A memory of a mother…

My stories are filled with flowers. If you’ve spent any time at all in my fictional worlds, you’ve seen them spilling out of window boxes and pushing up through cracks in sidewalks. I love them. My mother loved them, too.

When I was five or six, we came across some Johnny Jump Ups growing wild. I could not get over their delicate beauty. Their lovely purple-gold faces. The next day we returned, my mother and I, and dug up a small plot to take home and replant so I could have a corner of the garden to call my own. That day marked the beginning of a lifelong love affair with gardening.

My mother went to tend to God’s garden when I was thirty, a mother myself, but still so in need of my own. Years ago now, but my heart still looks for her. Sometimes I catch glimpses of her in fields of wildflowers, in sunny September gardens, in the first soft tulips of spring. In the garden’s ever changing pageant of colors, I find her. And sometimes, like my long ago Johnny Jump Ups, I transplant a memory of a mother into my books.

Because children love what they are taught to love.

And writers must put into words what their hearts cannot forget.