Adam has been helping me plant flowers since he could toddle out to the small deck that’s attached to our family room. He’s only 4 but the boy knows his way around a garden. He loves water and rain and heat and dirt and sun and most everything that has anything to do with the great outdoors.
I didn’t when I was a child. Not when I was 4 and not when I was 14. My mother was always trying to get me interested in watering and feeding and coaxing things to grow. But I wanted nothing to do with touching things that shared their home with worms and earwigs.
I didn’t like dirt on my hands or sweat on my brow or wrinkled old work clothes. I didn’t like anything about Mother Nature. My idea of a perfect summer day was holing up in the cellar with a bagful of penny candy and reading Little Lulu comic books.
Adam isn’t old enough for comic books, and there’s no such thing as penny candy anymore. But I know how he feels about worms and frogs, which we run into now and then, and butterflies and all the bunnies — and there are many of them — that live in my backyard. He loves them all. Adam loves green trees and blue sky and white clouds and all the yellows and pinks and purples that have already come and gone. “It’s beautiful, Mimi,” he says so many times a day. About a tree in my backyard. About the forest in his. About something we see from the car — the moon following us, the dogwood tree swirling in white as we pass the library.
You wonder how children learn and what they remember. The other day, he and his mom and baby sister, Charlotte, stopped by and Adam raced to the deck and saw in the corner a single blue flower on a great green plant and came running to me. “Mimi! Mimi!" he said. "Come look. The clematis bloomed.”
I didn’t know the name of that flower until I was 59. He’s 4 and has it down pat.
A few weeks ago I took him with me to a nursery to buy some flowers and let him do the choosing. He picked red geraniums, pink Sweet William, white nasturtium, and one orange Gerber daisy “Because orange is my favorite, Mimi.” And home we came and dug and planted.
When I was 9 or 10 in a final effort to instill in me an appreciation of plant life, my mother bought me a small package of bachelor-button seeds and a clay pot at the five-and-ten. She even dragged in dirt from outdoors, then checked to make sure it was worm free, to please me. "Now you can grow your own garden right here,” she said. “We’ll put it in the window. You won’t have to go outside.”
God bless my mother. She must have believed that, once I saw life spring forth from seeds I had personally buried in worm-free soil, I would be awed and treasure everything that emerged from the ground.
I do now, of course. But I didn’t then despite my mother’s best efforts.
Now I am my mother, buying seeds, feeding the soil, gushing about all the loosestrife and phlox that have spread everywhere. Planning. Pruning. And helping Adam.
And thank Heaven, Adam isn’t me.
He comes over almost every day and the first thing he does is check the potted plants. “Mimi, your flowers are very thirsty. Do you want me to water them?” he’ll say some days. And on other days he’ll stick his hand into the planters, feel that a plant isn’t dry and smile.
He’s trying now to teach Charlotte about flowers and plants. He marches her around the deck and gives her the littlest watering can, and with his hand steadies hers so she can learn how to water by herself.
But Charlotte so far is more interested in eating the plants.
Adam perseveres. He’s like my mother. He aims to please. So he makes a game of it. Water for a while. Play bubbles for a while. Water. Bubbles. This works for a good five minutes.
Until Charlotte decides she wants to eat the bubbles, too.
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