Spring Bouquet

Spring arrives with the same exhilaration I feel when I receive a gift of flowers. I have said time and again in this blog how much I love spring and how it is my favorite of the seasons. I particularly love the hopeful, spring-green color that emerges in the hillsides when everything starts to wake up and come back to life for another season of growing and blooming.

While I know that spring officially arrives in March, in our cold climate, spring doesn’t start to make itself obvious until sometime in April.

My love of spring began when I was a child, perhaps because my late mother and I enjoyed spring birthdays. More likely, however, I love spring because my mom embraced the season fully with a joy that could only rub off on those around her.

My late mother, Barb Naidl (right), and me, posing in front of one of the lilac bushes in our backyard.

Spring meant an ever-cascading array of flowers in our home—lilacs, lilies of the valley, branches of forsythia and flowering current, and stems of iris, some dark purple and white and others brown and yellow. All of these flowering beauties grew without much assistance in our spacious backyard. They seemed to know they were welcome there, so they flourished pretty much on their own.

Me, lounging in our backyard. The beds of iris are visible behind me.

Beginning in April all the way through May, Mom would fill antique pitchers of all sizes with flowers, including one really large white porcelain pitcher that nestled perfectly into a large porcelain bowl, even though the bowl was not its original mate. That pitcher was so heavy that it required two hands to carry it safely.

This heavy bowl and pitcher held sprays of beauty during all seasons.

My favorite spring flowers were the lilacs and the lilies of the valley because of their heady scent. Mom would carefully cut, trim and then arrange small branches heavy with lavender and white lilacs in her precious pitcher collection and then place them strategically in nearly every room in our house, thus filling each space with fragrance.

There would be delicate milk glass vases filled with lilies of the valley, offering a lovely white-on-white contrast to the dark walnut antique commode chests on which they would be featured in our home’s living room. My mother loved antiques, so our home was rich with them.

Spring also meant the early budding of our yard’s three willow trees. Although they tend to be messy, I’ve always loved weeping willows. In the spring, they are among the first trees to hint that the seasons are changing, with their delicate yellow hue. 

The weeping willows in our yard provided a place for me to play and imagine.
In the early spring, they were among the first trees to hint at spring when they
turned a gentle shade of yellow-green while everything else was still brown.

Violets played a big part in my childhood springs and they still do today. As if overnight, our backyard would transform into a sea of white and purple as the violets began to bloom. Our family would wait to mow the lawn for the first time in the spring until the violets had had their time to shine.

Aside from nature’s welcoming changes, spring also meant a change in wardrobe, particularly represented by a new dress to wear to church on Easter. I can still remember how special I felt in one particular Easter outfit. The dress was made of a linen blend, the top portion of it white splashed with large, navy blue polka dots and the skirt portion plain navy. Over the dress was a matching navy linen blend coat. I wore a white hat decorated with a wide, navy blue grosgrain ribbon. The outfit was topped off with white anklets, white shoes and white gloves. I felt snazzy!

One of my favorite new Easter outfits from my childhood.
I felt so dressed up with my hat and matching dress and coat.

Despite my fond memories of new Easter clothes and the remembrances of how special I felt in them, when I reflect on springs past, it’s the flowers I recall most vividly and how my mom would bring them inside to transform our home into a special, fragrant and lovely place.

There are signs of spring sprouting everywhere now. Spend some time in nature, watching the changes unfold, the flowers bloom and the increasing signs of earth’s reawakening.

And as the earth transforms, contemplate what that reawakening of spring might mean for you.

Along Party Lines

There is a lot of talk these days about our political climate, the rancor, the division, and the voting along party lines without crossing the aisle for collaboration and compromise. 

While I find it all distressing, my thoughts about party lines took a turn recently when I recalled the term having a totally different meaning and growing up with our telephone at home being on a party line. 

For those who are too young to recall such a thing, let alone a phone that isn't exclusively yours and in your hand at all times, a party line was the technology of long ago -- and as recently as 50 years ago when I was growing up. A party line involved having multiple telephone users on one line. Rather than being able to dial a number whenever you wished, you might pick up the receiver, only to hear someone else's conversation going on. Party lines often swept through neighborhoods. You would have to wait patiently (or not so patiently) for the parties to get off of the phone so that the line would be available to you. That would mean lifting and putting back down the receiver periodically. The idea wasn't to eavesdrop on someone else's call. That type of etiquette breach would never do. It was to find out if the line was finally free. I recall the joy my mom expressed when technology had advanced to the point where we didn't have to share a party line with our rural neighbors. 

It was about that same time when we switched from having a boxy type of phone with a rotary dial to a slim trim-line phone, still with a rotary dial. (Push buttons were the next advancement.) Instead of the dial being on the front of the phone and the handset resting on top of the boxy device, the dial was tucked underneath the handset, making the phone look like a more modern and decorative contraption. Phones were no longer basic black. We had one that was olive green and another that was harvest gold -- very cool colors of the 1960s and 70s. 

There was more than one way to use a rotary dial phone. As you stuck your finger in the hole corresponding with the number you wished to dial, you could leave your finger in the hole as you pushed it around in a circle to its dial position and then back, or you could push it around in a circle to its dial position and then remove your finger so that it circled back to its original position on its own. The boxier telephones' rotary mechanism had an interesting sound to them as the dial whirred back into place on its own.

Using a rotary dial made placing a call a little longer endeavor, but phone numbers weren't as complex as they are today. In the days before area codes, we simply dialed five digits when I was growing up. Even though our three-digit prefix was EL6 (for Elmwood 6), or later 356, we simply dialed 6 and then the last four digits of the local number. For the longest time, our home phone number was simply 6-8231.

Using the phone surely wasn't like today where people are on their phones while they're walking, driving, shopping, dining, taking care of their children, standing in line at the store, or while supposedly conversing with others in the same room. Using the telephone was rather an event back in the day when households had only one phone. Even without a party line, all of the family members would have to share the use of that one phone and that meant that teenagers couldn't hog the device. 

While it's ultra-convenient to have this whiz-bang, modern technology in the palm of our hands, there was something lovely about having to share a party line or at least a telephone and to put it into its perspective in our lives. We can never go backward, but it would behoove us now and again to take a break from our phones and other technological devices -- even if only for a few hours, and give ourselves time to truly exist, to be present to each moment, and to give our full attention to where we are, who we're with, and what we're doing. Try it, and see how it feels.

Memory Lane

I have been given the assignment of writing a commemorative book about my workplace.  Consequently, I have been combing archives, reading yellowed newspaper clippings, browsing through photos, and reminiscing - a lot of reminiscing.  Although my work is very different from my late mother's, our careers have managed to travel down similar paths of late.  My work is in the same industry, the same community, the same organization as hers was.  Therefore, my research is proving to be a personal journey, recalling the wonderful people and momentous occasions that not only have touched my life, but touched my mom's, as well.  I'm grateful to have been afforded this opportunity to walk down memory lane, reconnecting with the people, places and occasions that make it a very special story to me.