Fresh Cut Flowers and a Single Tear – for my father

The first 2 visual memories that come to mind when I think about my father are the vase of flowers on the dining room table and a single tear running down his cheek. Now, there is the image of a vase of flowers on the table when I think about parts of my past, but they are more like Ian Tyson’s vision; “Some dead wild flowers and a bottle of vodka on the kitchen table/ Flowers for the good times and the booze for the bad . . .” ¹ The image that comes to mind of Dad’s flowers is much, much less dark.

For as long as I can remember, every few days from spring until deep in the fall, Dad would bring home a bouquet for the cut glass vase on the dining room table. Every year, he would start with the first pussy willow buds that he could find and follow them with forsythia, daffodils, apple blossoms, and lilacs.

Not content with just wildflowers, Dad planted a huge flower garden every year. This garden sat along the driveway fence and extended from the sidewalk to the orchard fence. I’ve never thought about it until now, but Dad’s flowers greeted everyone who walked into the yard. My father may not have been articulate in any conventional sense, but there was beautiful poetry and lovely lyrics in the work of his hands.

It has been nearly 60 years since he planted that flower garden for the last time, and if I ever knew the various types of flowers that he planted, I’ve forgotten them by now. All I know is that he had flowers blooming and available for cutting from spring through fall. After the early-season wildflowers, there were flowers to cut for the dining room table until the killing frosts in November.

It’s funny how our understanding of things changes with the passing of time. As a child, I thought the flowers on the table were just a normal thing in our house. When I was a younger man, I remembered them as being a curious peculiarity of my father’s quirky personality. At this point, deep in the late innings of this game, I realize now that flowers on the table were a deep, profound statement of my father’s love and commitment to my mother. The flowers were always there, no matter what was going on in his life.

There were times when Mother’s health created awful stress in our home. Farming is never easy, and there were days – hell, whole seasons – when it was all that Dad could do to drag crops out of that red clay soil, and get healthy hogs to market; times when the rain wouldn’t come or when the rain wouldn’t stop. There were summers when the boattailed blackbird swarms covered the whole of the sky for an hour or more as they flew over, and could destroy an entire 80 acres of corn in a single day. Dad’s life was not always easy, but no matter what was going on, what difficulties Dad was dealing with, there were always fresh-cut flowers on the table for Mom.

I have had countless hours alone over the years to think and contemplate on things, both seen and unseen. Those flowers continue to surface in my thoughts. I am awed by what Dad did to make sure that Mom had her flowers. It wasn’t that she ever asked for them – it was just my father’s expression of devotion. Although “Heartache and sorrow and sadness unendingly find, Wings on a memory”²,  the memory of the flowers on the table seems to override all the darker memories.

Of all the gifts that my father gave me, the memory of the flowers might be one of the best.

The second memory of my father that always comes to mind is the single teardrop that ran down his cheek for the last 20 years of his life. When Dad was about 60 years old, he blew his nose one day and ruptured a tear duct in his left eye. For the rest of his life, that tear duct leaked, and there was always, constantly, a single tear running slowly down his left cheek. Just one tear, and as it would finally drip off his chin, another single tear would begin working its way down his cheek.

Dad had worked all his life outdoors. His face was a weathered, almost walnut colored shade of brown. His prominent cheekbones gave his cheeks a rather hollowed look. He had expressive, brown eyes. The years of hard work, being outdoors, and life’s stresses left his face deeply lined. Not all the lines and wrinkles recorded hardship. No, many of them were laugh lines, and the deep crows' feet at the corners of his eyes marked a lifetime of smiles and laughter; marks of a man who was comfortable with himself.

When I remember that single tear, my mind does not necessarily jump to the hard and troubled times of Dad’s life; “for not all tears are an evil.”³ it is just as easy for me to remember the times when Dad did not struggle as to dwell on the hard times. He was a good man who lived by a simple code. He loved his family in his own inarticulate, maybe turbulent way. He always did the best that he could do with what he had. He tried to set a good example for his children. No, not all tears are evil.

These, then, are the first 2 things that come to mind when I think of my father: fresh-cut flowers on the dining room table and a single tear on his brown and weathered cheek. From where I am, with much more behind me than ahead of me, I think that these are wonderful images to ride with, down the last of the years.

Footnotes:

1.      Ian Tyson, “Alcohol in the Bloodstream”, “Eighteen Inches of Rain”, 1994
Mickey Newberry, "Angeline", recorded by Joan Baez, “Blessed Are...”, 1971
J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Lord of the Rings”, published by George Allen and Unwin (UK), Houghton Mifflin (US), 1954