I don’t believe in ESP, the healing power of crystals or feng shui; this is the only remotely miraculous tale I have to tell.
My parents were not gardeners. My mother was a city girl who killed all the houseplants and never touched a trowel. My father was too busy to do much more than hack back the English ivy that threatened our patio every year. We made do with the landscaping from our home’s previous owners: a diseased apple tree, some ancient bridal wreath spirea, one very messy mulberry. But my mother loved the airy grace of the dogwood tree and yearned for one for our New Jersey backyard.
For their 25th wedding anniversary in 1978, my father gave her a white dogwood, a sapling around four feet high, and found a shovel and the time to actually plant it. The small tree had only a few blossoms when he stuck it in the middle of the weedy lawn that May. But after that first year, the dogwood didn’t bloom again. Year after year, for twelve springs, the tree grew a little taller, but it never sent forth flowers. I think we even almost forgot it was a dogwood.
My father died of cancer in the winter of 1990, and my mother was diagnosed with cancer herself just six weeks later. That spring, in mourning and undergoing chemotherapy, there didn’t seem to be anything that could make my mother smile.
Until the dogwood bloomed. She counted a dozen white flowers on what would have been their thirty-seventh wedding anniversary.
Although practical-minded, my mother saw these flowers as a gift from heaven; a renewal of my father’s thoughtful anniversary offering. Seeing them distracted her from her grief and pain that spring. She made it to my August wedding and celebrated one more Christmas with our family.
I don’t know if that dogwood tree ever bloomed again, or even if it’s still there. My mother passed away, and we sold the house. But I do know that the power of those white dogwood blossoms gave us back our hope and faith in the spring of 1991. And every May the fleeting sight of flowering dogwoods brings my parents back to me.
