A Wish for Mother’s Day
On a chilly evening in the early days of the pandemic, my kids and I walked the back ten acres of a friend’s property. We were longing for a familiar face outside of our family of six, so we’d met and strolled at arm’s length to get some fresh air and welcome the blossoming spring.
His land consists of horse pastures, hardwoods, and one large clearing dotted with scrub brush at the very back. Taking our time, reveling in the birth of a new season, we meandered the perimeter of the field. As we rounded the backside, a chickadee caught my attention, seemingly beckoning to us in its repetitive dee-dee-dee. Delighted and curious, my oldest son and I followed the little gray bird toward the center of the clearing. It hopped from sapling to bush to thin tree branch, calling us all the while. Cautiously, we stepped around low points with gathered water, both intrigued by the bird’s playful nature.
“Chickadees remind me of my grandma,” I told him as we followed along. “Grandpa’s mom. She had a big birdfeeder in the pine tree outside her kitchen window, and all I can remember are the chickadees who came to feast every morning.”
I spent a lot of time with my grandmother when I was young. Much of my summer and most weekends were passed in the fields and swamps surrounding the family farmhouse. At night, tired from catching frogs or picking berries, I would retire to the twin bed at the top of the stairs and fall into the cool sheets that always lay ready for me.
As we ducked between outstretched twigs and overgrown brush, I told my son about her, recounting the small tasks she would give me in the garden and the way I would warm my feet in the mornings by the wood stove. I introduced him to the magical ways she could make the ordinary extraordinary – a piece of cloth turned summer dress or an old apple tree into a mouth-watering pie. And I told him about the evening walks I took with her all those years ago, on spring nights just like the one we’d been given.
“We were always on the hunt for pussy willows this time of year,” I said. “We’d walk the road by my grandparent’s house, and by the end of the walk, we’d have a whole bouquet.”
“What’s a pussy willow?” he asked.
I described the soft, grayish buds lining the ditches along my grandparent’s road. I hadn’t gone hunting for pussy willows in ages. I couldn’t quite remember the last time I’d even seen one.
“Actually, I have a weird feeling you’re about to find out for yourself…,” I whispered. Odd, as I’d walked this property before and had never seen the fuzzy buttons of a pussy willow branch.
The bird chirped its song just ahead of us, and our pace quickened to keep up. My pulse followed suit. Was she here somewhere? In the breeze? In the bird?
Nearing the center of the field, our guide landed on an extended arm reaching its soft buds toward the sunlight. I might have gasped. It could have been a shout. I honestly can’t recall, but I remember her there. All around us.
“Oh my God. This is it,” I laughed. “This is a pussy willow.”
“Really?” My son looked up at me in disbelief, a smile breaking across his freckled face.
It was just starting to bud, half of the small orbs still tucked safely inside their shells. I look around us, finding no other shrubs like this one. Our gift was sheltered inside the cover of various midwestern flora, growing trees and weeds for which I have no names. But this single pussy willow plant waited patiently in the center, stretching taller and taller each spring, until its blooms could reach out and finally touch the setting rays of sun.
“I’m pretty sure your great-grandma just sent us that bird, bud. To lead us right here. So, you could see this. So, you could meet her.”
We stood there together, fingertips touching the velvety offering, as the bird observed us from a nearby branch. Few times in my life have felt as wholly sacred as those minutes with my son, with my grandmother, in that field.
In the years that have followed, I’ve searched that same clearing to find that same bush, but I’ve never come across it again. I’ll try once more soon, when the weather warms and a chickadee lands at my window, reminding me that it’s time to go searching.
That spring day, when we all needed the love that lives just beyond our sight, we found exactly what we didn’t know we were looking for. And with Mother’s Day on my mind and spring infiltrating the air, I wish the same magic we found in that field to all those who could use their own dose – for those missing summer nights spent at grandma’s or walks with a mother who can no longer leave her bed, for those who enter this Mother’s Day grieving the women loved so fully and lost all the same. I wish that the spirit which survives inside the memories will take shape in Earthly form – a bird or a blossom, a breeze that drifts by and brings the smell of home.
More than that, though, I wish for lives lived in such a way that we are remembered long after we have gone. I hope for people left behind who wait and pray for signs, for friends who say our names and call us back to life for a few sacred moments as the sun sets upon another spring night. For grandchildren who believe that tiny black-capped birds are grandmothers gone too soon, and pussy willows are the fluffy stuff of nothing less than miracles.