Heavenly in a wildflower

Out of the cold dirt they come.

Beneath the brown leaves, next to the gray rocks, beside the sculptured tree trunk, their colorful faces lift toward the light. Brilliant blues, egg yoke yellows, and pale pinks pop up their sunny heads to the welcoming warmth of spring's sunshine.

They are back, these woodland wildflowers, like God's confetti upon the earth.

And we, oh of little faith, wondered if they'd ever return. After all, enduring such an endlessly gray cold winter made us feel like we were stuck in the icy grips of a perennial snow bank.

Yet, beneath all that frigid hard ground, these little woodland wonders lay in wait. And now that they are here, I know exactly what I must do. I call my mother.

"The blue scilla are in bloom!" I announce.

"Oh, we don't want to miss them!' she says.

She has been waiting for this call. After all, she is the one who passed her love of wildflowers on to me, and so together we check the weather, pick a day, and postpone all our seemingly important busyness because, as my mother says, "It is our thing."

Even at 88-years-old, my mother's memory is filled with the love of wildflower outings like a colorful album full of freshly pressed blossoms.

As a little girl growing up in the rolling hills of Ohio in the 1920s, soft spring days meant family excursions out into the wooded countryside in search of trailing arbutus, a rare and fragrant flower that crept along the ground, making for a perfect picnic spot.

When she moved to Illinois as a young wife and mother, she discovered Morton Arboretum and frequently packed my siblings and me, a buggy, and a picnic into the car each spring for a leafy stroll around the arboretum's winding paths to see the fields of daffodils. One of my favorite pictures is of my plump 8-month-old self plopped in a patch of daffodils, studying their golden trumpets with wide-eyed wonder.

For a wildflower lover, May Day, of course, provided the perfect excuse for my mother to haul her five kids out to a country road at the crack of dawn. There amidst the cool dew covered grass, we picked wildflowers for our May Flower baskets made the night before. Once back home, we stuffed them to the overflow with our flowers, popcorn, and gum drops, dashed to the neighbors to hang them on the door, rang the bell, and ran home. All before school started.

I can't say we were very alert for our schoolwork that day, but we knew our wildflowers.

Not surprisingly, when it came time for my first major science project, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. My mother drove me back to Morton Arboretum, this time as a 14-year-old, and I explored, identified, and photographed all the blooming wildflowers I could find. It was my first attempt at nature photography, a love I still pursue.

Wildflowers, however, bloom only for a short time and fade fast. So for the woman who can still recite verbatim Wordsworth's "Ode to a Daffodil," memorized from her youth over eight decades ago, it is time to seize the day.

Only now, like the wildflowers themselves, my mother and I have come full cycle. Our roles are reversed, and just as she pushed me in a buggy, I will need to push her in a wheelchair to accomplish our mission.

"We're off to see the blue scilla!" she happily announces to her friends as I wheel her out the door of her retirement home.

"The what?" they ask.

"The blue scilla are blooming all over Fabyan Forest Preserve," she explains. "They are just gorgeous!"

With a wave we roll on by, no time for chatter, for beauty beckons.

My sister and my mother discovered the blue scilla some years back just by chance. They had gone there to picnic and found the woods and hillsides covered in a carpet of tiny blue flowers perfuming the air with a delicate sweet scent.

On this fine spring day, I unload my mother's wheelchair from the car and roll her along the bike path in search of the perfect picnic spot. Easily finding it, we sit and admire the gently flowing river, greet passing bikers and handholding lovers, share our picnic lunches and listen as birds serenade us with their spring songs of happy harmony.

Then, on we move to seek the scillas. Although they are all around us as I wheel my mother along, I must point them out to her.

Legally she is blind.

And although she can still see some, much is dimmed and diminished.

"Here's a patch," I say.

"Where?" she asks.

"Right beside you," I answer.

"Oh, how lovely!" she says, looking hard.

As I push her along, I point out our beloved bright daffodils and the hints of a magnolia tree's first white blossoms.

"To think that so many don't know about this beauty!" my mother says.

Pausing to rest on a hill, we gaze at a sun-dappled ravine filled with endless blue scilla gently bobbing in the breeze like a sea of blue butterflies. And in that moment, we know exactly what the poet William Blake meant when he described seeing "heaven in a wild flower."

"I just want to be able to remember this sight forever," my mother says.

And so do I.

For more than their beauty, the return of the wildflowers signals a sense of rebirth and renewal, hope for new beginnings, and faith in undreamed possibilities opening on the horizon.

In all of life's circumstances, my mother has continually sought beauty, and in doing so, finds and feels the freedom so aptly expressed in her beloved Wordsworth poem: "And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils."

If I can remember that gift, then like the hymn of old, so sings my soul.