My little protégé brought her rubber boots with her today at my request. It rained last night. The moisture is running down the window panes and the morning grass is so wet that it is flattened.
I put on my rubber boots with the unicorns that she and her sisters gave me for my birthday last year. She puts on her pink Pepto-Bismol boots and we go outside.
The young lady is interested in growing plants. Every day there is a small bouquet of fresh flowers on her desk at home.
It would be easy to overlook the bouquet among her many other treasures – beginning readers’ books, construction paper crafts, stuffed animals, capless markers, scissors, old birthday cards and petrified Halloween candy. But in the middle of her carefully curated collection is always a small Ball jar of cosmos and zinnias. She and her mom plant them in galvanized tubs where they bloom until frost.
You have a good start in life if hand-picked bouquets of flowers are part of your everyday life.
Today she is making her rounds in our backyard.
First stop is the Fairy Garden, a bowl-shaped clay pot filled with white spring herbs that houses an aging miniature fairy with no nose and clipped wings. She places the fairy closer to the miniature yellow duck in the miniature birdbath.
Satisfied, we continue to the herb bed. She eyes a large, green plant that regularly bullies the others.
“Pinch off a leaf and squeeze it,” I say. All her life she’s been told not to hit, kick or punch, and now Grandma is telling her to squeeze something.
“When you crush a leaf, rub it gently between your fingers to create a smell,” I explain.
She rubs the green leaf with her chubby fingers and lifts it to her nose.
“What does it smell like?”
“Lemon.”
“Correct. It’s lemon balm. What is it?”
“Lemon bomb.”
“No, lemon balm.”
“That’s what I said.”
She walks on, picks a flowering chive plant, lifts it to her nose and sniffs it.
“What does that smell like?”
“Onion.”
“Close enough,” I say.
Then she breaks off a herb with tiny leaves shaped like mouse ears.
“That’s thyme,” I say. “Smell it.”
She’s not repulsed, but not particularly impressed either. “I know how to spell it,” she says. “T, I, M.”
“Well done!”
We turn to oregano with larger mouse ear leaves. She squashes the leaves, sniffs them, and gives me a look that says, “Did you really think this one was tough?”
“Spaghetti,” she says with a serious expression.
I pluck a sage leaf from her. She smells it, says “Yuck!” and throws it away.
And so Thanksgiving is over.
We cut her a small bouquet to take home and complement the collection with sprigs of lavender and rosemary. Unfortunately, we both forget when she leaves.
I do the only thing I should do and the only thing I can do – I place the bouquet of flowers on my very messy desk.
