Gardenia, The

July 27, 2007

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.