Thursday, May 23, 2013

Smiling Violets

I'm not that chick who gets overly sentimental.

Though I have my moments, like everyone does.

And I have what I like to think is a bizarre cross between superstition and recognizing signs. It's not about luck, so much as it is listening to the universe at large.

Case in point: violets were my mother's favourite houseplant.

The woman loved violets. And in her pseudo-guerrilla-gardening way, she would snap leaves off of blooming variations she saw out and about, and smuggle them home to propagate her own copy of that plant.

I have a lot of violets (none of them her original plants, though a couple were propagated from clippings). I have one violet that I adopted when a friend moved and she couldn't take it with her (hi, Emilia!). This particular violet is larger than your average violet...

Like, dinner-plate-huge.

Look in the mirror: she's sitting in an antique chamber pot. In a modern bathroom. (Tee hee.)

And this dinner-plate-huge girl (I call the violets my girls) has been blooming for a while now.

Over my birthday. My mother's birthday. Mother's Day. And now today.

And today is an important day, in the realm of this story.

Every morning for the past four weeks, I have woken up to see this girl smiling at me with all her blooms.

And no, I'm not silly enough to believe it's a violet smiling at me.

It's my mother.


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