On the sunniest of spring days, after church, after clearing the dinner table, after shedding Sunday clothes for play clothes, Dad loaded the four oldest kids into the Chevy wagon. From the farm we traveled east for a short while on County Road 366. After passing a long bank of just budding sumacs he slowed nearly to a stop and eased north onto a dirt road. The gently rutted path, used mostly by tractors with farm equipment in tow, bordered our freshly planted forty acres on the left and a hardwood forest to the right.
Happy enough to be riding somewhere, anywhere, with Dad, the purpose of our afternoon adventure was unclear until he explained, “We’re going to pick mayflowers for your mom. But it’s a secret, she doesn’t know.” I don’t think she did. We continued up the rise to a small clearing. Once parked, we hopped from the car and followed Dad into the woods as quickly as our short legs would allow. By now the snow had melted even in the hollows and the canopy above boasted hints of green and pale highlights of darker reds to come.
Once accustomed to the woodland light the mayflowers (actually wood violets) made their appearance, fragile blossoms scattered about the forest floor like white and lavender confetti. We picked them eagerly, adding each one to the gathering bunches in our hands. There was more to discover. Dad pointed out a lone Jack-in-the pulpit. Morels pressed through last year’s leaves and toward the light. Further up, white trillium.
A Sabbath poem by Wendell Berry celebrates a similar moment:
Now comes the overflow
Not to be imagined but in time,
in season, in presence. This is the
the splurge of beauty, transcending
every need we know. In her
greater knowing, great dame Nature
has called them, and they come,
the flowers in their thousands
under the still-bare trees, over
the dead leaves rising, moving
lightly as the air moves:
twinleaf, bloodroot, anemone,
violets purple and yellow and white,
bellwort. And the bluebells, whose perfume
cannot be recalled until
they are called back again. Who
would refuse this joy, this gift,
because in time it cannot last?[1]
On the short ride back to the white farmhouse, we held our fistfuls of flowers tight. Dad parked the wagon. We entered the house through the back porch and slipped quietly into the kitchen. The place was entirely still. Evidently our younger brother and sister had agreed to a nap and Mom was also resting. Now co-conspirators with our father, we arranged our flowers in the small jam jars set out on the table and filled them with water. “Oh, she’ll like these!” Dad remarked. We were desperate to wake her, but he counseled, “Be patient, she’ll see them when she gets up.”
Some childhood memories hold fast and recounting this one surfaced other moments with my father. They go something like this. During my grade school years, when we still lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Dad augmented his modest teacher’s salary by doing “woods work.” On Saturdays during the school year and more routinely in summer months, he harvested trees, primarily poplar for the local pulp yard and cedar for the fence factory in town. Many of those days Dad dropped me at an aunt and uncle’s house to play with my cousins then collected me at the end of his workday. On hot summer afternoons he’d pull up in the station wagon, tan arm resting on the driver’s side window, and sweat, sawdust, and dirt ringing his shirt. A chainsaw, cans of oil and gas, a toolbox, lunch pail, and water thermos were stowed in the back. There’d be small talk with his brother or sister-in-law, and we’d head for home.
Along those back roads purple and lavender lilacs, blue irises, pink lady slippers, orange day lilies, Queen Anne’s lace, daisies, and Black-eyed Susans often caught Dad’s eye. It was not uncommon for him to pull to the shoulder and gather a bouquet for Mom.
The writing life is a curious business. Unbidden, one line of thought often prompts another. Yes, our father’s love for our mom was no secret. But revisiting that sweetness took me to another register and I nearly spoke it aloud: what has become of human kindness? What of small gestures and gifts, attentiveness that bestows comfort and delight to others? Have I forgotten this virtue? Has the bombast of contemporary social and political life beaten it back?
Some boast that empathy is weakness, a naïve posture by those driven to amass wealth and power. But when a better vision discerns the subtlety of light, baser impulses fall away. In a Wendell Berry address entitled “It All Turns on Affection,” the wise Kentucky poet and grower insists, “As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And in affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.”[2] When our eyes are attentive, we can witness human kindness scattered all about, waiting to be gathered up and given in turn.
Mother’s Day, 2025
Notes:
[1] This poem is reprinted with permission from Counterpoint Press. Wendell Berry, “VI. 2015,” Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013-2023 (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2024), 77.
[2] In 2012 Wendell Berry delivered the prestigious Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.[1] Wendell Berry, It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2012), 14.