals sun-ward I would stare at them in wonder as my mother and I sat at the end of the driveway at the edge of adventure. When I went on bike rides with my father, there they would send us off with sweet good-byes and warm welcomes home. Then, when winter came, and the Tiger Lilies returned to hibernation, the sadness I felt for their beauty left was accompanied by the hope of next summer and their beauty to return. Now, time passed, I grew, and the wonder of these flowers seemed to be lost more and more as they left and returned. The magic of them was left with childhood days and carefree summers.
Mommom Gerry, my father's mother, was a gardener. She had the greenest thumb I have ever known, and her garden was glorious beyond compare. Granted, it was confined to the smallness of her trailer's yard, but as a child walking through it, it still engulfed me whole. There were tall flowers, and short ones, green foliage, and every color under the sun; there were Tiger Lilies. Every spring and summer her yard came to life with new and vibrant beauty that she toiled over herself. When she passed of lung cancer in May of 2013, the flowers remained. They grew indifferent to the turmoil surrounding them. Even without her living there (being as that she was in hospice for the last months of her life) the vegetation grew on. Even after her death, its charm and fairness continued to live. To this day, under new ownership and long changed by time, the garden that will forever be my grandmother's grows.
Soon after her death, a Tiger Lily appeared in my yard. Now, this was not by chance, no lone seed drifted by some twist of fate into the center of my front yard. It was put there by the choice; the choice of my father. He dug out the bulb of one of the pulchritudinous Tiger Lilies and brought his mother home with him. When the purple, orange, bloom sprang up the next summer, I was surprised. You see, I did not know that he had done this the previous year, and so, when faced with the newness of this life in my yard, I was curious. Pacing over to it, there was a sickly sadness that mixed into the pleased joy and memory of life. Standing over it, I was brought back to a million memories of childhood past. Crouching to smell its sweetness, I was wrapped in love felt only one short year ago. In this way, she will live on.
You do this too, I'm sure. It could be with a sunset and the blues melting with the reds. It could be with a snow-globe and its contained chaos. It could be with snow its delicate chills. It could be with any number of things. But I know that there is that one thing which connects you to those you have lost in the way that this Tiger Lily now connects me to her.
